Dream House as Review on Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House
by Franny Marzuki
Photos by Matteson Quint
Carmen Maria Machado, live at Prairie Lights
Photo by Matteson Quint
In her new memoir In the Dream House, Writer’s Workshop Alum Carmen Maria Machado wrestles with the concept of archive and explores archive as a conduit for violence. The memoir recounts an abusive relationship with an ex-girlfriend during Machado’s years as an MFA student. Parallel to the story are essays that explore the conversation—or silence—surrounding incidents of domestic abuse within same-sex relationships. The memoir’s title comes from the name Machado gave her abuser’s house in Bloomington, Indiana, where she began to pursue her MFA, after Machado was accepted into Iowa and she was not. The book acts as a record for Machado’s experience as well as an entry to the larger archive of lesbian abuse stories. While Machado attempts this archive, she never assumes wholism within this story. It is stated plainly in the prologue: “the complete archive is mythological, possible only in theory” (5).
Machado’s memoir is heavily set in Iowa City which exists for her as a place of “great pain but also great joy.” She tweeted that she was “full of feelings” when she arrived for her reading on November 9th. The upstairs of Prairie Lights buzzed with anticipation for her arrival. The entire standard for conventional readings had collapsed, with the chairs moved to face a side wall instead of the back in hopes of having enough seats for all the expected guests. By 3:30, half an hour before the scheduled start time, people were forced to stand near the cookbook section and sit on the floor in the front. Iowa City showed up for Machado, with friends and fans in the crowd waiting for her story to be shared.
As much as In the Dream House is a memoir, it is also a study in point of view and narrative tropes. Most of the chapters are written in second person with a contrasting first person for moments during the more essayistic moments and times of retrospection. The first person narrator, an older Machado that exists distinctly separate from her past self, retells her trauma and experience with abuse with a measured distance. This continues throughout the whole book until Part V when the two perspectives come crashing into each and the unreachability of the ‘you’ is shattered. In this final part, the reader has finally caught up to Machado in the present day and she no longer holds the power of retrospection over her past self. The identities of the ‘I’ and ‘you’ collide. The ‘you’ never returns.
Each chapter takes on a new identity, titled ‘Dream House as…’ followed by a genre that informs the content and style.
Each turn of the page reveals a new landscape for the reader to explore, to survive.
The breadth of genre ranges from ‘Dream House as Noir’ to ‘Dream House as Stoner Comedy’ to ‘Dream House as Plot Twist,’ each highlighting a moment in Machado’s relationship or commenting on representations of lesbian abuse in media. ‘Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®’ is a chapter that leads the reader down multiple paths after an argument with Machado’s ex-girlfriend. The reader is given agency over Machado’s actions, given options on how to proceed in what feels like a set of landmines always waiting to go off with one wrong step. It is narrative informing emotion.
In one of the memoirs more essayistic pieces, ‘Dream House as Ambiguity,’ Machado comments on the lack of justice within cases of abuse between women. She speaks on how the only cases that receive proper media attention and court proceedings are when the abused kills her abuser and, therefore, those instances are the only evidence that lesbian abuse exists. As Machado states: “the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention” (138).
Garth Greenwell (left) and Machado discussing In the Dream House.
Photo by Matteson Quint
During her reading, Machado commanded the room with her voice, delving into moments of pain and of levity with seamless transition. It was quiet enough that a cough could shatter the air. Once the reading ended, it moved into a conversation with fellow LGBT writer Garth Greenwell. One question asked about the use of footnotes that frequently reference an index from Stith Thompson called Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Muths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends.
Greenwell was particularly struck with the footnote in ‘Dream House as Lesson Learned’ when a homophobic aunt of Machado’s says she doesn’t “believe in gay people” and Machado’s mother says “nothing at all” (71). This line ends with a footnote that reads: “18. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type S12.2.2, Mother throws children into fire.” When asked about the significance of Folklore in the context of a non-fiction fiction story, Machado said that she found the idea that all human behavior and experience have existed before her, that she wasn’t the first nor the last to feel these emotions, offered a great comfort. “They made me feel less alone,” she said. “That somebody who lived and died long ago had something to say about what happened to me.”
As much as Machado’s work acts as a narrative, it also acts as a uniquely physical object. Within the pages, there is a very deliberate use of blank space. The beginning of this book consists of a dedication—”if you need this book, it is for you”—three epigraphs that are all given their own page, a title page, ‘Dream House as Overture’ that criticizes the use of paratexts and prologues, and ‘Dream House as Prologue.’
To enter this book, the reader must encounter the contradiction and space these pages introduce. There is a physicality to flipping page after page and seeing so few words written on them, it cues readers that they are entering a story with walls and road-blocks. They cannot simply enter with ease. There are chapters later on that present one sentence that doesn’t even break the second line of the page. These lines are saturated, emphasized, given the importance of a page, of a title. ‘Dream House as Utopia’; ‘Dream House as Famous Last Words’; ‘Dream House as Epiphany,’ “most types of domestic abuse are completely legal” (112).
The initial contradiction comes when the reader is told that Machado hates the use of prologues, as all they do is reveal that the author is hiding something. Then we are forced to confront the fact that the next chapter is a prologue. Machado is condemning its use while hiding something great beneath it. This gives allowance for the words to exist plainly at face value. The reader must accept these contradictions because domestic abuse is often littered with them. The abuser is loving, and then they are not.
When asked about her venture into non-fiction, Machado said that this was a story that had been fighting to be told for years. Anyone familiar with Machado’s debut collection Her Body and Other Parties can see the echoes that exist between the two works. There is one poignant story called “Mothers” that deals directly with domestic abuse between two women in the collection.
Cover of In the Dream House via Graywolf Press
Another, softer echo comes in ‘Dream House as Pathetic Fallacy’ as Machado recounts her abuser’s habit of hoarding fruit until it rots. An eerily similar situation is mirrored in the story “Especially Heinous” as one of the characters buys fruit and vegetables just to have them waste away in her fridge. In “Especially Heinous,” the character resolves this obsession by tending a garden. Machado says that the books are continuous with each other but serve very different purposes. “There was something really important to me of getting this book out of my system, it feels like I unclogged a drain. The reason I chose non-fiction… was because I thought it deserved to be told as a non-fiction story that’s not hiding behind this veil of fiction.”
In the Dream House is a nightmare, a haunted house contained within the pages of a memoir. But in the end, it is hopeful. Machado allows the readers to see her life, still tinged by trauma, blossom. She is married, writing, and continuing. There is no definitive end to stories like these, just wind to carry us to where this specific tale ends. In the Dream House is a nightmare, but it is also the beginning of an archive, an open door.