A review by bookishmillennial
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

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.

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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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