WIRED Book of the Month: Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House

Midway through In the Dream House, her memoir about an abusive relationship with a former girlfriend, Carmen Maria Machado makes a painful observation: "Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat." She's referring to Adam's job in Genesis of naming the animals, but she's also confronting the core challenge of her book. Domestic abuse in queer relationships is rarely written about—when your love is taboo, so are its violences. Machado must create a new tongue.

No other writer is better suited. The author's previous book, Her Body and Other Parties, is a collection of short stories so effortlessly wide-ranging they pivot from fantasy to romance to humor in the blink of an eye. Machado can always find the words to convey what she means, even when she's using language in ways it's never been used before. She is a master of bending genre tropes to her whims—painting family dramas and domestic microagressions as the horror tales they are, demonstrating women's invisibility by literally making them see-through. (FX is currently developing the National Book Award-nominated book into a Black Mirror-style anthology series.) She uses the language of genre to tell stories genre books often ignore. It’s easy to call what she does speculative fiction, this generation's Angela Carter, but hers is a genre unto itself.

For In the Dream House, the focus is singular—one very traumatic relationship—but the references she employs to illustrate it, the concepts she invokes to build her narrative, are legion. Constructed as a series of vignettes, each chapter is named "Dream House as …"—where the home she shared with her abusive lover is presented as a different metaphor. "Dream House as Five Lights" is a chapter that looks at psychological trauma through the lens of Picard’s torture at the hands of the Cardassians on Star Trek: The Next Generation. "Dream House as 9 Thornton Square" takes its title from a location in the film Gaslight and explains how the movie gave gaslighting its name. (A subsequent chapter explains how director George Cukor challenged Judy Garland’s sanity to get the performance he desired for A Star Is Born.) There is a Choose Your Own Adventure section that painfully relays the patterns and cycles of emotional manipulation. An early chapter titled “Dream House as Folktale Taxonomy” breaks down the subtle misogyny of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid (why must the heroine be silenced?), and throughout the book Machado adds footnotes that connect events in her relationship to tropes outlined in the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. The taxonomy chapter ends with a Quichua riddle: "Whatever names me, breaks me."

What Machado names in Dream House isn’t entirely new, but has it ever been laid out so thoroughly? As she writes in her intro, the history of abuse in queer relationships is spotty at best. Very little of that history is recorded to begin with, and the parts that deal with domestic violence often go untold for fear of making queer people look bad, even when they are. "We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity," she writes. "That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough." This comes in a section on the problematic nature of Disney’s queer-coded villains. Machado is a magician at illuminating difficult topics with familiar examples.

There is a generous accessibility in this framing. The subjects Machado covers are so big, so heartbreaking, that the occasional reference to popular culture makes them comprehensible for readers who may never experience what she experienced. Being able to draw those comparisons isn't easy, but it's also essential. Most of the stories like Machado's have been erased, or not recorded at all. To tell hers, she has to draw on the corpus of known tales. It's like a retcon; Machado is reminding us that what happened to her has happened for generations, and she's putting it back in the cultural consciousness where it belongs.

Genre fiction has always worked in metaphors, of course. Mad Max: Fury Road is a class war. Star Trek is about equality in a universe where diversity includes myriad species and life forms. Blade Runner interrogates what it means to be human. In that sense, Machado's book is not unique. But in the way it seamlessly weaves the facts of her life with fictions—the ghosts that still haunt her, the fact that even time travel could not undo what’s been done—is a masterstroke. Machado's that writer who can convincingly code-switch between sci-fi nerdery and lyrical realism. She's equally at home in both worlds.

In the Dream House begins with a near-perfect dedication: "If you need this book, it is for you." Machado, who teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, has spoken recently about trying to help her students see abusive behavior in their own lives. She knows she cannot speak to every person the way she can talk with her classes, "so I wrote a book." Dream House, then, is an attempt to fix the future if the past is a lost cause. It is also proof that sometimes the most valuable stories genre writers have to tell are their own. Believe them.

• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
  This short story collection is nothing short of phenomenal. Read it now before the FX anthology series comes out.

• Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson
  Although it has some historical elements, Winterson's book is pure fiction—but it does play with genre themes in ways similar to Machado's latest.

• Shrill by Lindy West
  Writer Lindy West's account of her harassment at the hands of online trolls is quite different from Machado's story, but the bravery and grace with which she writes about it is just as good.

• What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence by Michele Filgate
  There are a lot of great nonfiction pieces in here, but Machado's essay about her relationship with her mother is a definite highlight.

• Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain by Abby Norman
  Norman's book is an amazing and unflinching piece that mixes autobiography and real-world (and often underacknowledged) medical issues facing women.

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