How to Tell an Impossible Story

Review of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (USA: Graywolf Press, 2019)
By Stephanie Chan

How do you write a book about a kind of violence that is at once a cliché in art and almost impossible to speak of in everyday life? In Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (which just won the LAMBDA Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction), you do it by examining every issue, trope, and myth surrounding the subject, turning them inside out and trying them on for size. In the Dream House, Machado’s follow-up to her award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2016), is simultaneously a memoir about domestic violence in a romantic relationship between two queer women and a resource guide on queer domestic violence in literature. As Machado writes, “I have spent years struggling to find examples of my own experience in history’s queer women. I tore through book after book about queer women of the past […] wondering what would happen if they had let the world know they were unmade by someone with as little power as they.” Machado’s new book, in other words, is an engagement, even a reckoning, with queer history and literature.

In the Dream House follows Machado as she starts a relationship with a woman that turns psychologically and emotionally abusive. To call it a memoir, though, would be like comparing the Great Barrier Reef to a fish tank: it is far more complex and vaster in ambition. Consider the footnotes scattered throughout the narrative, many of them providing links to the book Motif-Index of Folk Literature to remind us of the influence of stories and other cultural artifacts on what we perceive. For instance, in the chapter titled “Dream House as Lesson Learned,” a homophobic aunt tells Machado, “I don’t believe in gay people.” When Machado’s mother stays silent in the face of such abuse, her silence is glossed by the footnote, “Mother throws children into fire.” While the book’s narrative is honest and heart-wrenching, the glosses on the narrative present the personal life as an examinable, deconstructed text. The references to myth demonstrate how queer narratives have a historical basis, even as the personal narrative prevents the reduction of life into an amalgamation of tropes.

The titular “Dream House” of Machado’s book is a framing device—at once the physical house belonging to her abuser, a symbol for their relationship, and the utopian ideal of lesbian love. It recurs in every chapter title—"Dream House As Prologue,” “Dream House as Road Trip to Everywhere,” “Dream House as Stoner Comedy,” “Dream House as Cabin in the Woods,” “Dream House as Thanks Obama,” “Dream House as Noir”—as Machado explores different facets of her relationship, writing through different lenses and in different styles. This repetition gives us the feeling of a story that will never be satisfied with itself, that does not have a clear ending or beginning, a story searching endlessly for different ways to see and describe itself. As a poet, I felt immediately at home (pun intended) with this book due to this strategic use of motif, which I find more common in poetry than in prose. This fragmentation serves as a way not just to distance us from the story but also to distance ourselves from ourselves, and question the frames with which stories are told.

Also significant is Machado’s choice to narrate her abuse in second-person perspective, even as she narrates everything else that happened to her before and after in first person. She justifies this stylistic decision in “Dream House as Exercise in Point of View”:

You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then […] I was cleaved: a neat lop that took that first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective—away from the second, who was always anxious and vibrating…

When Machado explains her transformation, the reader realizes that they are not just reading a story about a stranger ‘you,’ they are meant to experience what happened through the writer’s eyes. This is the power of the creative non-fiction mode: to control your own narrative in a way that commands understanding and empathy from readers. We recognize that Machado is writing about her abuse with the distanced ‘you’ not only to separate herself from those events, but also to indict her reader for reducing victims of domestic violence to two-dimensional caricatures, a diminished ‘you’.

If Machado leads her reader to confront their complicity in cultures that erase or marginalize narratives of abuse, she also provides opportunities for her reader to draw their own conclusions. The style of her memoir is a breathtaking back and forth, where the reader is constantly being pushed to the brink, then pulled back and questioned about what they have just read and how they have processed it. Consider “Dream House as the Wrong Lesson,” which glosses the abuse by giving the history of ‘gaslighting’:

When MGM made the Academy-Award winning version of Gaslight in 1944, they didn’t just remake it. They bought rights to the 1940 film, “burned the negative and set out to destroy all existing prints.” They didn’t succeed, of course-- the first film survived. You can still see it. But how strange, how weirdly on the nose. They didn’t just want to reimagine the film; they wanted to eliminate the evidence of the first, as though it had never existed at all.

Or the relationship vignette in “Dream House as Deja Vu,” which conflates the reader and the abused self together, thereby allowing the reader to enter the ‘Dream House’ and stare out from its malformed architecture:

She says she loves you. She says she sees your subtle, ineffable qualities. She says you are the only one for her, in all the world. She says she trusts you. She says she wants to keep you safe. She says she wants to grow old with you. She says she thinks you’re beautiful. She says she thinks you’re sexy. Sometimes, when you look at your phone, she has sent you something weirdly ambiguous, and there is a kick of anxiety between your lungs. Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like the most scrutinized person in the world.

This collage-like scattering of non-linear story fragments, bits of information, the occasional flash fiction, and even a Choose Your Own Adventure® section leaves the reader to make their own connections. It is perhaps a technique more familiar to poets than to prose writers, but it is deployed by Machado to devastating effect.

Another challenge the book tackles is portraying abuse in lesbian relationships (I use ‘lesbian’ as a shorthand for ‘same-sex relationships between women who love women’ here: Carmen Maria Machado is actually bisexual) in a heteronormative world where queer abuse is still misunderstood . In an interview with Poets and Writers magazine, Machado speaks about this confusion:

 …with straight couples we say ‘oh that’s just heterosexuality’, with queer couples we say ‘oh that’s just drama’. Or the fact that we’ve stereotyped domestic violence so that we think of very specific things. It’s very straight, very white big man/tiny woman.

Society is quick to trivialize any abuse in queer relationships, which are often seen as either superior to heterosexual relationships or as bound for failure. Although power differences and abuse are seen as an inherent risk of straight relationships, violence in queer relationships is easily brushed off as ‘drama’, as petty catfights. After all, aren’t queer (femme) women these strange childish, highly emotional creatures who are always squabbling but ultimately incapable of true violence? isn’t intimate partner violence something that can only be enacted by large, masculine men? These thoughtless dismissals make abuse in lesbian relationships hard to write about, which in turn has real life consequences. Machado’s book provides examples of this in “Dream House as Ambiguity” where the legal system’s inability to comprehend lesbian domestic abuse led to unjust rulings against Annette Green and Debra Reid, who had retaliated against abuse in their queer relationships.

While it appears that speaking out about queer domestic violence may counteract dismissal or misunderstanding, frank discussions of queer abuse can be abused as evidence that queer relationships are inherently volatile and unstable, and thus, unnatural. Machado lays this out in the chapter “Dream House as Public Relations” where she writes, “people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, they have twice as much to prove.” In Machado’s case, the narrativization of her own abuse requires a confrontation of her perceived shortcomings. In the chapter “Dream House as Sniffs of Ink from Women,” Machado talks about her frustration at how easily the story of her own abusive ex-girlfriend played into the cliché of the ‘lunatic lesbian.’ She writes, “Years later, if I could say anything to her, I’d say, “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.” As a queer person, I found that both heartbreaking and easy to relate to.

I never thought I would make a comparison to a poem about birds in a book review about abuse, but Machado’s memoir works in the same way as Wallace Stevens’ poem “13 Ways of Looking At a Blackbird”: playing with perspective; zooming in and out; hiding, then revealing details to tell a story. In the Dream House shows us over a hundred different ways to look at a relationship and gives us new ways to imagine our own lives. This is why In the Dream House has been described as ‘genre-crushing’ by writer and poet Melissa Broder. Is this book, ostensibly a memoir, actually a prose poem? Can a 283-page volume be seen as a single zuihitsu? Who said memoirs had to be linear stories? Who said every chapter in a memoir cannot also work on its own as a mini-essay or poem? The fragments that make up the book are held together not so much by narrative as they are by Machado’s astute, self-aware voice.

Despite its subject matter, the book does have many light moments. Speaking for myself, a bisexual writer, Machado’s book felt almost like a homecoming because of her frank descriptions of queer relationships, identity, and community. I was captivated by the moments that felt so true to life. For instance, when Machado is invited by her partner to house hunt, except that Val—her partner’s ex—is also coming along for the ride. Machado relates the day’s events and ends with a brief fantasy of three-way relationship: “a perfect intersection of hedonism and wholesomeness.” Another little detail is when Machado makes a weekly, seven-hour long drive across state lines to see her girlfriend. These lighthearted moments make the reader question their complicity in narratives of abuse. How could an abuser be capable of violence if they are also capable of niceness, of creating beautiful memories? Machado honors the good parts of her toxic relationship in order to help us understand how she ended up in it, and how fine the line between an apparently functional and abusive relationship really is.

When her abuser finally ends the relationship, Machado’s first reaction is to collect a bunch of old library catalog cards from someone off Freecycle to turn into a collage (because, why would anyone not?) Perhaps that is the best metaphor for In the Dream House: that it is a primer on how to turn lived horror into art. How to make sense of violence and trauma through collage, through taking a true story apart, rearranging its components, and splicing them with myth, quotes, tropes, history, to both provide and hide context. In the end, the Dream House is a mirror that reflects back to ourselves all the ways in which we think about violence, gender, and women. The result is a highly experimental yet wonderfully accessible literary masterpiece.



Stephanie Chan (also known as Stephanie Dogfoot) is a poet, educator and stand up comic based in Singapore. Their first poetry collection, Roadkill for Beginners, is about growing up (and not) and searching for utopia in various places around the world, from cabins to squatted buildings to Singapore’s jazz café smoking areas. They serve on the organizing committee of IndigNation, and host a regular poetry open mic night called Spoke & Bird. They are inspired by small mammals, large trees and damp soil.  You can find them at www.facebook.com/stephaniedogfoot.