In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat.

They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.

Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions. I bring this up because it is important to remember that the Dream House is real. It is as real as the book you are holding in your hands, though significantly less terrifying. If I cared to, I could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could. No one would stop you. Dream House as Picaresque — Before I met the woman from the Dream House, I lived in a tiny two-bedroom in Iowa City.

And in the same way the dandelion’s destruction tells us about ourselves, so does our own destruction: our bodies are ecosystems, and they shed and replace and repair until we die. And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy—that constant, roving hunger— you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.

Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what—not who—you are. The story always looks a little different, depending on who is telling it.

It tells a single story, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and creates real-life associations of evil and depravity. It is not incorrect to tell an artist that there is responsibility tangled up in whom you choose to make villains, but it is also not a simple matter. As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.

They can be what 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. 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.[12] They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go.

Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.

I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn’t my room, it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim.

Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system.

Dream House as Epiphany — Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean.

The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember. —Sarah Manguso

But the end did not come as fire or flood. No glittering comet struck our planet. No virus leapt from continent to continent until bodies lay strewn in the streets. The flora of the world did not grow to overtake our buildings. We did not run out of oxygen. We did not vanish or burst into dust. We did not all wake up with blood soaked into our pillows. We did not watch a beam from an alien ship carving trenches into the earth’s crust. We did not turn into animals. We did not starve or use up all of our potable water. We did not trigger a new ice age and freeze to death. We did not choke to death in a self-induced smog. We didn’t get sucked through a wormhole. The sun did not overtake us.

“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” you say as you swim about, trying to find your way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.”

Alice!

you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt.

There is a Panamanian folktale that ends with: “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off.” It’s the only true kind of ending. Sometimes you have to tell a story, and somewhere, you have to stop.