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A review by emergencily
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
5.0
this memoir, about the author's abusive same-sex relationship and the emotional fallout of that experience, was honestly so devastating...i finished this a month ago and i still don't feel like i quite have the right words to talk about this book yet.
i loved the way this memoir and the experimental chapters were structured. it's mostly a lot of short chapters like a series of vignettes, which are no less powerful for their short length. this book can punch a hole in your heart with only a single sentence on a page. i loved the experimentation with different literary devices and narrative formats to frame her experiences - a choose your own adventure-styled section, a tv show episode script, academic-style essays, fairy tales and myths, media analyses, etc. it may feel disjointed to some, but i found it really made sense for me. if you let it pull you in, it will to you too. it captured the chaotic, disassociative, back-and-forth, here-and-there, cognitive dissonance and emotional experience of going through trauma and abuse in a way that i think a "normal" linear format couldn't have.
the second person perspective is something that i have found is rarely done well, but machado makes such skillful use of it here to pull you viscerally into her story and into the "dream house" with her. making your way through the chapters as she jumps back and forth in time, place, emotional state (and disassociative state) and literary metaphor makes you feel like you're in a victorian gothic horror and walking through the dream house with her, wandering through those empty rooms, seeing shadows flickering in the corners of your eyes, and feeling like there's no way out as something stalks you through the house.
there are so many scenes in this, as she recounts incredibly harrowing memories of her abuse, that made me feel genuine dread pooling in the pit of my stomach. with horrifying effectiveness, she captures that constant baseline anxiety and dread you have with an abuser of always "waiting for the other shoe to drop," even as you're having a good time with them, and even as they're making you happy in the moment. she pulls you in as a reader so deeply into her memories that it feels like you're in the room with her as these things happen. sometimes, it feels like it's happening to you. for anyone with experiences of abuse, please take care of yourself as you read. it's so eerie to read books about abuse and recognize such a familiar playbook of techniques.
this book was really powerful and moving for me. she puts voice and form to the weight and enormity of an experience that can feel impossible to define.
i loved the way this memoir and the experimental chapters were structured. it's mostly a lot of short chapters like a series of vignettes, which are no less powerful for their short length. this book can punch a hole in your heart with only a single sentence on a page. i loved the experimentation with different literary devices and narrative formats to frame her experiences - a choose your own adventure-styled section, a tv show episode script, academic-style essays, fairy tales and myths, media analyses, etc. it may feel disjointed to some, but i found it really made sense for me. if you let it pull you in, it will to you too. it captured the chaotic, disassociative, back-and-forth, here-and-there, cognitive dissonance and emotional experience of going through trauma and abuse in a way that i think a "normal" linear format couldn't have.
the second person perspective is something that i have found is rarely done well, but machado makes such skillful use of it here to pull you viscerally into her story and into the "dream house" with her. making your way through the chapters as she jumps back and forth in time, place, emotional state (and disassociative state) and literary metaphor makes you feel like you're in a victorian gothic horror and walking through the dream house with her, wandering through those empty rooms, seeing shadows flickering in the corners of your eyes, and feeling like there's no way out as something stalks you through the house.
there are so many scenes in this, as she recounts incredibly harrowing memories of her abuse, that made me feel genuine dread pooling in the pit of my stomach. with horrifying effectiveness, she captures that constant baseline anxiety and dread you have with an abuser of always "waiting for the other shoe to drop," even as you're having a good time with them, and even as they're making you happy in the moment. she pulls you in as a reader so deeply into her memories that it feels like you're in the room with her as these things happen. sometimes, it feels like it's happening to you. for anyone with experiences of abuse, please take care of yourself as you read. it's so eerie to read books about abuse and recognize such a familiar playbook of techniques.
this book was really powerful and moving for me. she puts voice and form to the weight and enormity of an experience that can feel impossible to define.