In the Dream House

A Memoir That Refuses Its Own Form

Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House defies easy categorization, which is perhaps why it appears here alongside poetry collections – it has the compression and the formal self-consciousness of the best poetry, even though it is, strictly speaking, a memoir. Published by Graywolf Press in 2019, it tells the story of an abusive relationship between two women, rendered in second-person narration and structured through the lens of narrative tropes: the Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure, as Haunted House, as Fairy Tale, as Comedy of Errors. It is one of the most formally inventive books of literary prose published in the last decade, and it reads with the intensity and precision of the most ambitious poetry.

The Second Person and Its Work

Machado narrates the abuse she experienced not as “I” but as “you” – a choice that does several things at once. It creates an uncanny distance from the narrator’s past self, the quality of observing oneself from outside the body. It implicates the reader in the experience, making them not observers but participants. And it mirrors the psychological reality of abusive relationships, in which the victim often comes to see themselves from outside, narrating their own life in the voice of their abuser. The second person is not a trick but a formal argument about how trauma actually works.

Queer Domestic Violence and Its Archives

One of the book’s most significant achievements is its reconstruction of the archive of queer domestic violence – the literary, historical, and cultural records of intimate partner abuse between women, which are sparse, suppressed, and often deliberately obscured. Machado’s extensive footnotes and archival chapters document the ways queer domestic violence has been rendered invisible both by homophobia (which denies that queer relationships can be sites of real intimacy and therefore real violence) and by feminist discourse (which has sometimes struggled to accommodate female perpetrators). This archival work is both scholarship and an act of solidarity with survivors whose experiences have been dismissed.

Genre and the Dream House

Each chapter of the book takes a different narrative genre as its frame: fairy tale, bildungsroman, haunted house, choose your own adventure, and so on. This is not merely clever – it is the book’s central formal argument. Machado is showing how narrative genres shape and misshape our experience, how the stories we have available to tell ourselves determine what we can and cannot recognize as happening to us. She could not find her own story in the genres available to her; the book is partly an act of creating the genre she needed.

The Prose as Poetry

Machado’s prose has a lyric quality that places this book firmly in the company of the best poetry: the sentences are compressed and rhythmically charged, the images precise and strange, the movement between concrete and abstract fluid. Reading it aloud reveals a sonic architecture that is more poem than novel. This quality of the writing is not incidental but necessary – the compression and precision of lyric are how Machado gets at things that more relaxed narrative prose would let slide past. The form earns its difficulty.

What the Book Accomplishes

In the Dream House won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction, and numerous other prizes. More importantly, it has found a readership of survivors – including many who had not recognized their own experiences as abuse because they did not fit the expected narratives – who have described it as lifesaving. This is not language typically applied to formally experimental literary works, and its application here suggests that Machado’s formal choices were not aesthetic exercises but necessary means to an end only that kind of writing could achieve.

Verdict

In the Dream House is one of the most important and formally accomplished works of the past decade. It is not an easy read, but it is a necessary one – for its archival work, for its formal innovations, and for what it says about how narrative shapes and distorts our experience of violence and love. Read it carefully and read it more than once.

What is In the Dream House about?

In the Dream House is a memoir about the author’s experience in an abusive relationship with another woman, narrated in second person and structured through multiple narrative genres including fairy tale, haunted house, choose your own adventure, and bildungsroman. It is also an archival and scholarly account of queer domestic violence and its cultural invisibility. The “dream house” is both the literal house where some of the relationship took place and a metaphor for the seductive ideal that abusive relationships often present at the start.

Why is the book written in second person?

Machado chose the second person because it accurately reflects the psychological experience of abusive relationships, in which the victim often observes themselves from outside, narrating their own experience in a dissociated voice. It also implicates the reader in the experience rather than positioning them as comfortable observers. And it creates a deliberate formal instability – the “you” who experiences the abuse is both Machado-in-the-past and the reader, and the ambiguity is the point.

Is In the Dream House about queer domestic abuse specifically?

Yes – the relationship it describes is between two women, and the book addresses the specific ways queer domestic violence is rendered invisible both by homophobia and by feminist discourse that has struggled with female perpetrators. But the experiences it describes – the cycle of idealization and devaluation, the isolation, the gaslighting, the difficulty of leaving – are recognizable across different types of abusive relationships, and many readers with different backgrounds have found their own experiences reflected in it.

Is In the Dream House difficult to read?

Yes, in the sense that it deals with abuse, psychological manipulation, and trauma with unflinching honesty. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it does not soften or aestheticize what happened. Readers who are survivors of abusive relationships may find it both the most accurate account they have encountered and occasionally difficult to be inside. The formal innovations – the second person, the genre frames – create some protective distance, but they do not eliminate the emotional intensity of the material.

What awards did In the Dream House win?

The book won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography, the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named a best book of 2019 by numerous publications and has received extensive critical attention for both its literary achievement and its political and cultural significance.

How does the archival dimension of the book work?

Throughout the book, Machado incorporates historical and literary evidence of queer domestic violence – accounts, records, and cultural representations that are deliberately sparse and often actively suppressed. This archival work is documented in footnotes and in separate chapters that serve as historical context. Machado is both documenting her own experience and arguing that the scarcity of models and narratives for queer domestic violence was part of what made it so difficult for her to recognize and name what was happening to her.

How does this book relate to Machado’s fiction?

Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017), established her as one of the most formally inventive writers of speculative and literary fiction working today. In the Dream House uses many of the same formal strategies – the genre frame, the formal self-consciousness, the compression of the prose – but applies them to autobiographical material. The two books are very different in subject but continuous in sensibility and craft. Reading them together gives a fuller picture of Machado’s project as a writer.

Who should read In the Dream House?

Anyone interested in formally innovative literary writing; anyone who has experienced an abusive relationship and struggled to find language for it; anyone interested in queer literature and its histories; anyone who wants to understand how narrative genres shape what we can and cannot recognize as happening to us. It is not a book for everyone in the sense that its subject matter is difficult, but as a literary achievement it speaks to the broadest possible readership about fundamental questions of form and experience.