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In the Dream House is a memoir which seeks to end what its author calls the “archival silence” surrounding queer domestic abuse stories. Carmen Maria Machado weaves the tale of her own history with same-sex domestic abuse, specifically the abuse she suffered at the hands of ‘the woman from the dream house,’ her former romantic partner. However, the memoir is not only a personal account of the role that the queer domestic abuse relationship played in Machado’s development, but also an effort to explore how and why queer domestic abuse stories have been historically silenced, never able to find a place in the historical register. The lack of history and ‘evidence’ relating to same-sex domestic violence is part of the reason why Machado was so untethered by her abuse, she had no context, no visible community of survivors sharing their own stories. Machado makes a very important structural connection between this concept of “archival silence” and her own memoir project, telling us in the opening pages that the word “archive” derives from the ancient Greek word for “house.” The Dream House is the home that Machado’s former girlfriend lives in through the majority of the narrative, a haunting home in Bloomington Indiana, a physical and emotional space that Machado struggles to escape. We must thus imagine her memoir as an archive, a house for her story, the building blocks of representation for survivors of queer domestic abuse.
Not only is the memoir’s metaphorical structure noteworthy, but its more literal construction as a series of vignettes or exercises in form, feels vital. These short chapter formats are the materials that make up the dream house, with titles such as, “Dream House as an Exercise in Point of View,” “Dream House as Epiphany,” “Dream House as Legacy,” and “Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun.” The chapters weave their formal concerns into Machado’s narrative with varying degrees of heaviness, “Dream House as Noir” explores Hollywood’s preoccupation with turbulent lesbian romance tales, while “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” gives a situational choose your own path narrative in a potentially dangerous situation, with the “if you…go to page 163” layout (Hint: every scenario ends with an explosion from ‘the woman from the dream house’). The single sentence chapter “Dream House as Epiphany,” simply reads, “Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.” Machado manages to explore these formal themes without drifting into gimmicky territory, her writing is so incisive and tonally pitch perfect that her play with form never feels like its overcompensating for a lack of material.
The memoir is chronological in that it tracks the progress of Machado and her girlfriend’s relationship through time, beginning with their early meetings and concluding after they have separated, however within this time structure Machado weaves in childhood reminiscences, philosophical meditations on queerness and violence against women, while also tackling the historic ignorance toward queer domestic violence that is baked into the American judicial system. Machado also includes reflections from her experience of actually writing the memoir, where she was and how she felt while recalling her traumatic past. Machado begins with meeting the ‘woman from the dream house’, who was at the time dating a woman named Val. (A stranger-than-fiction twist that made me gasp aloud with delight: Machado and Val are currently happily married, they reconnected after Machado and ‘the woman from the dream house’ broke up). Machado’s attraction to ‘the woman from the dream house’ is immediate, and her desire is only heightened when ‘the woman from the dream house’ begins paying special attention to her. They are quickly swept up in a romance, one that feels for Machado like real love, it is erotically charged and fulfilling, and Machado feels blessed to have won the affections of such a beautiful and intelligent woman. Thus begins the abuse narrative, which is tinged with moments of ecstasy, regret, fear, and anxiety, and Machado expertly blends the early highs and lows of what become the most perilous years of her own life. Machado blurs the lines between physical and metaphysical space in a memoir that feels like the first entry in an archive that was previously empty.