Reviews tagging 'Alcohol'

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

101 reviews

buttercat42's review

dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

4.5

Somewhat difficult to get into at first, and then impossible to put down. I love the fragmented format and found it very readable. The writing was deliciously intelligent. An important queer story I didn’t know I needed. One quibble— of course I understand the importance of the more educational passsges at the end, but they felt poorly incorporated with the rest of the book. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Toxic relationship, Blood, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Sexual assault, Sexual content, and Sexual violence

Moderate: Alcohol and Homophobia

abmochapman's review

challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

4.0

In the Dream House might be one of those books to which I return again and again. Although Carmen Maria Machado’s writing is at times difficult and frustrating or simply gauche, it is also at times full of beauty and release. And what’s more is how much her words speak to experiences resemble my own despite the world of difference between them. 

Abuse in queer relationships is unique and deserving of the time and attention she pays to it in this book, and yet, the pain I experienced in abusive heterosexual relationships seems almost the same. I do not know the specific pain of being betrayed by a same-sex partner, someone who is so similar to me, but I do know what it’s like to doubt my own experiences and even wish there had been physical scars to which I could point as evidence. I understand that sick desire to be hurt enough to be heard.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Domestic abuse, Lesbophobia, Emotional abuse, Toxic relationship, and Mental illness

Moderate: Sexual violence, Alcohol, and Infidelity

bookishmillennial's review

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

disclaimer if you’ve read other reviews by me and are noticing a pattern: You’re correct that I don’t really give starred reviews because I don’t like leaving them. Most often, I will only leave them if I vehemently despised a book.

I enjoy most books for what they are, & I extract lessons from them all. Everyone’s reading experiences are subjective, so I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not, regardless if I add stars or not.

Find me on Instagram: @bookish.millennial or tiktok: @bookishmillennial

This was a powerful memoir full of vignettes -mostly in a linear fashion- which told readers the story of Carmen's experience being in a toxic and abusive long-term partnership. She tells this memoir in second-person POV, saying "you" but describing herself and what she did and felt during these experiences. No review can properly express how much this memoir packs a punch, and shines a light on domestic abuse within lesbian relationships. Carmen notes that this isn't meant to be harmful representation of what a lesbian relationship is, but is simply to shine a light on the domestic abuse that also happens in queer relationships, not just heterosexual ones.

Carmen provides references of books and articles on this topic at the end of the book, and I can only imagine how painful recounting all of this, and publishing this must have been for Carmen, so I'm grateful to her for sharing this with us. The chapters are all named "Dream House as ____," which work really well, and some of the chapters are one page long! It's short but may take some time for readers to digest, as it does contain such heavy content. Take care while reading, but I will absolutely be reading more from Carmen in the future! 

I highlighted SO much in this book, but here are some quotations that stood out to me: 

Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

“Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” I would yell. I want to reclaim these words—after all, melodrama comes from melos, which means “music,” “honey”; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen—but they are still hot to the touch.

But house idioms and their variants, in fact, often signify the opposite of safety and security. If something is a house of cards it is precarious, easily disrupted. If the writing is on the wall we can see the end of something long before it arrives. If we do not throw stones in glass houses, it is because the house is constructed of hypocrisy, readily shattered. All expressions of weakness, of the inevitability of failure.

Your scary aunt said, apropos of nothing, “I don’t believe in gay people,” and from the back seat—empowered by adulthood—you said, “Well, we believe in you.”

You wish you could accurately describe the bone-deep ache of walking on that campus, the too-late realization that you’d fucked up your whole life by not having sufficient ambition. Who are you? You are nobody. You are nothing.

I had figured out exactly nothing. I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.

You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that?

How do we direct our record keeping toward justice?

We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

In one trip, she can listen to 75 percent of an audiobook. If she is driving at sixty-five miles per hour, and the average length of an audiobook is ten hours, how many months will it take for her to realize she has wasted half of her MFA program driving to her girlfriend’s house to be yelled at for five days? How many months will it take her to come to terms with the fact that she functionally did this to herself?

“My queen,” the letter said, “your words are very pretty. And yet they cannot obscure the simple fact that I have seen your zoo.”

What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?

Dream House as Proof:
So many cells in my body have died and regenerated since the days of the Dream House. My blood and taste buds and skin have long since re-created themselves. My fat still remembers, but just barely—within a few years, it will have turned itself over completely. My bones too. But my nervous system remembers.


In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept.

You will wish for it anyway. Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Domestic abuse, Alcohol, Emotional abuse, Violence, Cursing, Homophobia, Toxic relationship, and Gaslighting

scifi_rat's review against another edition

dark emotional hopeful reflective tense fast-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, and Toxic relationship

Moderate: Lesbophobia, Domestic abuse, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, and Homophobia

Minor: Death, Drug use, Injury/Injury detail, Mental illness, Misogyny, Sexism, Infidelity, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Violence, Murder, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Sexual assault, Biphobia, Alcohol, Blood, Bullying, Cancer, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Vomit, Fatphobia, Adult/minor relationship, Body shaming, Cursing, Grief, Pregnancy, Religious bigotry, and Torture

erica_reads_things's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective sad fast-paced

4.75

I absolutely adore this book. Right off the bat I would have given it 5⭐, but I listened to it on audiobook. And as much as I love listening to especially memoirs read by the authors, this text was a bit hard to follow at first on audiobook. I plan on reading a paper copy soon and will likely give it a full 5. 

I loved the narrative style and tropes of the Dream House once I got used to the flow. I really appreciated how Carmen held the complexities of domestic violence and the topic and experiences within the queer community. This text will absolutely remain an important work in queer narratives. So well done. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief, Emotional abuse, Toxic relationship, Domestic abuse, Gaslighting, and Sexual content

Moderate: Homophobia, Death, Hate crime, Alcohol, Biphobia, Lesbophobia, Body shaming, and Stalking

Minor: Injury/Injury detail and Fatphobia

rovwade's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful sad tense fast-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence, Alcohol, Sexual content, Domestic abuse, Homophobia, and Emotional abuse

lizziaha's review against another edition

4.5

damn i really wish i paid more attention in my literary theory class. I feel like it would’ve heightened the experience for me. the style of writing in this book is so compelling, I found myself framing my own memories in it: “dream house as” and second person pov. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Toxic relationship, and Suicidal thoughts

Moderate: Alcohol, Infidelity, Homophobia, Fatphobia, Grief, Sexual content, and Sexual assault

Minor: Biphobia

ayoderable's review

challenging dark informative sad tense medium-paced

5.0

Tough read but so beautifully done

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, and Toxic relationship

Moderate: Suicidal thoughts and Sexual assault

Minor: Body shaming, Alcohol, and Fatphobia

maess's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense fast-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicidal thoughts, Gaslighting, Homophobia, Infidelity, Misogyny, Outing, Sexism, Alcohol, Animal death, Blood, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Violence, and Vomit

remimicha's review

challenging emotional informative reflective sad tense fast-paced

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Panic attacks/disorders, Misogyny, Alcohol, Biphobia, Blood, Body shaming, Cursing, Fatphobia, Toxic relationship, Suicidal thoughts, Sexual content, Emotional abuse, Domestic abuse, Sexual assault, Religious bigotry, Animal death, Gaslighting, Homophobia, Infidelity, and Lesbophobia