There’s “Dream House as Inciting Incident”, in which Machado meets her nemesis. What is happening? Where is the author going with this? The sections, each of varying lengths, are titled. “I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice measure the emptiness by its small sound.” “I speak into the silence,” Machado writes. It is powerful how Machado writes her way out of that life.

Like most villains, the woman in the Dream House (as Machado names her girlfriend) offers her evil in equally measured, small doses. We know this from hyperbolic portrayals of lethal relationships, but that’s not what we find here. Machado is manipulated, deceived, subject to screaming rages. Machado’s the heroine of her memoir, but that’s not to say her nemesis is conclusively full of absolute malevolence. That horror hides behind corners, buries itself in whispered threats.

Like most folk tales, Machado’s narrative is buried beneath a layer of horror. Smoke by werner22brigitte ( Pixabay License / Pixabay) It’s about so many things: a toxic relationship with an emotionally abusive girlfriend a “choose-your-own-adventure” that proposes scenarios and likely outcomes fairy tales’ a history of queer domestic abuse built on historical accounts and connections between the author’s experiences and Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk-Literature (1932-1936). The only way to effectively process Carmen Maria Machado‘s masterful, harrowing, beautifully controlled memoir, In the Dream House, is to understand that this is one of the more ambitious, audacious, and successful experimental accounts of a journey from a house of horrors. When the reading experience proves not as easy to dismiss, and we need to take a while to “process” the world we’ve safely entered with the guarantee that the author herself survived, writing about their book becomes a welcome obstacle to overcome. Many of these titles in what we might refer to as “survivor” narratives can be dismissed and relegated to earnest accounts, each indistinguishable from the other. If we read this genre with the voracious appetite of somebody convinced they’ll never be able to read again, or we pick a title at random that proves to conclusively change our lives, the fact that we’ve invested the time to experience the chosen narrative means we have no choice but to process the story. The same verb can be used after finishing a memoir. Go through any traumatic experience - the sudden death of a family member or loved one, or the shocking realization that a destructive relationship needs to end if we expect to survive - and experts will always monitor how we “process” the experience.

One of the key verbs used in therapy is “process”.

In the dream house carmen machado