in the Dream House

Brilliant, but Buried: In the Dream House

When I started In the Dream House I was excited to read something that focused on the relationships of a Midwestern queer woman. Not only am I a gay woman, but I am also incredibly familiar with Bloomington, Indiana, and the beautiful Indiana University campus where the story takes place. The opening — “If you need this book, it is for you” — prepared me to identify with the writer.

Unfortunately, the actual meat of In the Dream House is buried under pages of single quotes from other writers and musings on popular media. Within all of the asides and media musings, however, Carmen Maria Machado creates a visceral, horrific view of the abuse she endured. Her choice to write the following scene in the second person felt utterly inspired.

Machado’s ability to turn phrases and her skill in putting forth how it felt to have an abusive partner are astonishing.

Machado is sitting in the kitchen with her girlfriend’s mother. While she is at the table, the mother is chopping up vegetables for dinner. Machado places the reader into these moments as if to allow us to experience that panicked sense of helplessness. With that in mind, be aware that the following quote speaks directly about partner abuse:

Your girlfriend comes into the kitchen, and asks, ‘What are you reading?’ as her hand starts to circle your arm. “I’m—” you start to reply, and her fingers tighten. Her mother, still chopping, says, “Are you girls still going to the beach later?” Her knife raps against the cutting board with unnerving precision.

Her grip goes hard, begins to hurt. You don’t understand; you don’t understand so profoundly your brain skitters, skips, backs up. You make a tiny gasp, the tiniest gasp you can. It is the first time she is touching you in a way that is not filled with love, and you don’t know what to do. This is not normal, this is not normal, this is not normal. Your brain is scrambling for an explanation, and it hurts more and more, and everything is static. Your thoughts are accompanied by a cramp of alarm, and you are so focused on it that you miss her response.

The power of Machado’s words and her ability to force you into experiencing the narrative is the real meat of In the Dream House. It is to the book’s detriment that it relies so much on other media and familiar tropes. Before you get to Machado’s words, you read three quotes, each taking up the space of an individual page. To me, it seems that the author is afraid to nakedly put out her story and must wrap it in the blanket of other media, which might have been her point.

Every section has a similar formula of a header that says “The Dream House as..." This is an extremely effective way to make the reader feel the sort of monotony that an abuse survivor deals with. The dream house is a physical monument to the author’s pain. It stands to prove that what she went through was real.

Nearly each and every section includes equating her life to either a book, movie, or TV series. This action made me feel thrown from her gripping narrative, and after a while, it didn’t give me a chance to get back into Machado’s story entirely. Perhaps she thought that it would be a way for straight people to better connect with her. However, Machado’s very human needs, fears, and pain connect to a reader far better.

Machado’s switching between second- and first-person could be extremely compelling as a way to tell a story. I’m a huge fan of perspective changes and non-linear storytelling. However, because she is doing so much, it only added to the hard stops I had to take to reorient myself. There was no pattern to the use of perspective change. Switching to first-person as a way of speaking in the present is what I believe she was going for, but I cannot be sure.

That is the core problem with In the Dream House. There are too many “tricks” pulled out in the book. Reflection on popular media, formatting choices, perspective changes, and, finally, a “choose your own adventure” set of sections are all crammed in. By themselves, or combining two of them, would allow the reader to connect more to the actual story.

The “choose your own adventure” sections were the most powerful for me to read. They represented an obvious and horrifying picture of how an abusive partner can wear someone down, and masterfully showed the futility that abused partners can feel. However, by the time I got to that section, my first thought was “not another gimmick.”

However, Machado’s ability to turn phrases and her skill in putting forth how it felt to have an abusive partner are astonishing. In the sections where I could fully immerse myself in her story, I was enveloped by her pain, her reflection, and the rawness of her perspective choices.

In the Dream House is a beautiful tale hidden inside a book that contains everything but the kitchen sink. Machado’s ability to draw you into her narrative through the use of perspective is exemplary. The feelings she’s able to convey are painful, raw, and real. You just have to look for them within the tangents of media viewpoints and quotations.