In the Dream House is a maze of emotion and analysis. With bewitching, at times chant-like prose, Machado invites the reader into her dream house, lets us look in all the closets and the empty rooms and watch as she recreates, or resurrects-as she writes that all good memoirs should-what it was like to live for several years with an abusive partner. “You are being tested and you are passing the test sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are look how loyal, look how loved.” That is how scary, Machado means to say, how incongruous and entrapping an abusive relationship can be. “This is how you are toughened,” Machado writes to the fairy-tale wife and to a younger version of herself. Though it frightens her, this fairy-tale figure manages to convince herself that it’s completely normal. Take, for example, this nightmarish moment from a fairy tale, described by Machado to show her reader the contradictory, illogical feelings she had about her then-girlfriend: the mythical Bluebeard’s young wife watches, horrified, as her new husband dances with the corpses of his former wives. One question is persistent throughout Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir about an abusive same-gender relationship: How did we get here? Followed, usually, by: Is this the last straw? In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
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