In the Dream House

Incredible. Carmen writes with such elegant, haunting complexity that both shocked and touched me. A deeply important and necessary text.

Carmen pulls apart different elements from her experience as a victim within an abusive queer relationship, examining them from different angles trying to process, understand, and heal. She shares her experience in contribution to a collective history of abuse, placing it in the context of various pieces of film, writing, legal proceedings, folklore, clichés, and many various literary devices. Machado discusses the importance of documenting cases of abuse between people with shared gender identities, revealing that the silencing of such experiences contributes to the isolation and de-humanisation of queer women. The doubt and disbelief that victims of queer relationship trauma are so often met with, even by themselves, resulting from the scarcity of documentation of such experiences. She disentangles the ways in which seeds for abuse are planted early on, and how victims are slowly drawn in by disguising isolation, manipulation, and degradation as luck, passion, and love.

I loved how it was structured, the fragmentation of her writing. The splintered narrative a perfect representation of her story and her journey in making sense of it, as well as putting it into historical context. I loved that it was written in the second person, whether used as a device to increase reader relatability or an address to her past self.

Anyone close to me in the past week can attest to my love of this brilliant memoir, in that I have not shut up about it or stopped force-reading them excerpts.