A review by jschro12
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

4.5

 In the Dream House is a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado told through dozens and dozens of lenses, and Machado expertly flips them down, one after the other, layering them on top of each other in a way so as to see each of their facets both individually and in combination. Domestic abuse in queer relationships suffers from a respectability politic that renders a topic that already is hidden and shied away from even more invisible. She adds this memoir and these stories of her relationship with her abusive ex to the archive: “I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice, measure the emptiness by its small sound.”  Machado lyrically and poetically guides us through from the early days to the end of their relationship, while also drawing from experiences across her life and from sources across the spectrum about queer domestic abuse. Within In the Dream House, she is both imagining languages and structures within which to understand her experiences, while simultaneously critiquing and navigating the building of those forms. The resulting work is both stunningly beautiful and oozingly horrifying, especially (as Machado notes) in the mundanity of the story contained within its pages. 
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