In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

 genre: memoir

Carmen's memoir of psychological abuse in a queer relationship absolutely floored me.  As in, I've truly never read anything like it.  Told in vignettes and short essays instead of a flowing story, we watch the slippery slope into abuse and the quicksand of our brains when it's happening.  How to even believe it's really happening?  How to have enough confidence to know you need to escape?  It's terrifying in its portrayal of the abuser and I literally felt my heart and body react to the situations that Carmen was in, it's so frightening.  Not only that, but woven into her own story are threads of other relationships, both fictional and from other memoirs and news stories, that put her own abuse in a queer relationship into a wider context.  She reminds us that all humans can be cruel, no matter where you land on any kind of spectrum.  Cruelty is not relegated to male or female, gay or straight, butch or femme.  Our expectations for what an abuser LOOKS LIKE can cloud our judgment or make it hard for us to "believe" in the lived abusive experiences of others or even believe that what's happening to US is abuse.  Such is the murky and destructive waters of abuse.

I have to say again how uniquely beautiful and devastatingly painful this book is.  I wanted to read it so quickly because it's so well written and yet I found myself stopping for my pen over and over because I had to underline something particularly thoughtful or insightful or horribly lovely.   I'm using too many adjectives but there it is.  Each vignette has a title that relates to some kind of narrative trope and my brain loved this device, finding connections between the title and the text of the vignette itself, not to mention the genius addition of footnotes that also categorize what's happening based on folk literature motifs.  ALSO the whole device of the Dream House.  All of it.  For such an upsetting topic, I cannot imagine a book that could've impacted me more, that could've set my brain spinning faster within the dynamic and threatening walls of our own dreams and expectations.

**I need to give a content warning though, not just for the abuse, which could be incredibly triggering, but the language is very coarse with a lot of sexual expletives that could bother more sensitive readers. I still absolutely think it is worth reading but readers should be in a good headspace to read a book like this.