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“Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” by Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado’s “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” read by Zoë Winters as Act Two: You Can’t Go Your Own Way of episode 703--“Stuck!” of the radio program This American Life: www.thisamericanlife.org/703/stuck/act-two-8.

Biography of the Author

Carmen Maria Machado is an American writer born in Allenton, Pennsylvania, in 1986. She is best known for her short story collection Her Body and Other Parties and the award-winning memoir about abuse in a lesbian relationship, In The Dream House. One of Machado’s favorite genres is horror because as a “transgressive space,” she explains in an interview, it

“tells us a lot about who we are, what we are, and what we, individually and culturally, are afraid of.” Another of her interests is writing about sexual pleasure:

I feel like it’s not often done well....I’m tired of reading really dreadful sex scenes where everyone’s miserable and then eventually maybe one person has a reluctant orgasm. I thought, What if I tried to have a scene where people had sex and it was great? My characters do have sex in varying emotional states, and with various results.

While Machado admits to having cried while completing some of her most personal writing, she determinedly balances her expressions of vulnerability with bluntness so as not to seem soft or sentimental.

Analysis

I was only eleven years old when I arrived in the United States from the Dominican Republic to live with one of my mother's sisters. I lived with my aunt and a family of five for five years , during which she physically and mentally abused me. She always put me down in front of all her other kids, and I was given chores while others were outside enjoying the weather.  I felt very isolated and trapped. I was a minor and therefore not able to do anything until my mom came from my home country, and none of my family members outside of her household wanted to help because they did not believe that she would do such things. My aunt’s physical, emotional and mental violence created a monster in me; what she did hurt me so deeply that it still haunts me and will not let me leave in peace. Listening to Machado's chapter “Choose Your Own Adventure” from her memoir In The Dream House resonated with my own pain, uncertainty and isolation. In this chapter, Machado portrays domestic abuse as imprisonment.

Machado calls her memoir "In The Dream House" to show the transformation of the cabin she shared with her ex-girlfriend from the home of her dreams to a house of nightmares. Noting Machado’s fragmentation of its narrative through the use of “short chapters and frequent shifts between genres,” Katherine Connel compares the novel to a “haunted structure” where the reader becomes disoriented like a character in a horror film. Thus the irony of the book’s title: living in a dream house should mean living in a house where you are loved, at peace, and, most importantly, happy; that was not the case for Machado. The particular chapter analyzed here, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure,” introduces the abusive relationship as a rough awakening from dreaming:  

Page 1, you wake up, and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes, and clothes, and dishes. You think to yourself, this is the kind of morning you could get used to.

When you turn over, she is staring at you. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. You don’t remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly.

The most obvious way that this chapter illustrates the toxic cycle that entraps victims of domestic violence is its structure.  “Choose Your Own Adventure” is another name for a gamebook, that is, “a work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices. The narrative branches along various paths, typically through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages. Each narrative typically does not follow paragraphs in a linear or ordered fashion” (Wikipedia contributors “Gamebook”).For example, the beginning of this chapter gives the protagonist a series of possible reactions to the annoyed girlfriend:

“You were moving all night,” [the girlfriend] says. “Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake.” If you apologize profusely, go to page 2. If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to page 3. If you tell her to calm down, go to page 5.

Normally, the choices given in a gamebook narrative are positive. Not so in this chapter, whose narrative loops, as David Schwartz explains, tell the real story: “make a certain choice, and you find yourself reading the same page later. This is trauma. Recurrence. Multiplicity here allows Machado to showcase abuse’s chilling singularity. This is trauma. Recurrence” (Schwartz). Because the protagonist’s attempts to make a decision make her end where she began over and over, choices in this chapter illustrate a victim’s lack of control. They also highlight how in an abusive situation there is no way to pacify the abuser:

“You are such a fucking cunt,” [the girlfriend] says. “You never take responsibility for anything.” “Well, all you have to do is wake me up,” you say, a kind of incoherent desperation zipping through your skull. “That's it. Wake me up and tell me to move or sleep on the couch, and I will do it. I swear to you.” “Fuck you,” she says, and gets out of bed. You follow her to the kitchen. Go to page 7.

Even if the victim apologizes or tries to find a solution to the problem she still gets mistreated. There is no way out.

Machado’s use of the setting intensifies the reader's sense of imprisonment. Throughout the chapter, the protagonist moves from the bedroom to the kitchen and back to the bedroom over and over. In the kitchen she is cooking and cleaning just like a maid for her abuser,

Page 7. Breakfast. You scramble some eggs, make some toast. [The girlfriend] eats mechanically and leaves the plate on the table. “Clean that up,” she says, as she goes to the bedroom to get dressed.

And in the bedroom she is her sex slave:

Page 10. That night, she fucks you as you lie there mutely, praying for it to be over, praying she won’t notice you're gone. You have voided your body so many times by now that it is a force of habit, reflexive as a sigh.

After faking an orgasm, the protagonist falls asleep and sometimes dreams of a better day (“It's going to be all right”), only to wake up to have her dream transform into the hurtful bedroom to kitchen to bedroom cycle again.

Guanajuato, Mexico, that reads “If s/he controls you, humiliates you, insults you, hits you, yells at you, do not let that happen. Love does not hurt.”

Machado eventually escaped her controlling girlfriend and is happily married. I am a mother now, and my daughter has helped me in all kinds of ways to move forward and forget the past because I need to be strong for her. Still, books such as In the DreamHouse are important because they remind us that domestic violence is present in all types of relationships. After listening to the “Choose Your Adventure” chapter, I felt like I had just experienced something completely new, and yet its story was my story too.

Other works by Machado

"Her Body and Other Parties "-  Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.

Books like In The DreamHouse

• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson -  Four seekers have come to an ugly, abandoned old mansion and all four of the inhabitants begin to experience strange events while in the house, including unseen noises and ghosts  roaming the halls at night, strange writing on the walls, and other unexplained events.
• How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ. Explains how women are prevented from producing written works and not given credit when such works are produced.

GET HELP AT https://www.thehotline.org

If you are in a situation where you feel trapped or experiencing domestic violence, here is a site where you have some resources to help you. On this website there are instructions on how to get help, get involved, plan for safety and more. You can live chat with a professional that can help you and everything is anonymous. You can call and text its 24/7 website to help those in need.