[Book] In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado - #17 in Memoir 📚
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado [Book Review]
✨ Best Memoir Books ✨
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
There are a lot of reasons this book is remarkable, but I don’t quite have the emotional bandwidth to unpack them all right now. Instead, I just want to lay out the parts that struck the deepest chords in me—the unexpected moments of recognition, the little glimmers of light in the wreckage of this harrowing story about queer abuse.
There were times when it felt like Carmen was reaching through the page, taking my hand, walking me through a house built from her memories and mine, saying quietly, “See? It's the same story.”
One moment in particular floored me: a reference to the most haunting Star Trek: The Next Generation episode—the one that gutted me, flayed me like an amberjack. To see it named here, used as a metaphor for a type of experience I’ve never quite found the words for... it was more than validating. It was like someone finally acknowledging a shape I’ve been trying to trace in the dark for years.
And then there's the nostalgia-cringe of early-2000s LiveJournal culture—so specifically formative, so irreproducible in today’s internet. The rawness, the mess, the hyper-personal way we performed and processed identity as teenagers online. To find someone else who was also shaped in that space, who remembers what it felt like to be forged there—that was a quiet kind of joy.
I didn’t come into this book expecting those moments. I stumbled on them like tripping over sacred ruins in the middle of a collapsing house. But they stayed with me. And for all the devastation this story holds, those fragments felt like grace.
Where can I grab a copy of this book?
Don’t miss out on this captivating journey!
This memoir isn’t just a life story—it’s a layered journey of discovery, filled with hard truths and unexpected turns that draw you in and keep you thinking long after the final page.