The antechamber of “In the Dream House,” a new work of memoir-cum-criticism by Carmen Maria Machado, is crowded. It contains a dedication, three epigraphs, an overture (declaring the author’s suspicion of paratext), a prologue, and another epigraph. Paging through this front matter feels like waiting for a haunted carnival ride to start, only to be wrong-footed. When does it begin? you think. Then you realize, It’s already begun.
The memoir, by the acclaimed author of the short-story collection “Her Body and Other Parties”—which was a finalist, in 2017, for the National Book Award—chronicles Machado’s experience in a horrifying relationship. Just as it is difficult to say when the book begins, it is difficult to say when Machado’s girlfriend, blonde and slight, also a writer, first reveals her nature. Is it when she flies into a rage after Machado fails to respond immediately to a text? When she digs her fingers into Machado’s arm? Over the course of a formative love affair, the woman—who dwells, witchlike, in a cabin, in Bloomington, Indiana, which Machado calls the “Dream House”—will accuse Machado of cheating; throw things at her; lie to her; manipulate her; scream at her; and reduce her, again and again, to tears.
Yet the arc of this ordeal, although it forms the book’s skeleton, is not Machado’s true subject. Instead, “In the Dream House” is primarily about the quandary of constructing “In the Dream House.” It is a quandary both because the telling is painful and because Machado, who has no language for this telling, must invent one. The concept of “archival silence,” Machado writes, captures the idea that certain histories never enter the cultural record. Before she met her ex-girlfriend, Machado hadn’t encountered narratives of queer domestic abuse; she lacked context and precedents; she could not make sense of her experience. (In one passage, she compares her state of mind to that of a gay teen crushing on a same-sex classmate without knowing anything about gayness.) In the book’s opening pages, Machado notes that the word “archive” derives from the ancient Greek word for “house.” She invokes Louise Bourgeois’s theorization of memory as “a form of architecture.” Her intent becomes clear: to imagine an archive, or dream a structure, in which her story can live, surrounded by literary trappings—epigraphs, prologue—that lend it legitimacy. Machado’s introductory quotes aren’t just gloss, in other words. They’re bricks.
The book itself takes a breathtakingly inventive form. Each short chapter examines its content through a lens—or places it in a room—that is summarized by a heading: “Dream House as Confession,” “Dream House as Stoner Comedy,” “Dream House as Word Problem.” The relationship between section and title morphs throughout. Some chapters sample the tropes and tones of their professed genre. (“Dream House as Noir,” which unpacks the sexist stereotype of the stormy lesbian romance, concludes “Dames, right?”) Other chapters seem to critique their classification or to be only glancingly connected to it. This elaborate architecture could have felt florid, but the headings also help unlock each vignette’s function, like a brushstroke guiding viewers’ eyes around a painting. “Dream House as Déjà Vu” conjures the eeriness of a relationship’s private, repeated mantras. In “Traumhaus as Lipogram,” Machado compares writing under a formal constraint—without the letter e—to absorbing the “taints” of abuse. One is confined in ways that are not immediately legible; there’s a whisper of wrongness. (“It is an awful thing, that missing symbol,” Machado writes. “Folks know.”) These shifting angles of illumination achieve a full, strange representation of the subject. Machado acknowledges that we are more than what happens to us; we are also the scripts we use to imagine ourselves.
The book feels ambitious in other ways. Along with chronological vignettes from her relationship, Machado weaves in childhood memories, meditations on queer representation, and a legal history of lesbian domestic abuse. The text can inhabit any skin, but it cannot reverse time or save the writer’s past self. The point of view cycles between an “I” that speaks for Machado-the-author, fierce and eloquent, and a “you” that signifies Machado-the-victim. The disconnect between these perspectives accounts for the memoir’s air of anxious virtuosity. “I left, and then lived: moved to the East Coast . . . moved in with a beautiful woman,” Machado writes. “You cried in front of many people. You missed readings, parties, the supermoon.” Sometimes, the two personae flicker and merge. One chapter, “Dream House as Accident,” both recounts an accident and feels, artistically, like an accident: a one-sentence interlude that violates the memoir’s logic. An accident is not a type of story—or is it? It is as if the book is both unravelling and teaching readers how to read it.
Machado’s writing, with its heat and precise command of tone, has always had a sentient quality. But what makes “In the Dream House” a particularly self-aware structure—which is to say, a true haunted house—is the intimation that it is critiquing itself in real time. Machado seems to anticipate—and even riff on—our skepticism of her tricks. “Dream House as Pop Single,” which examines the Aimee Mann ballad “Voices Carry,” is a suggestive but perhaps unnecessary study of how song lyrics might depict domestic abuse. It feels digressive, but intentionally so, and in the next chapter, “Dream House as Half Credit,” Machado cops to scribbling in as much information about a topic as she can when the answer on a test eludes her. Later, she addresses directly her tendency to fracture narratives: “You know that if you break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears you will be able to access their truths in a way you couldn’t before.” Given the truths that do emerge, it’s a convincing explanation for her methods—if also, apparently, a self-serving one. “I broke the stories down,” Machado writes, “because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.”
Some of Machado’s preëmptive maneuvers work better than others. “Dream House as Queer Villainy” celebrates the “aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee” of figures like Cruella de Vil, Ursula, and Jafar. Machado appears to be wrestling with the imagined objection that her book participates in a tradition of demonizing gay characters. Her answer—that queer people “deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity”—feels a bit like Intro to the Politics of Representation. Another chapter, “Dream House as Unreliable Narrator,” walks a similar line between basic and resonant. “My parents . . . loved to refer to me as ‘melodramatic,’ or, worse, ‘a drama queen,’ ” Machado writes. She fumed to see her poetic outrage at the world’s injustice reduced to a plea for attention. “After all,” she notes, “melodrama comes from melos, which means ‘music,’ ‘honey’; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen.” Machado understands that memoir, like architecture, requires a sense of proportion. The problem is that women’s feelings are rarely ever considered proportional.
Machado is taking huge formal risks; she’d be unreadable were she not also disciplining her book to within an inch of its life. Consider the Dream House’s many personalities: “a convent of promise (herb garden, wine, writing across the table from each other), a den of debauchery (fucking with the windows open, waking up with mouth on mouth, the low, insistent murmur of fantasy), a haunted house (none of this can really be happening), a prison (need to get out need to get out), and, finally, a dungeon of memory.” The place’s meanings proliferate wildly—an effect of trauma—but the writer remains in control. Her images resist dissection. “In dreams,” Machado continues, the house “sits behind a green door, for reasons you have never understood. The door was not green.”
I love that green door for the way that it flashes up from Machado’s unconscious, signifying—what? Poison? Regeneration? She is describing how a place seeps, with alterations, into her nightmares, and yet much of the book does the reverse: it shows phantasmagoria overtaking a physical site. Here and in her short stories, Machado subjects the contemporary world to the logic of dreaming. She is often said to spin urban legends or fairy tales; her writing, while clear, is full of nameless currents, hidden transactions between pleasure and terror. The result is a space that cannot, even years later, be easily escaped. “It occurs to you,” Machado writes, “that you are this house’s ghost.”
