Review of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

In The Dream House portrays emotional and psychological abuse in a same sex couple, detailing the way the relationship devolved into something confusing and scary. The writing is experimental. Carmen uses second person narration to create distance between herself and her memories. The nonfiction work's honest portrayal of female-on-female abuse and 2010's attitudes about sexuality make it relevant. No wonder it's been wildly successful on TikTok.

What does same sex abuse look like?

For Carmen, it looked like a slow breakdown. First a petite, ivy league educated blonde fluent in French mesmerized and infatuated Carmen, instigating a three-way partnership between The Woman from the Dream House, Carmen, and someone named Val. After Val drops off, Carmen and The Woman plunge into an obsessive monogamy.

Carmen spends two years of her MFA Creative Writing program driving back and forth between Iowa City, where she lived, and her girlfriend's house. She focuses more on The Woman at the expense of other relationships in the graduate program. The Woman begins to display controlling, paranoid behavior such as constantly accusing her of infidelity, asking her to front the money for ill-considered plans, driving recklessly, but also driving slowly when Carmen needs to catch a flight, taking Carmen to New York and then abandoning her in the streets so she can't find her way back, berating her, and then eventually cheating on Carmen and ending the relationship. Some people criticize the book because they expect the abuse to physical or more severe; but I think that the reason this book is worth reading is because it describes how a woman abused another woman. It doesn't need to be physical to be serious.

The writing is characterized by cerebral reflections in the refrain "Dream House As..." and the use of second person to describe Carmen's memories. It also makes extensive references to pop culture.

A primary message of In The Dream House is that many people in the lesbian community are hesitant to indict other lesbians of abuse. Therefore, an overarching marketing message is that Machado is being brave by bringing attention to abusive dynamics in the queer community. Many studies have shown that the rates of intimate partner violence in the LGBTQ community are higher than in heterosexual couples by a noticeably wide margin: leading by 10% in both gay and lesbian relationships. This is not surprising to me because I have personally witnessed many same sex relationships with people I knew from school and in my own family. Girl-on-girl on relationships can be extraordinarily cruel, deranged, and severe.

Let's Compare the Messages of the Book to History and Religions

I try not to critique authors themselves because no book is perfect and I wouldn't be talking about their work unless I believed it was worth talking about (a truism, yes); however, I do comment on the social problems that their work presents. Stonewall occurred one year before 1970 and the acronym LGB began around the 1990s. This coincided with the dramatic increase of the divorce rate since the 1970s through the 2020s, which also coincided with feminism. That is to say nothing surprising: LGBTQ became a known lifestyle option around the time that people decided that families with mothers and fathers were not as important as the individual's right to limitless self expression. Of course, this becomes a serious problem when someone enthralled to their own emotions expresses themself by being cruel and nasty.

One crucial point from the text is that most forms of abuse, especially emotional and psychological abuse, are completely legal. True. That is to say that social norms are not really the realm of the judiciary: it would be unsustainable to put people in jail for being rude. At the same time, it's very important to try to be kind. The institution that used to set those standards and model exemplary behavior was a recognized, codified, institutional religion. Of course, some people who pretend to be Christian can be as abusive as anyone else; but if people really believe that they must treat others like Jesus would or they'd go to hell, then they would be motivated to treat their spouse, mom, friends, and children right. Islam functions similarly, and, if anything, it's more prescriptive and direct with exactly what constitutes fair business deals, fair adoption, and fair marriage contracts, which is why the golden age of Islam occurred before the Mongols when there was a recognized, codified, pervasive, exclusive, institutional religion. It's also why contemporary structures of Arab nationalism are inextricably linked to Islam. The point I'm making is not evangelical but academic: the secular West currently has human rights as the foundational text upon which we codify how people are allowed to behave, so the mechanism to condemn bad behavior is mercurial at best and occasionally missing all together.

The dichotomy preached by both Christianity and Islam is: the human wants to sin, but we should refrain in order to please God. In this paradigm, the self is the source of the problem. In human rights culture, the human should be able to ascertain whatever he or she wants as long as it doesn't affect another's personal freedom. But, what if the human wants something destructive long-term, selfish, indulgent, or chaotic? Human rights culture is missing a code. In order to compensate for the element it's structurally missing, and because people have no idea why they're so miserable and unhappy, secular Americans believe that the reason their lives are in shambles is because of people blocking social progress. This logically results in upheavals to dogpile on rudeness, as seen in cancel culture over and over and over again.

Finally, towards the end of the book Machado uses the metaphor of gravity verses a downward propulsion machine to describe the difference between her lesbian relationship and her relationship with her college boyfriend. Obviously Carmen is not saying that LGBTQ relationships are unnatural; instead, I think she's saying, "I had to try really hard," and that should be scrutinized in great detail.

In conclusion, I do recommend reading this book. The way women are abusive to other women needs to be understood and stopped.