In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press, 2019)
★★★★☆
(content warning: emotional abuse, sexual assault, rape)
A memoir of an abusive queer relationship, told through a collection of short chapters, each presenting the author’s experience through a particular narrative trope.
Harm and abuse have been top of mind for me lately—ever since the #MeToo movement gained momentum, ever since one of my favorite comic book authors was exposed as a serial predator, ever since I learned that someone I was close to committed intimate partner violence and attempted rape.
I’ve never been in an abusive relationship. But, like one in six women, I’m a survivor of sexual assault. And while that’s never been a defining part of my identity, over the last month, learning how to better prevent harm and support survivors has become one of my foremost priorities. It’s distressing how prevalent intimate partner violence is—and it’s wonderful that we have a growing body of work that openly discusses these issues (including I May Destroy You, the excellent ongoing HBO series).
Stories like Machado’s are vital because they bring behavior that thrives in secrecy into the light, and the more people who can thereafter recognize and address abusive behavior in their own relationships, the more we can bend our society towards justice. I want to see more survivor narratives, period. But In the Dream House is also a powerful, brave, and ambitious book in its own right, a book whose structure lends deft complexities to its message.
I most appreciated the way Machado examines and lays bare her reasons for staying in the relationship after her partner first behaved violently to her. She comes at these reasons obliquely, including, in one gorgeous and chilling chapter, through the metaphor of the “Bluebeard” folktale. In the folktale, Bluebeard gives his newest wife the keys to his castle and a strict test: she must never open the door in the basement. Of course, the wife opens the door—discovering, within, the bodies of all Bluebeard’s previous wives, and setting her on a course toward her eventual escape.
Machado envisions an alternate ending to the tale: one where, instead of failing the test, the wife succeeds—only to endure more rules, more tests, more foots-in-the-door, “allowing herself to be trained, like a corset fanatic pinching her waist smaller and smaller.”
This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability.
In Machado’s alternate ending, the wife convinces herself that love must be “tough.” That to succeed at love she must be “loyal.” As a result, we better understand some of the wife’s—and the author’s—psychology. But what kind of love makes these demands in the first place?
Machado continues interrogating the idea of “tough love” when she describes the ways people minimize and question her experiences of abuse after the fact. They mutter things like, “We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says”; “love is complicated.” In a footnote, Machado reflects:
“Experiencing the ordinary brutality of love does not make one a victim. It makes one an adult,” Maureen Dowd wrote of Joyce Maynard, when Maynard published a memoir about how a decades-older J. D. Salinger seduced, abused, and disposed of her when she was eighteen. What, I wonder, is Maureen’s definition of ordinary? Brutality? Love?
By showing how the construction of “tough love” is endemic in our society, Machado shows how easy it is for people who have experienced abuse to internalize that staying in the relationship, toughening up, loving harder, is what’s right and good. (And of course it is endemic: just look at the message of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.)
I have many more swirling thoughts about this book, but I’ll conclude by noting that after my friend Endria read In the Dream House, she wrote a devastating account of some of her own experiences with abuse as a Black queer femme. I look forward to the ways Machado’s memoir might continue to prompt other survivors to process and share their stories.