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

challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

In the Dream House is a fragmented, poetic, and emotional recollection of an abusive queer relationship.  With beautiful writing and a unique structure, the author masterfully crafted a book that jumps between first and second POV. She utilized a fractured and meandering nature to amplify the chaos surrounding the primary storyline, and looked at the situation through the lens of many reframings and references (such as pop culture, folk tales, direct anecdotes, and more). 
This memoir really grapples with the author's experience in a meaningful way, as well as the varying perceptions of abuse, lesbians, and the point where they meet in the middle of a venn diagram. Too many heavy hitting, impactful quotes to count. These were a few of my favourites:
 
"You wonder if, at any point in history, some creature scuttled over what would, eons later, be the living room, and cocked its head to the side to listen to the faintest of sounds: yelling, weeping. Ghosts of a future that hadn't happened yet."

"A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to."

"But house idioms and their variants in fact often symbolize 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. "

"In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you."

"And as the ground gets farther, and farther away you swear to yourself that you are going to tell someone how bad it is, you’re gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening. By the time the ground is coming towards you again, you are already polishing your story. "
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