By Cassie Baudouin
Your mind indeed is tired. Your mind is so tired that it can no longer work at all. You do not think. You dream. Dream all day long. Dream everything. Dream maliciously and incessantly. Don’t you know that by now?
– Patrick Hamilton, Angel Street
“In the Dream House: A Memoir” by Carmen Maria Machado is a very creative memoir following the author’s experience in an abusive same-sex relationship. She uses classic thriller and horror tropes to tell the story, and she often refers to the relationship itself as the Dream House, “If I cared to, I could give its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could. No one would stop you.”
The subject matter of the memoir is very hard and tough to digest, but the work is also really inventive. She writes the book in segments, not quite chapters, with titles characterizing the Dream House in time:
- Dream House as Inciting Incident
- Dream House as Menagerie
- Dream House as Queer Villainy
- Dream House as Unreliable Narrator
To name a few.
Machado focuses on telling her own story, but she also taps into why she’s writing this at all. The whole memoir is masked in a metaphor born from the ancient Greek definition of the word “archive” – Arkheion, or the house of the ruler.
She explains that what is included or left out of an archive is always a political act, and it’s the archivist who decides what lasts, what gets told. Abuse/domestic violence among queer partners is never regarded as it should be. In her prologue, she quotes queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence….When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.”
In Dream House as Ambiguity, Machado details the events of domestic violence cases between queer women. The conversation of domestic violence in lesbian relationships has been prevalent within the community, but didn’t truly hit the courts until 1989 with the case of Annette Green. She was the first to use the term, “battered woman syndrome” to justify shooting her partner.
The judge eventually allowed Annette Green’s defense but later required it to be called “battered person’s syndrome” even though both people involved were women. Green was later convicted; “A paralegal who worked with Green’s attorney told a reporter that ‘if this had been a heterosexual relationship,’ she would have been acquitted.”
Machado also recognizes the nuances and intersections of race and class, Annette Green being Latina. She references the Framingham Eight, a group of women imprisoned for killing their abusive partners, where Debra Reid was the only black woman and the only lesbian.
When it came time for their stories to be heard in front of a committee to consider their sentences, she was to be presented as “the woman” of the relationship, “The attorneys believed, rightly, that Debra needed to fit the traditional domestic abuse narrative that people understood: the abused needed to be a ‘feminine’ figure-meek, straight, white – and the abuser a masculine one. That Debra was black didn’t help her case; it worked against the stereotype.”
The most inventive part of this memoir comes through pages 162-177: Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure. She details some of the darkest moments in their relationship and makes it into a game, all while breaking the fourth wall with what feels like Annie Wilkes’s sledgehammer.
At the end of every adventure or encounter with the woman from the Dream House, Machado gives the reader a series of possible ways she might have responded to her girlfriend’s attacks, each with a page number to go to. It’s quite the journey. There are a couple of pages that aren’t options in the game and would be impossible to get to unless you cheated.
She balances on the line between the reader’s restlessness, and her own exhaustion, “You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me. Go to page 171.”
The audiobook is narrated by the author and folks… Performance is a performance, is a performance, is a performance. The physical is equally incredible and transforming (see Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure), so do what works for you, I guess. Either way, you’re in for something special.
