gabi reads: "in the dream house" by carmen maria machado

(and becomes more distrustful of commercially popular recs)

I wanted to like it. I really did. The unorthodox structure for a novel, vindicating my friend’s taste, a sense of spite I won’t elaborate on, not now and not ever—I had so many reasons to try my damnedest and purest-hearted to like it. And for just short of a first half, I managed to.

I was so engrossed the night I started it, I woke up furious that I had to work for 12 hours and couldn’t read it. I was enraged when my otherwise dear friends showed up on my break to hang out with me, and I couldn’t read it. Some of them waited for me to finish my shift, despite what I believed to be a more than suggestive you don’t have to. I begrudgingly joined them for a drink. I was merely defeated, and resigned myself to the idea I’m not reading any more today. Except that I’m someone who’s never gotten over anything ever, so of course I didn’t do that: I was so bitter about it, I couldn’t even drink. I had two cigarettes that night and convinced myself I’m dying of a lack of joie de vivre? cirrhosis? patheticness?

The next day (also a work day), the anger persisted. Kinda: come my lunch break, it transmuted into vexation. I don’t know if it was because I read the one-then-two-then-three-star-yes-in-that-order Goodreads reviews—I’m headstrong enough that my predilections and preferences aren’t easily swayed, even less so in literature, but they might’ve highlighted some aspects that irked me that I hadn’t quite clocked or been able to put my finger on. Regardless, towards the end, it almost turned into a not-quite-hate-but-distinct-dislike read.

Basically, I read it with and through increasing levels of cortisol, but at least the reasons varied and changed over the two days of my lecture (actually a plus). But disliking a memoir remains awkward business, suffused with a relentless compulsion to justify that you’re not trying to dismiss the events, just the way in which they’re told. You’re in the clear, probably; unless that dislike doesn’t merely cover writing technicalities and instead involves disagreement with i.e. political stances, moral tenets, and general attitudes. Thorny territory again. What now?

Because the thing with memoirs is that they’re still nonfiction, which means they aren’t afforded the same liberalities as works of fiction—and why should they be? But neither is it demanded of them to submit to the same rigorosities as nonfiction.

Disagreeing with the stances and philosophies of a book’s fictional characters does not make a bad book, and an unlikable character isn’t a bad character. Yet, with the author-character in a memoir, it might be too uncritical an act to brush aside all such considerations: likability is still not a prerequisite, but there is a scrutiny for validity and credibility. Veridicality?

It’s just a heightened degree of personalism, and no separating the art from the artist in their social entirety: the artist prostrates themselves as art. One’s then permitted to have their opinion and enjoyment of the memoir be more affected by their stance on the author-character than by that on the author or the character in fiction.

I’m gonna use the poor in spirit man’s excuse and say: it is all about balance or whatever. Whatever.

The first part is mostly about the budding romance between Machado and her abusive-to-become ex-girlfriend. The build up is well-done and despite the tenderness there’s a looming sense that it’s all going to go wrong. In part it’s done by the book’s very description—you do get what it says on the tin. But the signs are also discernible enough to elicit a familiar disquiet. Your viscera is telling you what is to come, what’s in store for you, but for some reason that you may or may not know yet, you still don’t press on the breaks. (You can regardless press the Button:)

But, to a fair extent, it’s also that Machado does a rather good job of foreshadowing the collapse; prolepsis can be a wonderful device when used aptly.¹

She manages a fair balance of subtlety and explicitness in that. She also intertwines it with literary tropes or pop culture. An instance of it I rather liked, both in its own merit and in the way it merged with the storytelling, was the link to Bluebeard’s story:

This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability. 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.

However, in the broader ecosystem of the book, the chapter reads quite dauntingly.

Repeatedly throughout the book, Machado uses storylines of dead, battered and abused women. Sensibly, it’s a terrible degree of pain one must reach as to start drawing parallels between her own situation and such dire cases. It also begs for a mindfulness and consideration that seems entirely foreign to Machado, who takes herself as a starting point, passes across those women just enough to turn them into plot devices, and tactlessly returns back to herself.

While the allegoric examples foster sympathy, the usage and, more importantly, the handling of real life cases come across in poor taste. Attributing missing Lauren Spierer a contextual narrative of running away from something and titling the chapter Dream House as Warning isn’t a crime in itself (it is, a bit). Yet, along with little else beyond the impact on Machado and a brief mention as to how people care more about certain victims than others, Spierer being in the “luckier” category if one might call them that, it ends up mere moral self-aggrandising: Machado is socially and politically aware, Machado cares insofar as to raise this, Machado finds the questions what if this were me? how does this relate to me? could this be about me, me, me? in the real woman in flesh and blood, adds that to her story, and pays her no more attention.

Even more appalling a moment is when her friend’s house burns down. She goes to a party; she hooks up with someone. The day after, the house burns down. Someone dies. In the neighbouring sentence, Machado’s is centre scene:

The next day, her house burns to the ground. Your friend is fine, but one of her roommate’s housemates is killed in the blaze. You are thinking about fire inspectors examining your hot bones among the cinders as you drive out of town and south through Central Valley.  

The over-looming, pervasive sense of you should pity me, and even when it’s not me to pity, you should still pity me will soon become tiresome—and not in the least in relation to the woman in the dream house; the poignancy there continues to exist, yet you come to learn her executioner isn’t just her girlfriend, but everyone. The references, too, in their roles as symbols and placeholders for plot lines, become tiresome and confused. While a great deal of them work, some of them are now a bit too distant from what’s at hand, while others seem to probably have never seen the (or a, any) hand.

I’m not a lazy reader at all (will keep you all posted on how that goes once I finally tackle Gaddis’ Recognitions), and I might one day write a manifesto against clarity and connections that are a bit too on the nose. Yet a chapter that stretches and stretches and stretches on just a Star Trek episode didn’t quite do it for me. Matter of personal taste? Might be. It may also be relevant to the plot but I wouldn’t be able to tell you in good faith since I skipped right past.

(At least the title was honest. In Dream House as Prisoner’s Dilemma, there was no dilemma at all, if some grief and mental turmoil. As far as prisoners go, I’d been lured into a cell where I would come to discover myself a solitary jailbird.)

But, before the title-contents disconnect, came the overusage: of Thompson’s motif-index, that is, and of the Taboo, especially. In her rapt attempt to turn everyone into as flat and skin-deep a character as possible, Machado allows for no variations in behaviour, let alone arbitrariness.

I’m not trying to be prescriptive; her story is her story. We’re not given any insight into the capriciousness governing so many abusive dynamics, which might indeed be because that’s just not how it was: that what flies one day is an unpardonable transgression of the laws of psychosexual aviation the next. You never know what you’re allowed or even encouraged to do, and what lands you in the dreamdoghouse. Whereas it’s an utter delight to constantly guess motives and anticipate various reactions that can come from anywhere on the whole wide spectrum of human emotions to one given behaviour of yours based on the day of the week or what direction the wind blows from that day, knowing every possible course of action will invariably be deemed unacceptable, flawed, or offensive is no fun.

Yet, more generally: is anything taboo when everything is taboo?

I said it quite sheepishly to the friend who’s recommended me the book, and, even though he was in agreement, I’m saying it not much less sheepishly now:

It’s a memoir, it’s a victim’s memoir, and it’s personal, which is why it doesn’t have to present a universal narrative. What happened happened, and it’s not for me or anyone else to object to her account, really, and even less so to its authenticity.

Rather, it’s the manner in which the story is told: it’s not an unconvincing story, but it’s unconvincing storytelling. It’s unconvincing writing. The woman in the dream house might’ve been a convincing woman; her one-dimensional character isn’t. The story is a fragmented recounting of events more than anything heartfelt and it reads like inchoate self-flagellation.

Within a relentless, big bad wolf versus little old me dynamic that goes on for most of the book, Machado constructs two fixed, inherent categories of victim and abuser. The roles are fixed and no one can escape, eskew or change their nature. The fixedness of the persecutor shines through in the ex-girlfriend’s seeming capacity for vileness and just vileness. The latter amounts to an archetype of victimhood, namely that of the self-pitying, pathetic victim, which Machado uses to shroud herself against not just her ex, but the world.

In Dream House as Unreliable Narrator, Machado writes:

When I was a child, my parents—and then, learning from their example, my siblings—loved to refer to me as “melodramatic,” or, worse, a “drama queen” Both expressions confused and then rankled me. I felt things deeply, and often the profound unfairness of the world triggered a furious, poetic response from me, but while that was cute when I was a toddler, neither thing—feeling, responding to feeling—aged well. Ferocity did not become me. Later, retelling stories about this dynamic to my wife, my therapist, the occasional friend, led me with incandescent rage. “Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” I would yell. I want to reclaim these words—after all, melodrama comes from melos, which means “music,” “honey”; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen—but they are still hot to the touch.

I won’t go for the low-hanging fruit that is the cloyingness of 2016-era “Yes Queen” pop feminism; to each their own bleeding heart liberal self-empowering, I guess. But her condescension and the general sense of persecution-turned-identity preclude the memoir from achieving its highest potential with the least changes in tone and contents: an astute, even brilliant, insight into the mental states of the incipiently aware victim still under or just in the wake of active fire, and the sometimes perceived, sometimes material limits on agency. Despite her self-satisfaction and arrogance, she speaks like a current victim rather than a survivor.

While she still doesn’t have to absolve her executioner, the expansion of that beyond her romantic relationship just serves to delineate a self-indulgent category of the perpetual victim who can’t surpass her condition, who can’t be free unless she is freed. Always a passive actor, always a sufferer; always the persecuted, so implicitly never the persecutor. A prototype incarnate of the tormented, completely oblivious to everyone’s dual capacity to both tyrannise and be tyrannised.

I was hoping to go she-likes-me-she-likes-me-not-but-im-she-and-the-book-is-me style. Alas, the floret seems to be one of treacherous ideologies.

Queerness, too, is approached in an apparently self-effacing yet convincedly self-assured manner. Part of the reason being that, as she points out (albeit much more convolutedly and somewhat confused herself), people tell themselves and each other lies about lesbians and queer women: without the masculine element, lesbian love is pure and sweet and warm, and how could my girlfriend ever hurt me when violence is of the manly domain and g-i-r-l-s only have good and love in their hearts. Until.

There is merit in addressing her own biases at various stages in her past, and how those had changed over time. Yet, her mousy insistence on it, on the immanent subversiveness of a book written by someone unfortunately socialised as straight and for people at a similar station, is too magisterial for what’s essentially entry-level queer theory. She also notes:

In the Dream House is by no means meant to be a comprehensive account of contemporary research about same-sex domestic abuse or its history.

Situated towards the end of the book, the sentence feigns modesty; this modesty only thinly veils the condescension of: I know I’ve written a really good book, you could treat it as a treatise because you’ve now reached the end and its high academic and archival quality might prompt you to do so but please, tempted as you might be because it’s, you know, good, don’t do that (but I know you want to). Her self-deprecation, although facetious, might have been retroactive: the queer archive she spent so much time browsing seems to have only taught her lukewarm #CoExist liberalism paired with… demands for prison sentences for perpetrators in ambiguous/low-to-no-proof abuse cases (straight or queer!).

Ultimately, it could probably have done with less of why it’s important for queer culture; we neither needed nor wanted a reactionary theory of abuse that bemoans the leniency of punitive justice systems and reduces the participants to one of two unchangeable categories: the perpetual victim or the evil, incorrigible abuser.

But maybe that’s what Machado needed: the angry, paltry, and bitter black-and-white thinking catharsis one inevitably needs and undergoes while or immediately after being part of such a dynamic. As much as I would’ve liked to read why it was important for her, and as much as I would’ve liked to see where she’s standing on it now, a decade ahead and happily married, she wasn’t exactly ready to lay it out bare. And, like everything else: this, too, is fine.

The matchbox cat is here to calm me down (and also because I need something serving as an icon of sorts).

1. Amending this to say: assuming you don’t know what the book is about. My goodness. I’m taking this back. I could just delete it but I won’t—that’s not who I am.