YOU Writes Very Well – So Nice, We Bought It Twice!

Sounds Good!

Katy told me the book was good. Really good. This she had decided from just a few sample pages. I was off to get a copy the next day. But the store was out – there’d been a bunch of people buying it recently. They’d order it for us, let us know. If we found it elsewhere that was fine. So I came back with that news – and suggested the Kindle option; almost always the back-up, safety-net.

Katy told me the book was brilliant. Amazing. This again after actually reading it. Her Kindle indeed sufficed. The very next day the bookstore emailed to say they had our copy. I decided to go and pick it up anyway. If it was that good, I’d absolutely need to read it. And we’d probably want to loan it out, or at least have the option. We sometimes talk about doing a Kindle swap, she’ll have a great book recommendation and we figure that if I’m reading it on her Kindle then she can just find something (great recommendation, or otherwise) from my Kindle. I think we’re also glad we’ve never actually greenlit this. Like the house’s literary Feng Shui will go to ground. The words won’t harmonise, the worlds will unhappily collide.

So I bought the book. A paperback copy of the title she’d just read. Basically, we bought it twice.

And now we’ve both read it. I stayed up deep into the night and read the book in almost one go. I very nearly didn’t put it down, I was so often made to feel like I couldn’t put it down, the words holding me, the world made so real, right there drifting in view.

So what book am I talking about?

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

It is not brand new, though it is only just over a year old (released late 2019). Not a new release but it might be still new to you.

Let me first say that it’s been some time since I stayed up for a big chunk of the night to read a book in nearly one go. And most other times I’ve done it the end effect has been akin to homework (probably because I’m off to interview the author the next day. I rather like the cramming approach in that situation. It feels like the book is fresh in my head).

In The Dream House is a memoir. Though it feels like a whole new genre, or a mash-up of several. In The Dream House is devastating. And brilliant. And probably in equal doses.

It is a survivor’s story of domestic abuse, mostly verbal and emotional abuse. Some physical too.

The second-person narration means that, for the most part, it’s ‘You’ telling the story.

‘You’ writes very well.

Machado had a book of short stories on the market already – also brilliant, I’m told. In fact a skilled up-seller told me that, convincing me to walk away with Her Body and Other Parties the first time I tried to buy Dream House. (When Katy’s finished with those stories I’ll be diving right in).

Even though the statute of limitations passes pretty quickly on plot-spoiling, I’m being careful to not say too much about what happens in the book. (It’s still all swimming in my head, to be fair). But what I’m most taken with is how it happens, by which I mean how the message is delivered.

In short chapters, sometimes a half a page – and in a couple of devastating situations just a single line – Machado walks us back through the relationship, from its happy earliest days to the realisation that the abuse was hiding there deep in the relationship, like other pesky third wheels such as alcoholism or a gambling problem. And then through actual examples.

She takes a location-idea and architectural structure and reframes that as the ‘place’ for this book – the Dream House. Her ex is now referred to only as the woman from the Dream House/the woman in the Dream House – necessary, because when the Dream House woman threatens Machado to never write about her, to never write about any of ‘this’, our author agrees. She’ll tell us, in these very pages, that “fear makes liars of us all”.

Every chapter mentions the Dream House in the title, reimagining it as a particular style of writing (Dream House as Soap Opera), playing with various techniques/tropes (Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun/Dream House as Chekhov’s Trigger), or locating us deep in the emotional baggage (Dream House as Dirty Laundry) and often the emotional response (Dream House as Second Chances). The Dream House is the cell where this all occurred, where it occurs again in the writing and for the writing.

The second-person narration technique is common in poetry, in some essays and short stories. It’s less common in novels, because it’s hard to sustain across longer works – but there are obviously some notable examples. Bright Lights, Big City has one of those backstories of being rejected a bunch of times because no one wanted to publish a second-person narrated novel, but Jay McInerney stuck to his guns, got the book published and had the hit of his career. The book he lives on and from to this day.  

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid features a slight twist on the second-person narration style, by basically blurring it with first-person, having his ‘I’ speak to the ‘you’ that is the reader; the book needs this to tell its conversation that we, as readers, are essentially eavesdropping in on, but are rather quickly made to feel complicit, quite deeply connected.

Second-person narration can be a risk but the payoff is that dream for a writer of deeply connecting the reader. We’re seeing it being used in memoir more often.

(My favourite book of last year was Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman – a brilliant piece of writing that is funny and sad and weird and wonderful and entirely told in the second person).

Machado opens and closes the book as herself, first person, the ‘I’ coming forward to own the story. But in the short chapters, and in the range of writing styles, in the black humour and deep soul clean she is giving us more than a memoir. Dream House reads, variously, as a personal letter, a set of short stories (prose poems, perhaps), a TED Talk transcript, and the dream-state hovers – making some of the action and emotion in the chapters so vivid. Because the deeper you go, the more specific you are in the telling of a story, the more universal it becomes.

I heard that so perfectly explained on Brené Brown’s podcast just last week.  (And to be, um, more specific, it was this episode talking with historian Jon Meacham).

A good book recommendation is one of the great things in life I reckon. I give them to Katy all the time. Too many. She shrugs. Sometimes she gets there. Has a stab. Same goes when she finishes a great book. She often says that I should read it. I tell her I will and then never do. It isn’t because I don’t actually want to. It is because the list of books from the library, and the books that we’ve bought and never quite got to, also that are on the Kindle, then that are borrowed from others, it is always teetering on infinite. The books themselves like Jenga towers on the cabinets either side of our bed.

It felt good to take the word last night. Hers. And then several from Carmen Maria Machado.

I hope to further recommend this brilliant book. And all I can really add is my enthusiasm. I put the book down and paused for a second to try gather some thoughts. And now here they are.

We got our Kindle copy where you get those
We got our physical copy from the great team at Unity Books in Wellington