Book Review: Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House

Wow, what a heartbreaking, torturous book to read when you're about to get engaged. No seriously, that is when I originally read this book about a confusing relationship of psychological abuse: I was on an airplane to Iceland to get engaged. It was brought with me for spring break because it was assigned reading while I was in graduate school, and I had no desire to fall behind, even when I was on an amazing vacation.

Machado didn't make it hard to want to read though. In fact, the more I saw of the dream house, the harder it was to shut the door into this world. As I attended one of my peer's thesis defenses this past week (shout out to Emily Miller, who deserves a lot of congratulations!), I was reminded of how dreadful a home can feel.

And that is the inspiration for this post this week. I wanted to talk about the book and share what my original response to it had been as an MFA student, and you can find both of those things if you keep on reading.

This is a view from the cabin I stayed at in Iceland, and I have to say, it was truly a dream.

---

My Review of Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House

Rating: ★★★★☆

Carmen Maria Machado is probably the most honest real estate agent you've ever met: no real estate agent would walk you through a place she used to call a home and point out all the good things while nailing home the gore of the bad. That is probably why she is a successful memoirist who has made a reader feel like they have shared the complexities of the dream house with her.

As many fairy tales do, it starts with the heroine being saved from another relationship and falling in love with something that is supposed to be better. The opportunity of something better has a castle, and that castle is the dream house. It isn't until the reader has moved inside that they realize how big the moat is separating the dream house from the rest of the town, and the halls of the dreamhouse are actually dark and damp with despair.

One of the tools that Machado employs to invite readers in from time to time is second person point of view. While some writers use this as a trick, Machado uses it elegantly, because she isn't referring to the reader as a you, but to a younger version of herself at these points. With the understanding that the older "I" narrator is speaking to a younger "you" narrator, there is a new layer of vulnerability in showing this dream home.

This is my copy of Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House as it sits on my desk and is illuminated by the glow of my computer, which I thought was applicable for the vibes.

While readers are living in the dream house, they will enter Machado's mind as she lived through a psychologically abusive same-sex relationship. The strength of entering the scene and living it out in the dream house is stronger than being told what happens; instead of watching a friend's heart get broken, it is the reader's heart that breaks for Machado, over and over again. And yet, Machado's craft is so precise that there never seems to be a wasted word; there is always space for another room, more of the story.

When it comes to form, this book becomes the house, and the rooms change over and over again. From a room being a Noir film to being a Sodom story, from being an Apartment in Philadelphia to being a Natural Disaster, the dream house is ever changing and constantly shifting as a reader exists inside of it. The use of footnotes is a constant reminder of how the floorboards will constantly shift beneath a reader's feet as a new level of understanding of what the dream house is continues to emerge. As Machado writes herself, "And isn't their violence always a footnote, an acceptable causality?" (227).

This book captures all of the work that Machado put into it, from living this experience to reexamining it, to dissecting it and making sense of the experiences alongside research. That work is difficult but necessary, and Machado out did herself with the work she put In the Dream House.

This quote might not hit on its own, but in the context of the book, it is a real gut punch.

What I Wrote as a Student on March 27, 2024:

"A stylistic choice that stood out to me in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House exists in part three of the book when she employs the idea of a choose your own adventure to showcase that the relationship was a cycle that she could not get out of. “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” (162) gets a reader to flip to certain pages depending on the choice that they would make. It ends up being a circle, over and over, which exemplifies how this narrator could never make the right choice, there was no right choice, only this painful, repeating cycle. At some point, I just tried to read it in order, which is ironic because there is no order in this cycle. A reader can only get to some pages by “cheating” (165), and in life, the narrator couldn’t cheat. They were stuck in a vicious cycle that they couldn’t escape, and making this essay a hermit crab really highlights that.

"Another craft choice that Machado plays with is changing point of view depending on the scenario to maximize the tension. In “Dream House as Libretto,” it opens, “My middle school music teacher” (178). Right next to it, “Dream House as Sci-Fi Thriller” opens with, “One night, John and Laura ask if you want to watch a movie with them” (179). I believe that this craft choice creates tension by controlling the emotional stakes. “Libretto” in the my as an I narrator creates a reflective distance; in it, Machado does not need a reader to be in that moment, and by having an I narrator, the reader ends up in the role of an observer. They are not directly impacted by the murder of Carmen or misplaced assumptions. In contrast, “Sci-Fi Thriller” puts the reader in the moment, in the experience of having a partner who assumes that they cheat, the stress and tension of having to handle that when the reader has done nothing but fall asleep from watching a movie."  

My initial reading response may not be the best thing I've ever written, but here is a photo of me post engagement.

More About Carmen Maria Machado

Author Website: https://carmenmariamachado.com/

"Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Her essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania."