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\u201cYou\u2019re not allowed to write about this\u2026 Don\u2019t you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?\u201d So said Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s ex-girlfriend after she had unleashed a tirade of verbal abuse.<\/p>\n
Years later, Machado has written about her experience (\u201cFear makes liars of us all,\u201d she notes) but perhaps not in a way anyone might have expected. It\u2019s hard to describe exactly what this book is. Well, it\u2019s a slightly mind-bending memoir about two young, ambitious writers whose passionate relationship sours when one begins to subject the other to emotional and, at times, physical cruelty.<\/p>\n
But that doesn\u2019t quite capture how it haunts the grey areas of abuse, how it shatters the memoir form, how like a dream it shapeshifts. It\u2019s literature as gaslighting. It ensnares and unsettles, tantalises and wrongfoots.<\/p>\n
Machado is at the forefront of a wave of writers (including Sarah Hall, Julia Armfield, Fiona Mozley and Sophie Mackintosh) producing sensual, defiant, highly inward stories that centre on the female body. She was shortlisted for a US National book award in 2017 for her gothic-flavoured short stories about sex and gender. With hindsight, her short story, Mothers, which deals obliquely with domestic abuse between two women, now appears to be a rehearsal.<\/p>\n
For all the experimentation, the basic narrative is straightforward. When Machado was at the Iowa writers\u2019 school in her late 20s, she met a witty, worldly, petite blond Harvard graduate who spoke French and was a \u201cmix of butch and femme that drives you crazy\u201d. Machado, who had grown up in suburban Pennsylvania, had dated plenty of men but she had never been in a relationship with a woman before. She finally felt she had found the person she had been waiting for. They had great sex, met each other\u2019s parents, and went on road trips between Iowa and Bloomington, Indiana, where the girlfriend lived in a cabin, which Machado calls \u201cthe Dream House\u201d.<\/p>\n
\nFights erupted out of nowhere… Soon she was doubting her own perception of reality<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
But soon little problems arose. The woman became paranoid when Machado didn\u2019t answer her phone. She accused Machado of cheating on her with everyone from friends to her dad. Fights erupted out of nowhere. Machado describes the moment it first dawned on her that she was being abused when, out of nowhere, her girlfriend dug her fingers into Machado\u2019s arm: \u201cThis is not normal. This is not normal. This is not normal. Your brain is scrambling for an explanation,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n
Soon, she was doubting her own perception of reality. If Machado expressed satisfaction in her own work, the woman from the Dream House would make her list (even write down) all of her flaws. But the cruelty was often followed by sweetness and denial.<\/p>\n
Machado mostly narrates this in the second-person present (\u201cyou are\u201d) \u2013 hard to pull off without feeling gimmicky \u2013 but the book\u2019s organising principle is more dizzying. Since there are so few literary accounts of abusive same-sex relationships, Machado forges a new way of telling her story that borrows from dozens of genres. Some chapters are named after narrative traditions such as romance novel, stoner comedy, road trip, self-help bestseller. Others filter her memories through literary tropes such as Unreliable Narrator or Pathetic Fallacy or Choose Your Own Adventure. The latter invites the reader to make a series of decisions, pointless even though they give the illusion of control.<\/p>\n
The section entitled Dream House as Epiphany has one line that simply reads: \u201cMost types of domestic abuse are completely legal.\u201d The effect of constantly switching between narrative traditions mimics the feeling that Machado experienced, that of trying to build a relationship on endlessly shifting sands.<\/p>\n
This is the second high-profile book exploring abuse in lesbian relationships to be published in the last year. In the Booker prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other<\/em>, Bernardine Evaristo chronicles a doomed love affair between a coercively controlling radical feminist and a more laid-back theatre producer. But until now, such literary treatments have been extremely rare.<\/p>\n
The author writes that her memoir is an attempt to build the kind of archive of same-sex abuse that would have made her feel less alone. It\u2019s an \u201cact of resurrection\u201d that contains many other accounts that she found buried in news reports of old cases. She uses footnotes to track various folk tale motifs in the story, as if this meticulous cataloguing of strange behaviour helps orient herself within a bewildering experience.<\/p>\n