A review by eren_reads
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

5.0

This is more than just a memoir about the experience of being in an abusive relationship, it's a conversation about what stories are seen as the 'right' ones to be committed to the history books, the archives, and whose stories are told. Of which queer relationships, let alone abusive ones, are not included.

sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories...  The word archive... comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion, “the house of the ruler.”...  I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives.