The Book That Brought Me Back to Reading: 'In The Dream House' by Carmen Maria Machado

Some books, when finished, make you reevaluate all other books, make you want to stretch the 5-star system and fish out another star. I started In The Dream House late one Sunday and finished it Monday morning, having spent all night rolling around the bed, lifting it with outstretched arms, book eclipsing the ceiling light like a holy offering. I embarked on this journey with a thick stack of page markers and the intention to label every ‘good’ chapter. The stack has since thinned to dire levels, and the book sits bloated and fatter than ever, tiny post-it-thumbs jutting from the side like a dozen paper hitchhikers, all begging for a lift.

For a decade, Carmen Maria Machado struggled to voice the years of abuse at the hands of her girlfriend. She didn't yet have the language available to articulate her experience; she had to find it, cultivate it. 

We know that a monster is waiting for us; she tells us so constantly, explicitly, and we still reel with surprise when she flashes her claws.

In this shockingly experimental memoir, Machado uses the fragmented form like she invented it. We find ourselves in a psychological horror, a romance, an essay on queer Disney Villains, a starkly fourth-wall-breaking choose-your-own-adventure, where our narrator berates us for defying her laws; we find ourselves in Bluebeard's lair, then a bowling alley, then a palace, then a tropey slasher movie, creeping over Machado's shoulder into a spider-laced basement, breath catching like a hook in our throat. We know that a monster is waiting for us; she tells us so constantly, explicitly, and we still reel with surprise when she flashes her claws.

This book, on the surface, is an experimental memoir, a mirror, fractured into a thousand, glinting shards. Beneath that, it is a living, breathing creature, with skin, teeth and blood. 

Carmen Maria Machado is a master of her craft; that is an undeniable truth of her writing. It was so perfectly written, at times, that I’d want to cry just at the beauty of it, the way you might cry at a painting in a museum, catching some universal truth framed so accurately, so unexpectedly, on the wall. The reality that abuse can, and does, exist within lesbian relationships is the painful and shamefully radical heartbeat of this memoir. The faces this abuse can take on are dark and numerous. The ways in which it is so publicly concealed are even more so. Machado’s effort to stitch together a canon of writing on this topic, amidst the ever-pulsing sting of her own experience, is breathtaking and evades categorisation. What started out as essay soon twisted into visceral lived experience. This book, on the surface, is an experimental memoir, a mirror, fractured into a thousand, glinting shards. Beneath that, it is a living, breathing creature, with skin, teeth and blood. 

Consider this. If you could watch a painter coat a canvas lick by lick, face stationed so closely to the brush that you can taste the paint, feel the residue flick your cheek, see in real time the unfurling of each line, the slow, measured turning of the wrist, so closely that none of it makes sense, but all of it captivates you… if you could do that for hours, see it harden, watch line after abstract line curl into existence before you… if the painter could turn, when done, and lift your head in her warm, paint-stained palms, if she could smile at you, manouvre you so calmly, with such certainty that you let her… if she could lift you away, turn your face back to the art, reveal to you the vastness of the work… if you could only now make sense of the fragments, piece them together with this fresh, new perspective, see the sheer size of the canvas you were only moments ago pressed right up against… if you could do all of that, and love it, and know that each strange, masterful stoke was placed with precision all along, that each one constituted a month, a year, ribboning out into a lifetime, it might feel a little something like reading this book.

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Buy it at Waterstones here

Or leave your house (heaven forbid) and find it in the world! Support your local indie bookstores <3