In the Dream House

Honestly, I have not read that much nonfiction recently. Most nonfiction titles I can think of that impacted me are ones that I read in high school, such as All Creatures Great and Small by James Harriet because I liked reading about animals. However,  a few months ago I read In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. I did not know much going into the book other than that it was well written and the book was available through my library, so I decided to check it out (literally). As soon as I started reading, I was hooked onto her story and her writing. It follows the author's experience of domestics abuse specifically in a queer relationship with a woman. She talks about how when most people think of domestic abuse, that there is usually a male figure involved, but there are some toxic relationships between women that go unnoticed. However, parts of the memoir are through different horror and scary movie tropes. With each chapter, the title would be for example, "dream house as haunted mansion" or "dream house as apocalypse." She also included historical details where terms such as gaslighting has originated and developed overtime. It was a memoir that I was not expecting to enjoy because it read like a non-conventional horror story that felt like fiction. It was really engaging and the writing was super creative and memorable. Overall, In the Dream House made me realize that I should read more nonfiction since I never really explored the genre before reading it.

Here is a small excerpt: 

You are definitely the most uncool person ever to attend this M.F.A. program. The woman from the Dream House, as a Dalek, can barely move through the crowd. People keep knocking into her costume. You want to tell her a joke — “Start yelling ‘Exterminate!’ People will move!” — but she wouldn’t get it. You watch her down one drink, then another. 

After an hour, she walks home drunk and furious. You follow her for blocks, watching her bump along ahead of you, not certain what to do because you have the keys to your house. She has a colander on her head, like a conspiracy theorist — a true tinfoil hat. You’d been angry with her before, but there is something so tender and vulnerable about a grown woman, in a disintegrating costume of a character from a show she does not watch, stumbling back to a house in drunken anger. You think, this will be a good story, one day.