In the Dream House: A Memoir

I heard the author on a PRS interview and was intrigued by her life story, her writing talents and the way she presented her troubling story of domestic abuse in her gay household. She spotlights deep trouble in our culture that goes unspoken, undiagnosed and untreated and so it is hidden. I especially noted the way she spoke of herself in the third, impersonal voice when she was speaking of her time "in the dream house" or under her partner's abusive spell. Her awakening came at last and she moved into speaking of herself as "I". That subtle use of the pronoun, and the way she identified each "dream house" with short, titled chapters created an engaging, compelling form of first-person storytelling. I was troubled throughout the book and kept rooting for her to wake up from the dream. The value was that her story is so common and found in millions of relationships; I kept reading on. I recommend this book for its compelling story and for the story structure that housed my attention and curiosity the whole way through. It's a map through the brambly parts of mental illness, the dangerous distress of dysfunction, and the people who get caught in the dream house.

I read this book in one sitting - it was utterly un-put-downable. It tore my heart apart, but stuck around to gather the pieces and offer a healing salve. Even if you've never experienced any type of abuse, the story is so well written, the style not just creative but cleverly reflecting the topic of the book, and the narrator's voice so likable, that it's a memoir that anyone could easily name in their top 5 favorites. It's very clear that a lot of intention went into the entire piece.

If you have ever found yourself in an abusive relationship, you know how isolating and bleak it feels. If you’ve ever found yourself in a queer abusive relationship, you know that the feeling of isolation is also threaded with shame, confusion, and a lack of visible precedence. If you’ve ever found yourself in a queer, psychologically/emotionally abusive relationship, then you know how utterly impossible it is to find representations of your experience in movies, art, literature, television, etc. This book is important not only because it serves as a brilliantly written cautionary tale that anyone, in any kind of relationship, can be preyed upon - but also because those of us who have can finally add a book to our shelves that accurately represents our experience, or even use it as a resource to suggest to others who are struggling to understand our experience. The book benefits everyone who reads it - queer or not, abused or not.

Towards the end of the book, Machado mentions a moment in her past, wherein a woman at a party whispers to her, "I believe you". She is so overcome with gratitude and begins to cry so hard that she has to leave the party and go home. Every page of this book felt to me like a soft, gentle whisper in my ear: "I believe you. I believe you. I believe you."

A 1000x better than expected, and I expected nothing short of holy scripture.

Months earlier I stumbled upon the description and knew this book would be monumental. As early reviews crept in, my anticipation grew. I had my Kindle fully charged and stayed up until midnight so I could start reading the second it released. By 2am I was 30% done. A few marathon readings later, I reached the last page with breathless finality. The result? Monumental doesn't even begin to cover it.

The funny thing, it's not monumental because of what happens. Bad relationships happen all the time. Abusive relationships, mental and/or physical, happen all the time. It's talked about less in queer relationships, that's true, and Machado does a great job pointing that out, but I doubt anybody will be dumbfounded by what they read. They will be surprised, however, that there's someone brave enough to talk about it, and by how personal she's willing to get. They will be surprised by how she structures it.

The structure really is what makes this a masterpiece. It's not just the experience, it's the delivery. The darkest memories are brilliantly conveyed in second person and through varying lens. Most of them literary devices. Machado recounts her life through the eyes of Chekhov's Gun, Choose Your Own Adventure, Haunted House, Erotica, Plot Twist, and dozens more. Each section is short and precise. Never a wasted word. For those uncomfortable reading about abuse, she doesn't take it too far either. This isn't battered woman porn. She doesn't go on and on. We get snippets, glimpses of a life that we can easily piece together, and, more importantly, relate to.

What she accomplishes for the queer community specifically, I think, is breaking the ice. After hard-fought battles for marriage equality, there's this unspoken rule that gay relationships must work. If they don't, people will point and say I told you so. By extension, rights may be taken away. Obviously that's not the only factor that kept Machado in her relationship. It may not even be in the Top 10, but it is a shadow that hovers over the scene. She points to lesbian stereotypes as well. Society expects men to be abusive, but two women? Their relationship should be a utopia, right? These stereotypes, this ice, is something she clearly wants to break apart. And she succeeds tremendously.

Of course you don't have to be queer to recognize this is a master work of memoir and creative non-fiction. It is a testament that all experiences, however ordinary or unique, should be shared. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the book is the relentless honesty. She veils it slightly by the structure and 2nd person, but in a way this makes the experience more real. More true. And the accomplishment, I think, is for any one person to read this and be able to know that, for sure, they are not alone.

I was absolutely beside myself when I finished this. What an incredibly up-close look at emotional abuse. You can tell that the author really dug into her past - her strengths, weaknesses, insecurities - to offer us this raw and vulnerable look at some of the darkest parts of humanity. This is juxtaposed with lyrical writing and commentary that took my breath away. I highlighted so much of this book, and think about it often. Beautiful story through and through.

Struggling between 4.5 and 5 stars, so I’ll round up. I loved this memoir. I’ve never highlighted anything so much in my life, and even though I’ve never been in an abusive queer relationship, there were so many parallels to my existence. The prose was lyrical and beautiful, and tackled the subject material in a raw unflinching manner that I appreciated, without overwhelming the reader with secondhand trauma for shock value. Just a really wonderful book.

I only recently re-entered the world of female non-fiction (not necessarily feminist, but female authors writing on subjects related to female living), and am reading this work as a part of a "book club," if you will. This review is not about Machado's experience, which is actually quite universal to all abusive relationships (to which I have great empathy), but to the book itself.

The book follows, very generally, Machado's foray into an abusive relationship that happens to be a queer one (she being, from my understanding of the work, bisexual and her partner a maybe-polyamorous lesbian? A better description is her lover is presented as someone with a severe personality disorder that manifested itself onto Machado and transcends sexuality). The experience is given in a series of vignettes, intermixed with other vignettes on subject matters such as the art of vignettes/short stories/fables and academic-esque musings on lesbian culture. I get that it is hard to write about difficult personal things, so short form might be easier because of the "quick-in-quick-out", but it makes the story disjointed. There is an underlying current of mental dismantling though, so maybe the argument for this structure is to mirror this precipitous state.

The book references that during this time Machado was finishing her MFA, and her work was not great. It would have been interesting to hear more about her work and day-to-day in her graduate program rather than just snapshots of social interactions with others versus social interactions with her partner. She only lightly touches on the bleeding edge of abuse.

There is also something to be said though, about professional/academic writers writing about their states during writing. It can be incredibly boring for an average reader who is has a life more tethered to reality rather than academia. So maybe that is another thought on this...

The book generally brought me back to my undergrad days hanging out at Bluestockings, when I had the time to really look and reflect on my chosen relationships rather than the socio-economic ties and required obligations that drive me now (mortgage, children, etc.). If you find this type of self-exploration and reflection indulgent or even narcissistic this book is not for you. If you have the capacity to read a very academically written queer relationship and general abuse story, then the book is worthwhile. 

All such experiences deserved to be heard, and it's unfortunate that certain ones tend to be left out of discussions

Things like domestic abuse that doesn't involve much physical violence, controlling and possessive behavior in homosexual relationships, when the abuser is a woman and/or the victim is a man all get completely overlooked. Often even by people who claim to care about protecting abuse victims

This leaves the victim in these situations not only suffering from the abuse, but often having no where to turn to. And that's if he/she is even aware of or willing to acknowledge that he/she is a victim of abuse. It's very common for victims to not even interpret the behavior as "abusive" when it's committed by a woman, and/or if it doesn't result in trips to the ER

...in an effort to develop the sort of response I know I'm "supposed" to have towards the author's experience in an awful relationship. But with each subsequent read, I've just found myself thinking more and more how broadly mediocre the whole thing is - the writing, the narrative, the author. I did think the choice to structure it in a fragmentary, metaphorical way was interesting... but I don't think the "narrative" itself - a fairly run-of-the-mill crappy relationship - was robust enough to stay compelling across this constellation of disparate prose-snippets.

Not only that, but I just have to say: I started to find the author more obnoxious with each read. The number of times she goes along with things that are against her best interests because she "didn't know what else to do" (that exact phrase) become mind-numbingly frustrating. It's like watching one of those weight loss reality shows where the person keeps insisting that they're trying to lose weight, but then the camera pans to them eating an entire sleeve of Oreos. It's that level of passivity, that level of irresponsibility, rebranded - by way of vantage - into being a sad story about a woman whose girlfriend said some really mean things!

She sounds like the grown-up version of that friend we all had in high school - that morbidly obese sex-pest who won't stop making everyone uncomfortable by either rambling on about fandoms no one cares about or weaseling something sexual into every conversation. (There's a point in the book where she just randomly says, "hey guys, doesn't this creek kinda smell like semen?!" and notes that all her friends disagree with her. Spare of detail, I can still picture it perfectly in my head: the awkward scrunch of several faces; the unspoken sentiment passing between them - as it has so many times previously; the sheer weight of their tolerance. That scene is straight out of the obese sex-pest playbook.)

Reading this book actually feels a lot like watching My 600lb Life - you get the sense that even though the experience itself is not particularly noteworthy, a skilled hand (in this case, an MFA graduate) has been hard at work in the editing room, constructing dramatic scenes out of minor details, sussing out the most poetic bits and staging them appropriately so the audience doesn't sleep through the rest of it.

I guess this is the real success of MFA programs: turning mediocre writers into bestsellers by teaching them how to leverage even the most mundane of personal experiences. (Case in point: one of the stories in her other book is just a long, drawn-out Law and Order fanfiction.) And Iowa is allegedly the best MFA program in the country, so... bravo?