Emily: Okay hello. Welcome to a new blog series which we have named... what did we name it again?
Kelli: Girl and Girl on Girl on Girl.
Emily: 4G for short.
Kelli: JK I think we’re calling it Queer Girl Book Club.
Emily: We're workshopping this as we go, people.
Kelli: Mostly because I wanted to focus on queer women/NB people, but we'll see what choices we make moving forward!
Emily: Yeah who knows. We might throw some dudes in there. But like... we may never. That's our prerogative. This is our blog.
Kelli: Also, we're girls, so the name still works.
Emily: Anyhow. For our inaugural Queer Girl Book Club blog post, we're talking about Carmen Maria Machado's memoir In The Dream House. In this book, Machado examines her first serious relationship with another woman. More specifically, she examines the abusive nature of said relationship, not only through her personal experiences, but also in the context of history and pop culture and how that frames the way we look at lesbian relationships and abusive relationships. As I was reading this, Kelli, I felt like you and I were a good pairing to get together to discuss this book because 1) I was in an abusive relationship for four very long and formative years of my life and 2) Although I can't speak to your reactions and experiences, I thought you could probably identify with a first queer relationship, since you recently started dating women.
Also just to be clear, we have both dated women, which doesn't make us experts at lesbianism, but we are coming from that perspective, which I think is helpful to know.
Kelli: Yes! I could definitely identify with Carmen a lot throughout this book, as a person who has known for most of my life that I'm bisexual but didn't actually explore it until this past year. I think there is something about being in a "first" relationship that makes you extremely vulnerable, and often leads people to falling hard and fast, which when paired with an abusive personality is really, really dangerous.
And even though Carmen had been with men before, and had had experiences with women, this was her first big relationship with a woman, which is its own kind of first. I kept thinking like - I'm lucky that the first woman I dated wasn't like this. Because if she was, I could see myself falling into this trap. Same goes for my first boyfriend, obviously.
Emily: Yes, my first serious boyfriend was very abusive. I think what especially worked for me in this memoir, just off the bat, was the contextualizing she does here. She uses a lot of framework to put us in her headspace in this relationship. It's hard to explain exactly what abuse feels like from the inside, but what Machado can do is tell us how she was thinking and what about the outside world framed those thoughts and feelings.
For instance, she says early on, well, I was just always told women were emotional, so I thought this is how relationships with women worked. Obviously, she contextualizes it more than that, but that's just a general example.
Kelli: Yeah, definitely. And she talks a lot throughout about the societal framing of queer relationships and how those ideas are damaging — like, the idea that abuse can't exist within same sex relationships.
Emily: Right.
Kelli: Which leads not just to people not believing you if you find yourself in this situation, but also you not believing yourself. I think it's also important to note that anyone can be abused in a relationship at any stage of their life, even a man in a cis-gender heterosexual relationship, and that abuse isn't always physical. Like, there were a couple of moments of physical abuse in this book – like when the Girl in the Dream House (which is what Machado calls her ex throughout) grabs her arm and squeezes it until she bruises her. But a majority of the harm done is through emotional manipulation.
Gaslight: A form of abuse that’s unfortunately completely legal AND the name of a film Machado references
Emily: Yes. And just to talk about my own personal experience for a second.
Kelli: Please do!
Emily: I was really young when it happened to me. I was a teenager. I didn't know what an abusive relationship looked like at all. I was emotionally abused for years before it escalated to violence. A lot of the emotional abuse is about grooming. You can't be full-on abusive, emotionally or physically, at first. You have to get your partner to a place where they will willingly accept that sort of abuse from you. It takes gaslighting, isolating, manipulating, all of which I think Machado outlines really clearly in the book. And I think these personal narratives are SO so important because I don't know, if I were more aware of what abuse really WAS when I was younger, maybe I would've gotten out before my then-boyfriend was taking the abuse to a place of physical violence where I feared for my life.
I know we talked about this, but there's a really great chapter where Machado talks about this grooming. It's on page 59, I think. It's the chapter about the "Bluebeard" fairytale.
Kelli: Yes, absolutely. I would love to hear you say more about that chapter in regards to grooming because I just tried to start explaining it and thought "Emily would say this better.” Lol.
Emily: Well it's a short chapter. I feel like she explains it better than I ever could just say it, so my impulse is to say "just read it." But in case you're NOT going to do that, you assholes, here's the basic idea.
As I mentioned earlier, Machado uses a lot of fairy tales, folktales, history, pop culture imagery, and so on to contextualize her experiences. This chapter is specifically about the "Bluebeard" story in which Bluebeard tells his new wife she can do anything she wants as long as she doesn't go into this one locked room. Of course, according to the story (there are variants), the wife goes into the room and finds her husband's dead wives (?). And so she broke the rule. But Machado points out that this wasn't really the only rule. This was a test. And if she'd passed this test there would be more tests. And really it doesn't end. And that the more you're tested, the more trapped you become.
Kelli: Right. And that as you're being tested, you're led to believe that all of it is to prove your love.
Abusers and grooming. It’s been going on for ages (see: “Bluebeard”)
Emily: Yes. I think that's something pretty much all abuse stories have in common. It's all in the name of love and if other people don't get it's just because they don't understand.
Kelli: Right. And because they don't know that person like you do, and because nobody knows you like that person does. Or so they lead you to believe.
On the subject of fairy tales and pop culture references, I wanted to know what you thought of Machado's structure, the short chapters and many experiments she does with form.
Emily: I really enjoyed it. I think this kind of story can be relentless. So it was a nice way to take a breath. And like I said, I really appreciated all of the context. Some chapters break away from her story entirely to talk about historical cases of domestic violence or the way lesbians have been ignored throughout history. And then there are chapters that examine abuse in pop culture (SHOUT OUT to that awesome Star Trek chapter because I love TNG with all my heart).
With that being said, overall, my favorite chapters were still the straightforward personal accounts. How did you feel?
Kelli: I felt the same! I am a fan of fairytales in general so I also appreciated the footnotes throughout referring to Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, pointing out parts of her own life that reflect the tropes of those stories. It all fed into the idea that this relationship started out, for her, like a storybook romance, right along with this idea of a "dream house," like Barbie's Dream House, this signifier that she was getting everything she ever wanted. Everything a person could ever ask for.
I also really like the way she experimented with her writing itself. You and I have talked about our feelings about second person narration (not positive, lol), but I think it really works here, because she uses it purposefully.
Emily: Yeah, I wanted to talk about that. Because not all the chapters in the book are second person, and at first I thought she was telling only the parts that were during her relationship in second person. But then there's this chapter where she talks about a childhood dog she had, and it’s also in the second person.
Kelli: I thought that too, so I went back and read the initial chapter in which she points out the perspective shift, "Dream House as an Exercise in Point of View." She writes, "You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts." I think the "You" she identifies is something that was always a part of her, a part of her that got separated and became the whole during this relationship.
Emily: So then why did she use it in the dog chapter?
Kelli: Well, I think she identifies the "You" as a part of her that comes out in moments that are upsetting or frightening, in moments where she didn't feel like the first person (which she describes as an “assured, confident woman, girl detective, adventurer”), but rather like the second ("always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog"). Or where second person takes precedence over first person.
Emily: Ah I see. That makes sense.
Kelli: But yeah, I thought that worked over all even though second person usually feels gimmicky to me. Another chapter I loved, and which I actually heard on an episode of This American Life, is the choose your own adventure chapter.
Emily: Wait how did they read it on This American Life? Did they just go through it linearly? Cause she said, "DON'T DO THAT YOU'RE BREAKING THE RULES!"
Kelli: No, they basically figured out a way to read all of the answers while only repeating a few of them a couple times. They even say before reading it, "We've been trying to figure out how to do this for a while.”
Have you ever tried reading one of these bad boys on a podcast?
Emily: LOL. Yeah, I think that section really makes good use of the format. Because what she's trying to point out is abuse is a cycle. No matter what choice you make, none of them are right, and you're still going to end up in the same place.
Kelli: Exactly. And I liked how there was an option that a person would choose only if they weren't already trapped in this cycle, and you get to that page and it's like, "You would never do this."
Emily: Right. So was there anything that wasn’t working for you in this book?
Kelli: Honestly, no.
Emily: I’m just thinking of that chapter where that dude is like "I don't believe in lesbians" and Machado goes, "We believe in you." Such a good response.
Kelli: What else? I have had a copy of Her Body and Other Parties for like two years and still haven't read it, so looking forward to diving into that.
Emily: Yeah, I started it and almost passed out. I hear it’s great though. If you don't think of pregnancy as real-life body horror, then you’ll be okay.
Kelli: Yeah, I think I’ll be okay.
Emily: I'm giving this book 4.5 stars because I can't decide whether to rate it 4 or 5 on Goodreads.
Kelli: I'm giving it a 5 because, like I said, I can't identify anything about it that didn't work for me, and I found it incredibly moving, engaging, and smart. I've never really read anything like it.
Emily: Yes, definitely. Everyone should go read it now if you haven't already. And we didn't even spoil anything for you (as much as you can spoil a memoir).
So I guess we need to say what our next book is going to be!
Kelli: Recently on the podcast I mentioned I had never read The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and Emily was like, you know that has lesbians, right? So, our next book will be The Color Purple.
Emily: We're going to find out if an epistolary book will actually work for Kelli.
Kelli: I'll try not to get my hopes up.
Emily: So we’ll be back in two months, on September 15, to discuss The Color Purple by Alice Walker. It’s a short one, so you have plenty of time to read along!