![]() ![]() These are written in the second person, a choice Machado lays out in a section titled “ Dream House as an Exercise in Point of View,” which explains how the “assured, confident woman” she identifies as before and after this relationship is “cleaved: a neat lop that took first person…away from second.” It’s an effective device that draws us in as not readers or voyeurs, but participants. The through-line narrative of their relationship is rendered in a series of vignettes that detail accounts of verbal and emotional abuse, intimidation, manipulation, and deception. In a section titled “ Dream House as Not a Metaphor,” Machado writes, “If I cared to, I could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside.” With this provcation comes a warning. (Any idealized perception of queer relationships is complicated and dismantled by Machado’s writing.) Though its meaning shifts over the course of Machado’s delicately written memoir, one thing is made clear to us: The Dream House is quite real. ![]() The house also represents a false promise: a place where relationships among queer people can exist without flaw. ![]() It is the book’s primary setting-a backdrop to the abuse Machado experienced during her first relationship with a woman-and one of its main characters, too. ![]() In Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, the titular home comes to represent all the different parts of her story. ![]()
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