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When Love Becomes a Haunted House
In Carmen Maria Machado's "In the Dream House," we encounter a memoir unlike any other-a book that has captivated readers and critics alike since its 2019 publication. This Lambda Literary Award winner and New York Times Notable Book has been praised by celebrities from Roxane Gay to Emma Roberts for its innovative structure and unflinching examination of queer domestic abuse. Machado doesn't just tell her story; she fractures it into kaleidoscopic fragments, each reflecting a different literary trope or narrative device. What emerges is not just a personal account, but a groundbreaking work that fills a critical gap in queer literary history. As you step into this Dream House, prepare to be transformed by a story that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant-a house with many rooms, each revealing another facet of a relationship that slowly transforms from dream to nightmare.
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Entering the Archive: Filling the Gaps in Queer History
The Dream House begins with an exploration of what Machado calls the "violence of the archive"-the systematic erasure of certain experiences from our collective history. The word "archive" itself comes from the Greek for "house of the ruler," revealing how preservation of stories has always been a political act of inclusion or exclusion. For queer people, this relationship with evidence has been especially troubled, with their histories often gatekept by a heteronormative present that determines what deserves to be remembered.
Machado points out that the concept of the abused woman didn't exist in our cultural consciousness until about fifty years ago, and discussions of abuse in same-sex relationships are even newer. This creates a profound absence in our understanding-how do we talk about experiences that have been systematically erased? How do we do justice to those who have been wronged when physical evidence doesn't exist?
This is the void Machado's memoir seeks to fill. By documenting her own experience of psychological abuse in a lesbian relationship, she speaks into a vast crevice of silence. Her work becomes not just personal testimony but historical intervention-an attempt to resurrect the past, manipulate time, and put experiences in context. The Dream House stands as both literal structure and metaphorical archive, housing stories that might otherwise disappear.
The stakes of this project are clear: without documentation, without witnesses, without language to describe these experiences, they remain invisible. By writing her story, Machado creates a record that future readers might recognize themselves in-a beacon for those who might otherwise believe they are alone in their experiences. Her memoir becomes an act of resistance against erasure, a refusal to let these stories vanish from our collective memory.
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The Beginning of a Dream: Falling in Love
Before the Dream House becomes a site of trauma, it begins as a place of desire and possibility. Machado recounts meeting her girlfriend-a short, pale, androgynous woman with fine blonde hair-at a diner in Iowa City. From their first encounter, Machado is captivated by her raspy voice "like a wheelbarrow dragged over stones" and her perfect butch-femme mix. Every time this woman speaks, Machado feels something inside her drop with longing.
Their initial connection is electric. Machado tries to prolong their first evening together by ordering tea, scorching her mouth while desire pools in her limbs. Unlike her previous "floating-past" female crushes, this woman touches her arm, looks directly at her, making Machado feel "like a child making her first independent purchase"-that mixture of excitement and terror that comes with wanting something intensely.
When they eventually become intimate, Machado describes their first sexual encounter with reverence. On her new lover's lavender-scented bed, her girlfriend never kisses the same place twice, asking permission with each new touch: "I'd like to take your shirt off. May I?" Every whispered "May I?" thrills Machado as she says yes, yes, "like drowning willingly in the tide." This consent and care feels revolutionary to Machado, who has previously experienced disappointing sexual encounters with both men and women.
Their relationship quickly intensifies. They watch movies together, write across from each other, share meals where her girlfriend places tuna sashimi directly on Machado's tongue-"sturdy, labial, melting." Machado develops a taste for her dirty vodka martinis. They praise each other's writing, laugh at each other's jokes, and fall deeply in love.
For Machado, who describes herself as a "weird fat girl," this relationship feels like vindication. Her girlfriend seems to see past social markers to appreciate Machado's brain, talent, wit, and spirit. After years of insecurity about her body and desirability, Machado wonders if this is what most people experience: "a straight line from want to satisfaction." For the first time, she feels she can "drown in love without changing a single cell" of herself.
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The Dream House as Utopia: Building a Life Together
When Machado's girlfriend is accepted to Indiana University's writing program, their relationship faces its first major challenge. Initially devastated by the prospect of separation, Machado is surprised when her girlfriend proposes continuing their relationship long-distance. What begins as a polyamorous arrangement with her girlfriend's partner Val eventually transforms into exclusivity when her girlfriend breaks up with Val, declaring she wants Machado all to herself.
The Dream House in Bloomington becomes their shared vision of utopia. Even the name "Bloomington" feels like a promise-"living, unfurling, soft in your mouth." Together they house-hunt, visiting magical properties: one nestled in trees with puzzling indoor windows, another hilariously dilapidated with inexplicable clean shot glasses everywhere. The perfect house eventually appears-owned by redheaded parents with shy children, heated by woodstove, with chickens and a dog.
Standing under trees watching her girlfriend, Machado first admits her fantasy: their relationship evolving into a wholesome-hedonistic future of canning vegetables, writing by the fireplace, tangling in bed together, perhaps even raising children who would "give anything to have three moms." The Dream House represents not just a physical space but a vision of queer domesticity that feels revolutionary in its normalcy-a place where their love can flourish away from judgment.
Their shared creativity blossoms in this space. They write together, make elaborate meals, have passionate sex "everywhere-beds, tables, floors, over the phone." Machado marvels at the miracle of her girlfriend's body and her love for Machado's own. Their physical differences fascinate her girlfriend, who loves comparing her pale skin against Machado's olive tone, her pink nipples versus Machado's brown ones. "Everything is darker on you," she says with wonder.
This period of bliss feels like validation of everything Machado has hoped for-proof that she deserves love, that her body is desirable, that she can build a future with another woman that rivals any heterosexual romance. The Dream House becomes not just a place but a state of being-a utopian vision of what queer love can look like when allowed to flourish.
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When Dreams Fracture: The First Signs of Abuse
The first cracks in this perfect facade appear subtly. During a standardized test scoring job, Machado stays with a traumatized woman during her bathroom break, causing her girlfriend to call and text repeatedly. When Machado finally emerges, her girlfriend is furious, slamming the dashboard repeatedly, calling her "inconsiderate" for disappearing. Even after Machado explains about helping the traumatized woman, her girlfriend grows angrier.
When Machado pulls over and starts crying, insisting she made the right choice, her girlfriend leans close and hisses: "You're not allowed to write about this. Don't you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?" Machado nods, not knowing if her girlfriend means the woman or herself. This moment marks a turning point-the first time her girlfriend's anger feels disproportionate and controlling.
Other incidents accumulate. During a Thanksgiving gathering, when Machado points out practical concerns about hosting her girlfriend's entire graduate cohort without proper planning, her girlfriend calls her a "fucking bitch." Machado ends up at Kroger's at 11 p.m., paying for everything, then cooking while guests arrive and eat off paper plates, barely acknowledging her.
Her girlfriend's jealousy becomes increasingly irrational. Though Machado admits to having harmless crushes on many people-a quirk she's always had-her girlfriend begins accusing her of wanting to sleep with countless people: roommates, friends, colleagues, teachers, students, doctors, even her father. Denial sounds like confession to her girlfriend, forcing Machado to provide evidence of her innocence. During sex, her girlfriend grabs Machado's face demanding, "Who are you thinking about?" and commands, "Look at me when I fuck you."
Machado's body begins manifesting distress: constant nausea, burning gut, cramping, tremors, esophageal constriction. She cries without reason, can't orgasm, can't make eye contact. When a doctor tells her to lose weight, she misses the metaphorical diagnosis-"the weight you need to shed is the 105-pound blonde waiting outside with an annoyed expression."
These incidents reveal the insidious nature of psychological abuse-how it begins with small moments of control and disproportionate anger, gradually escalating until the victim begins to doubt their own perceptions and memories. Machado finds herself increasingly walking on eggshells, trying to anticipate her girlfriend's triggers, and modifying her behavior to avoid conflict. The Dream House, once a sanctuary, begins to feel like a trap.
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Gaslighting: When Reality Becomes Negotiable
One of the most devastating aspects of Machado's experience is gaslighting-her girlfriend's systematic undermining of her perception of reality. Machado describes this disorientation: "Her coldness is a puzzle you can't solve. You speak clearly, thinking carefully before you speak, yet when she repeats your words back, they're unrecognizable." She begins questioning her own words and intentions, unable to trust her memories when confronted with her girlfriend's confident contradictions.
Machado draws parallels to the 1944 film "Gaslight," where Gregory manipulates his wife Paula into believing she's insane by misplacing objects and secretly searching their attic for jewels, causing the gaslights to dim mysteriously. Paula's unraveling is painful to watch-"her radiant self reduced to a haunted husk floating through their London home." Gregory doesn't physically imprison her; he turns her mind into a prison.
This psychological manipulation becomes Machado's reality. During a long drive from Connecticut after the Harvard-Yale game, her girlfriend erupts in anger, demanding to know why Machado won't let her drive, accusing her of hating her and wanting her to die. When they switch seats, her girlfriend drives recklessly through Pennsylvania's dark mountains at 90 mph. In Ohio, she nearly falls asleep at the wheel, the car drifting dangerously across lanes. When Machado begs to drive, her girlfriend refuses: "My body is my bitch. I can make it do whatever I want."
Arriving at 4 a.m., Machado spots coyotes crossing the lawn and points them out. Her girlfriend explodes: "Fuck you! I thought you were pointing out someone who's going to kill us!" She storms inside while Machado sits outside in the cold, watching wildlife cross the lawn, determined to remember this moment. By morning, her girlfriend acts as if nothing happened, brewing coffee and sweetly scratching Machado's scalp.
This pattern-explosive anger followed by denial or amnesia-becomes increasingly common. After a bowling alley incident where her girlfriend whispers "I fucking hate you" and later screams directly in Machado's ear, throws her suitcase across the room, and pounds on the bathroom door where Machado hides, she later claims no memory of the events. "She tells me before sleep that she doesn't remember anything-just being at the bar, then crouching over me naked. Everything between is darkness."
Machado begins researching memory loss and sudden rage, wondering if her girlfriend might have a medical condition explaining these episodes. The internet offers little except an article suggesting heavy marijuana use might trigger schizophrenia in the genetically predisposed. When Machado shares these theories, her girlfriend scoffs with such disdain that Machado begins questioning her own memories even more deeply.
This systematic undermining of reality leaves Machado in a state of constant uncertainty, unable to trust her own perceptions. As Captain Picard confesses after his torture in Star Trek: "At the end... I was going to. I would have told him anything. But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights when there were only four." Machado finds herself in this same position-on the verge of accepting her girlfriend's version of reality over her own lived experience.
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The Isolation of Queer Abuse: Silence and Disbelief
One of the most painful aspects of Machado's experience is the isolation that comes with being abused in a queer relationship. She explores how discussions of domestic violence in same-sex relationships are relatively new in our cultural consciousness, leaving victims without language or framework to understand their experiences. This silence is compounded by the pressure queer people feel to present their relationships as ideal to a heteronormative world already skeptical of their legitimacy.
Machado writes about how fantasy defines female queerness-finding love and joy without men's "accompanying bullshit" seems like paradise. Literature about queer domestic abuse frequently references this punctured dream, a violation as painful as physical abuse. Even the rainbow symbol represents a promise not to repeat violence. Acknowledging the insufficiency of this queer idealism hurts almost as much as recognizing "we're in the muck like everyone else."
This pressure to maintain a perfect front creates additional barriers to seeking help. When Machado tries to talk about her experiences afterward, she receives mixed responses. Some listen, but others politely dismiss her experience, whispering doubts: "Was it really that bad?" "She seems perfectly nice." "Maybe it's changed?" These responses leave her feeling "desperate and horrible." Once at a party, a woman drunkenly whispers, "I believe you," making Machado cry so hard she has to leave.
Machado also explores how the queer community has historically struggled to address abuse within its ranks. In Dorothy Allison's story, lesbian friends debate community response to violence between women, revealing how loyalty falters when confronting uncomfortable truths. Many insisted these issues should stay within the community, often decentering victims while abusers operated freely. Even in court cases, queer jurors sometimes protected abusers out of misplaced solidarity.
The community circled essential truths no one wanted to face directly: women could and did abuse other women, and queers needed to address this because no one else would. This reluctance stems partly from fear that acknowledging abuse between women would reinforce harmful stereotypes about lesbian relationships being inherently unstable or pathological. Machado herself admits to being haunted by the specter of the "lunatic lesbian" and worrying that her girlfriend's behavior would "make us look bad."
Without physical evidence of her abuse, Machado struggles with how to validate her experience. She finds herself wishing her girlfriend had hit her-a terrible wish when millions pray for the opposite, but one born from craving "the clarity of something black and white after years of believing I was losing my mind, believing I was the monster." This absence of proof-what Jose Esteban Munoz calls "ephemeral evidence" in queer experience-leaves her vulnerable to doubt, both from others and herself.
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Breaking Free: The Long Road to Escape
Machado's journey out of the Dream House is neither straightforward nor immediate. Despite recognizing the toxicity of her relationship, she remains entangled through multiple breakups and reconciliations. When her girlfriend gets accepted to Machado's MFA program and talks about moving to Iowa City, Machado feigns excitement on the phone but afterward feels "like I did when my brother hit me with a baseball as a child-warm blood down your throat, tasting of milk and metal."
The relationship finally begins to unravel when her girlfriend confesses to falling in love with someone else-Amber, a classmate from Indiana. Machado is stunned into silence, remembering all her girlfriend's accusations about her merely looking at others. Later, when her girlfriend returns, she kisses Machado and says, "I think we're meant to get through this. Don't worry."
This pattern of breaking up and reconciling continues. Her girlfriend stops answering calls and texts, then breaks up with Machado over Skype, saying she still wants to be friends. Later, she emails asking Machado to visit her hotel in Iowa City. Despite initially refusing, Machado goes, bringing her belongings but staying instead. They argue, cry, and eventually have sex because Machado "only speaks the language of giving yourself up." Her girlfriend promises it will work, that Amber means nothing. The next morning, Machado discovers her girlfriend is actually dating Amber in Indiana and planning to stay there. When confronted, she smoothly explains it's "merely complicated"-she "cannot be an attentive girlfriend while loving someone else."
Even after the final breakup, Machado's girlfriend continues to pursue her, calling nine times and leaving multiple voicemails that alternate between loving pleas and vicious threats. Machado saves these messages in case she needs a restraining order but loses them months later when upgrading her phone.
The process of truly breaking free involves more than physical separation-it requires Machado to reconstruct her sense of reality and self-worth. A conversation with Val, her girlfriend's ex, proves revelatory. When Machado mentions meeting her girlfriend in an already-open relationship, Val's silence speaks volumes. "What are you talking about?" she finally asks, revealing that their relationship's foundational story was a lie.
This confirmation of her girlfriend's deception becomes a turning point for Machado. Arriving at a house party afterward, her friends immediately sense something's wrong. "I need a drink," she tells them, "And then I need to tell you a story." By sharing her experience with trusted friends, Machado begins the process of reclaiming her narrative and rebuilding her reality based on truth rather than her abuser's manipulations.
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Healing and Reclaiming: Life After the Dream House
Machado's healing journey begins with small acts of reclamation. After the breakup, she forces herself to leave her phone at home, practice ignoring it, remind herself she's accountable to no one. She describes an "indescribable emptiness" opening in her life-sex becomes unimaginable, masturbation nearly impossible. She wonders if she'll ever reconnect her brain and body or if they'll remain "forever separated by this terrible ravine."
Unexpected support appears from surprising sources. Her extremely Republican uncle Nick visits the day after the second breakup. Despite his Fox News-watching, gun-collecting politics, he embraces her when she breaks down, saying "Everyone's heart breaks in the same way." For an hour, he shares stories of his own failed relationships and offers practical advice. His kindness makes Machado smile for the first time in what feels like a year.
Machado finds solace in travel and writing. She drives to San Diego for a writing workshop, stopping in Berkeley to see her ex-boyfriend. Their relationship's "contained, clear problems" now seem refreshingly straightforward compared to the psychological labyrinth she's escaped. In San Diego, she writes, drinks scotch, and walks on beaches, beginning to reclaim her creativity and joy.
A surprising plot twist occurs when Val asks to accompany Machado back to Iowa. They drive to the Grand Canyon, capturing a photo of Val awestruck at the vast expanse. Later, on a friend's foldout couch in New Mexico, Val asks if she can kiss Machado, and she says yes. They spend their days driving and talking about the woman in the Dream House, and their nights curled into each other. What bonds them initially is knowing they're not alone in their experiences. Eventually, they'll move beyond this context-moving in together, getting engaged, and marrying.
Yet healing doesn't mean forgetting. Seven years later, Machado still dreams about the Dream House, despite being "four houses, three lovers, two states, and one wife removed from it." The dreams resemble childhood nightmares where she'd hear steady, approaching footsteps of some unseen monster. She learned as a child to force herself awake, but now fears that if she does, her abuser "will step from the dream into my waking world where I've been safe and distant."
Machado develops what she calls a "sixth sense" after the Dream House-a physical revulsion that arrives unprompted when meeting certain people, "like the sour liquid rush before vomiting." Though inconvenient and sometimes irritating, she recognizes it as important: "my brilliant body's brilliant warning" protecting her from potential harm.
Perhaps most significantly, Machado reclaims her story through writing this memoir. By breaking her experience into literary fragments-each section viewing the Dream House through a different lens-she creates a structure that reflects the fractured nature of trauma while asserting control over the narrative. Writing becomes both testimony and transformation, a way of ensuring her experience isn't erased from the archive of queer history.
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The Lasting Impact: Memory, Archive, and Moving Forward
In the final sections of her memoir, Machado grapples with memory, history, and the challenge of creating an ending to a story that continues to reverberate through her life. She acknowledges that "that there's a real ending to anything is, I'm pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go."
The question of where to end becomes both practical and philosophical. Should it be her wedding to Val "on a hot day in June"? Some narratively satisfying confrontation with her abuser? Or perhaps the recognition that one day, all of them will die-"Is that the end of the story? Time's mindless, chattering advancement?" She settles on a Panamanian folktale ending: "My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off." It's the only true kind of ending, she suggests-acknowledging both the necessity of telling stories and their inherent incompleteness.
Machado reflects on how writing this book felt like "pinning down fragments of history before they could shift or melt away." Her project is not just personal but historical-an attempt to fill gaps in the archive of queer experience. She acknowledges that her memoir isn't meant to be comprehensive research on same-sex domestic abuse or its history-"that book has yet to be written"-but draws strength from the limited existing writing on the subject.
The lasting impact of Machado's work lies in its refusal to let these experiences remain invisible. By speaking into silence, she creates space for others to recognize and name their own experiences. Her memoir becomes part of a larger project of expanding our understanding of both queerness and abuse beyond simplistic narratives or stereotypes.
In her epilogue, Machado describes writing part of this book in rural eastern Oregon, staying in a cabin at the edge of a dried playa. Walking across the cracked soil under a blood-red full moon, she wishes for clarity, wishes her younger self "could have lived here with me." Her dark silver moon-shadow walks before her as she returns to shore. This image encapsulates her journey-moving from darkness toward light, carrying her past self with her, finding solid ground after walking through desolation.
The Dream House remains part of her, but no longer defines her. She has built new homes, found true partnership, reclaimed her creativity and voice. Her story ends not with perfect resolution but with continued movement forward-a tale carried by the wind to readers who might recognize themselves in its pages and find comfort in knowing they are not alone.
