Carmen Maria Machado (2020) In The Dream House. London, Serpent’s Tail. 978-1-7881-6224-1

 

This book is a personal memoir, reflecting on an abusive lesbian relationship framed in different narrative lenses. The relationship is detailed from the first meeting, through the abuse and after the writer had left.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]

The story is told partly in the second person and partly in first person. It provides a really intimate portrait of the abuse told through many different narratives – some less than a page long – but each developing the story. It details coercive control in its clearest form – gaslighting, anger at saying or doing the wrong thing, being with the wrong people, it being the wrong time.

This is the first book I’ve read where the experience of the writer resonates with my own experience of an abusive relationship, despite my relationship being a heterosexual marriage and this being a lesbian relationship. All the other books have also been heterosexual relationships but nothing else has come close to my own experience.

Awards:

• Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction
• Winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
• Finalist for the Stonewall Book Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award
• Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
• Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

Best Book of the Year

• The New Yorker
• TIME Magazine
• Vogue
• Entertainment Weekly
• Harper’s Bazaar
• Paris Review

Best Memoir of the Decade

• LitHub
• Paste
• Autostraddle