In the Dream House

In The Dream House is a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. I was fascinated by the brevity of the chapters, an approach that served to deliver on the subject matter appropriately i.e., abuse in a same-sex relationship. The brief chapter were effective, at least for this reader, in that they allowed me the space to fully digest what was happening in the story without feeling overwhelmed.

In the book, the narrator walks us through her experience with an abusive partner, capturing even the subtle elements of it in a way that makes it unmistakable for the reader. You know that what you are reading feels off, different, wrong, hurtful etc. Mental/psychological abuse, I find, is hard to portray in writing and yet In The Dream House, Machado shows us exactly how it happened to her. It is a powerful telling, and one that I respect.

The book was on the reading list for my first Non Fiction Writing Workshop at Emerson College, and when I started reading it, I mistakenly thought it was to do with a house or a relationship’s drama within the setting of a house [talk about being so literal], but the book has little to do with a house. I like that the writer reaches for language that paints a picture but is not the picture itself.