To Be Read

In Episode 1 of To Be Read, Amanda and Gable discuss In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.

Lawmakers across the country are banning books they deem too dangerous for children to read—we added them all to our “to be read” list.  Join us each month as we read and discuss banned books: what we liked, what we didn’t like, why they say they banned it, and why they really banned it.

Transcription

AMANDA O’BRIEN, HOST: Hi and welcome to “To Be Read,” a Banned Books podcast presented by Urban Plains. This month’s episode we will be discussing in the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. My name is Amanda O’Brien.

GABLE THOMPSON, HOST: And I’m Gable Thompson.

AMANDA: In the Dream House was published in 2019 and includes topics of domestic abuse, toxic relationships and emotional abuse. Discussions of these topics may be triggering to some listeners. If you or someone you know are in an abusive relationship, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1 800 799 7233 or text start S.T.A.R.T. 288788.

GABLE: This week’s book talks about queerness but also abuse that exists in queerness. This is sort of Carmen’s memoir, sort of, but it also works as a historical piece that covers about abuse in queer communities that often goes sort of swept under the rug by history.

AMANDA: Yeah, it’s often not something that’s really talked about is abuse and in queer relationships. And even with more recent discussions about abuse and relationships, a lot of times people still think about abusers as being men when abuse can definitely happen in relationships between two women or two people that don’t identify as men. It was definitely interesting to kind of get into those topics a bit more through the author’s experiences.

GABLE: I know you’ve read this book before. Were you surprised when you first read it?

AMANDA: I well, I wasn’t really I I’m reading all the time. I just heard people talking about it. I really didn’t know what it was about. So I don’t know if I was really surprised, but I, I feel like what did surprise me was kind of the way that she wrote about something so terrible in such a beautiful poetic way.

When I read it the first time, I was listening to the audiobook and it was read by the author and so I feel like hearing it out loud and hearing, like, how poetic it was while also being so, like, scary and tragic about her life was very interesting to me, and I was very impressed with her because I don’t know how I don’t think I’d be able to talk about something so emotional while reading, like from my own memoir, audiobook.

And she did in really good way. So I was really impressed with that. But yeah, I don’t know if I was really surprised about the topic of the book, but I was definitely very interested in it. It wasn’t something that I really, I guess, never really something that I thought too much about. I don’t know if you can relate to that.

GABLE: I was definitely impressed by Machado’s word choice. She has a way of sort of like making something simple and so easy to comprehend sound like dangerous or hardcore, and then like vice versa. So like things that seem like extreme seem very like to use simple words. Does that make sense?

AMANDA: Yeah, I really like the way that she did that too. And I know especially at the beginning of the book when you kind of at least when I was rereading it, I feel like I started picking up on like the early warning signs that she did a really good job at kind of making you as the reader not really notice them in the way that she wasn’t noticing them as well.

So something when I got to when I finished the book and I obviously knew what happens in their relationship going back and rereading it and picking up those things, I thought it was really clever the way that she did that because it’s showing how she herself didn’t really notice those little things, those little warning signs of the way that the woman in the dream house was treating her.

And even when they do start happening more and more, she finds like a way to describe it. That kind of makes you brush it off to a bit until it starts getting really scary for her and she starts realizing a lot more how scary it is. And then you kind of start relating to that fear with her. And I think it’s really interesting the way that she centered the story about the abuse done to her in the dream house and talking about it as the dream house and only referring to the women in their relationship with her as the woman in the dream house.

Even though the relationship started before they really she really moved to the dream house, it was still always just the woman in the dream house.

GABLE: The first warning sign I picked up was her scream was the woman in the dream house screaming at Carmen in the car after she was gone for like two or 3 hours. Was there any that you picked up earlier on your second read through?

AMANDA: Um, I have to look at my personal notes with that, but yeah, that’s definitely one that I think you start noticing.

GABLE: That’s kind of when the dream falls apart.

AMANDA: Yeah. How it’s starting to get worrisome for her. Yeah, I think that was one of the early signs. But there was also when they were talking about how they took a road trip to Georgia, I think, and they were walking on, on the street and a man kind of starts yelling at her and the woman in the dream house immediately when the man starts yelling at her, she like does something to make him stop.

I don’t remember what it was. And then afterwards, she was kind of apologizing to Carmen. And Carmen was saying, like, why are you apologizing? You reacted immediately. And the woman in the dream house says, that she saw him coming a mile away. And it’s just what happens. Like she says, like, I’ve dated a lot of women. This is just par for the course.

This is the risk you’re taking. And I kind of when I was rereading that, I was like, oh, that was it. That was a warning, like pretty early on that she was clear. Clearly, if she saw him coming in and didn’t do anything to protect her beforehand, that was putting her in the way of danger and sort of reversing her guilt for not doing anything on to Carmen, for just saying, oh, I’ve dated a lot of women before, but you haven’t, so you wouldn’t know this.

This is just the risk that you’re taking So that was one of the one of the first things that I definitely didn’t notice on my first read through that when I was reading it again, I was like, oh, that that was definitely a pretty early warning for her. Yeah. Also, when she was gone, when they were proctoring standardized tests and she was talking to the woman who had been sexually abused and who was in the bathroom and emotional about that, and she was talking with her trying to help her out.

And the woman in the dream house was very upset with her for not picking up her phone or telling her where she was, even though she was dealing with something very important. She’s talking about how she thought that that explanation would kind of make the woman in the dream house at least feel regret for being so, so aggressive towards her.

But it just made her angrier. It was also definitely another early warning sign for that.

GABLE: Now, something we sort of had written down talk about was about the books written in a second person. NARRATOR So everything Machado does in the novel is framed as like, you did this, you, the reader did this, or this happened to you. And I think that sort of, like, is meant as a way to, like, sort of like, make you feel like the loss of agency she felt when she was trapped in this relationship, because she really felt like that there was no escape, that she was just stuck like this forever.

Like and that there was no way out. And so whenever she was instead of saying, like, I did this, she would always say, you did this. So you can kind of feel like, oh, yeah, you’ve already done this. You have no choice. You’re trapped sort of thing. That’s at least that’s what I felt when I was listening to the audiobook.

AMANDA: Yeah, I definitely think that’s part of it. And then I also think that the sometimes she switches between I and you, and I think that’s a really interesting way of sort of othering her. In the past when she was with the woman in the dream house, that’s the you and her outside of that relationship is the I, I thought that was really interesting, especially when there were chapters when she would switch between the both of those.

I know that in Dream House as an exercise in point of view. That’s page 14. She was saying, I thought you died. But in writing writing this, I’m not sure you did. I thought that was another really I thought that was really powerful about talking about how she’s kind of reopening a wound that she thought was pretty closed in the past and through kind of exploring this story and writing it, it definitely open things up for her, I think.

So it’s interesting to see how she views herself as existing as it like a ghost in the dream house. But she other is that sort of part of her. I know that there’s also an in dream house as a cottage in Washington on page 92 she says, I’d come all this way to this island to write a book about suffering.

And you did something terrible to a resident of the island who’d done no harm when she was talking about how she picked up a snail and accidentally dropped it and injured the snail. And I thought that was another interesting sort of othering of self and kind of switching her narrative through those terms of you and I, when she’s talking about talking about that.

GABLE: Kind of feels like someone is it’s less like she’s blaming herself and like it feels like someone else is blaming her when she says you did this.

AMANDA: Yeah, I do think that’s part of it where it’s kind of looking at what happened and sort of putting that bullet. Like I think it’s a lot more blame on the situation when it’s sort of kind of looking at how the woman in the dream house talked to her and treated her and would call her names and yell at her through that sort of language about like you did this, this was you.

So it was kind of an interesting way of her switching that where she switches from it to you as well.

GABLE: Now, the woman in the dream house or like Carmen’s abuser, there’s one part in the book where they mention like she doesn’t remember a lot of like or at least some of the times when she, like, screams at Carmen or like verbally abuses her. So it kind of makes it kind of hints that, like, there might be some sort of like mental issue that this woman is struggling with, but it’s never really, like, specified.

So it’s like we as readers will never get to know in Carmen and Val. So probably will never get to know what she was struggling with. There was a point in the book where she was going to therapy, but that stopped. And I think she just sort of said she didn’t need it anymore.

AMANDA: Yeah. She was saying that the therapist said she was fine and that she doesn’t need therapy. And then Carmen kind of responded like you were screaming at me. You made me hide in the bathroom, and you were like throwing things in and yelling things at me. And you don’t remember any of that. Isn’t that concerning? And she just sort of brushes the woman in the dream house sort of brushes it off.

And then I think also interesting, like an interesting part with that is the chapter where Carmen is talking about how she wishes that she had some sort of excuse like demonic possession or something like that to sort of explain the behaviors of the woman in the dream house and not even to just explain it, but also to excuse the behaviors and saying like, oh, if she’s possessed and none of this is her fault.

And I think that kind of goes with that. That we’ll never know what was actually going on with the woman in the dream house. We’ll never know how she was doing mentally because that’s not something that is really fully talked about in concrete terms. Another part that I thought was really interesting was sort of talking about queer villainy.

I really like that chapter. It’s on page 47 and it sort of talks about and I think that our discussion about mental illness and abuse kind of goes towards that when it’s sort of talking about how by expanding representation we give space to queers to be as characters, as real people, human beings, and how sort of taking away any wrongdoings of queer people sort of refuses their humanity.

Because in order to see someone who is fully human, you need to see that they are capable of both doing really good things and also doing really bad things. And that’s part of humanity. And that rights and be like the rights of queer people should exist or not because they are morally superior to other people, but because they are morally the same to other people.

I thought that chapter was really interesting with that.

GABLE: There was like worry that Carmen thought this book might serve as bad PR for queer people because the idea that like abuse exists in that community as well, like the beds aspects of minority groups can often serve as like reasons for like supremacist groups to like suppress them and minority groups. And so it’s kind of like this hard balance you have to draw between, well, abuse is a problem in this community.

We have to draw it out. But also if we talk about it, we risk drawing bad attention to ourselves.

AMANDA: Yeah. And I know with that, there was a part where Carmen was talking about how when she took her partner to Wisconsin to meet her Catholic conservative family, her aunt, who doesn’t believe in gay people, how she talks about how she was mad at herself for bringing someone that kind of confirms all their beliefs about how gay people are and how she was worried about that.

So I think that goes along with her worry about how queer people don’t need bad PR because they’re already being mistreated by a lot of people. And so her kind of concern with that on how to make how to write this memoir will also making sure that she’s not sort of making things worse, worse for queer people, which I think also goes towards how she wants the book to be viewed by other people.

She wanted to serve sort of as an example of an unhealthy relationship so people know what to look out for. And I think goes into some of the problems with why the book is banned is I know that there’s a lot of concerns with that on how to I think an issue that people have is they don’t know how to really are they have the concern of not really knowing how to view things with a critical eye and seeing that this book isn’t an ad like it’s not advocating for abuse.

It’s showing how harmful abuse can be in showing how scary and like horrific it could be. And it’s serving as an example to young queer people especially who don’t really have that sort of understanding of what boundaries need to exist in a relationship, because that’s not always something that’s taught in schools. So definitely learning what that sort of means for people is important.

GABLE: Now, some of the reasons for why this book was banned in Texas, wasn’t it?

AMANDA: It was in Texas. It was in the and Leander Independent School District of Texas is the one that banned this book. So the book was not even a mandatory reading. It was on an optional reading list that was given to the students, which was about 15 books long, where the students were able to pick whatever of that list that they wanted to read.

And so it wasn’t even a required reading, but there was a lot of response by parents to that. And I believe that this was in the high school to in the Leander Independent School District, but I’m not sure exactly where Leander or the largest school district is in Texas.

GABLE: So the worry wasn’t really that this book was being forced upon people. It was that it was available for students.

AMANDA: Yeah. Yeah, that was it, basically. So it wasn’t even that, like no one was being forced to read this book and it was if somebody was interested in reading this book, it was an option for them to read. And that was an issue to the school, to a lot of the parents of the school district. And actually, just two years prior to the book being banned in the Leander Independent School District, a Leander Public Library director was removed after hosting a Pride story time.

So it’s definitely an issue, I think, in the area that is closely related to the banning of this book. I know that in I think it’s page 232 in Dream House as a self-help bestseller Machado kind of talks about how she views herself giving advice to young queer people and how she would kind of prove to them that they’re not alone by providing an example of an unhealthy relationship if anyone is experiencing that, or just for them to view it and understand what unhealthy relationship sort of looks like.

And so it’s interesting that she talks about how that’s sort of what she imagines in the future, like a possibility for her and the school district sort of bans the book because why they say they ban it is because of there are some sex scenes in the book that they found inappropriate. But a lot of the banning, I think, focuses more on the queerness than it is on the sex itself.

GABLE: Are there any examples in the district of books being banned that don’t have any like queerness involved in them, but also have like graphic sex scenes being banned? Or does there seem to be like a correlation with each book?

AMANDA: I’m not entirely sure about all the books that are banned in that district. I know that there are a variety of them. I know that The Handmaid’s Tale does include sexual encounters that was banned in the book, and I I know that it includes heterosexual sexual encounters, but I don’t know about queer sexual encounters. But they also they banned a variety of books.

But I know that just the other day, a Texas superintendent asked librarians to remove books that had the cover topics of sexuality or transgender people, claiming that the books don’t correspond with the community’s conservative values. And that’s according to NBC News. So it’s it’s something that’s still very relevant. And I, I do believe that the superintendent did say that he wanted the any books that had sexuality in it banned, not just queer books, but there was definitely a focus, I think, on books that were about queer relationships more than it was about heterosexual relationships.

GABLE: But it kind of seems from the way they’re wording it, like if it has queerness in it, then it would be considered a book that has some sort of sexuality in it, even if it’s not like explicitly sexual. Is that.

AMANDA: Kind of. Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s definitely a part of it where if it includes any sort of queerness, then they view it as sexual in nature and therefore to them worthy of being banned. Even if the book does not include anything that is graphically sexual. Where In the Dream House did include some scenes that were explicitly sexual.

But there isn’t always it’s not always that it has to include that, I think, to be banned for sexuality. But something that Machado sort of told the student newspaper of the high school in the Leander Independent School District, which is the Van de Grift High School’s, “The Voice.” she was she had an interview with them where she was talking about how ideally we teach kids sex ed, but we don’t teach them relationship ed. We don’t talk about what an unhealthy relationship looks like, what’s normal.

We don’t give them that framework and we definitely don’t give it to gay kids, is what she said. So it’s definitely she is viewing it, I think, in a very same way that we are and that there is there’s definitely the concern with the Leander School District of how they seem to be viewing any book that includes sexuality as graphic sexuality, even if it’s just like mentioned of queerness.

GABLE: Now, something that’s an interesting concept that’s explored in the book because I believe there’s one line where it says most forms of domestic abuse are legal and where that we’re commons getting it is that not all domestic abuse is sort of seen as like physical or like results in like physical violence. She sort of seems to hint that like emotional and mental trauma also.

Can we fall into that category? Like, say, if a spouse is screaming at you or for a spouse constantly blames everything on you. And that sort of seems to be what Carmen went through in her relationship.

AMANDA: Yeah, there is definitely if there is there were definitely times when the women in the dream house was using those tactics on her of scaring her or calling her names or yelling at her or making her hide. And it wasn’t often that there were times that she was physically abusive to her. I know that there were a couple times when there were parts when I think she she punched her really hard and left a bruise.

And that was the first time that she used. That’s the first time Carmen said that she touched her with not love but hate. And that was something that was really concerning to her and rightly to everyone. But I that I think is part of part of it as well. But most of the parts that were abusive were mainly through verbal abuse, emotional manipulation, and yeah, there weren’t often times that were domestic violence done unto where that was physical, which is the main form of domestic abuse that is illegal.

Another part of the book that I thought was really interesting were the fairy tale references that were included throughout. I know that you listen to the audio book, so you didn’t really see the footnotes, but a lot of those were from a, I think, article or book that focuses on fairy tale and mythology and sort of the taboos within those and what those mean and that’s kind of scattered throughout the book.

I know that sort of with the Queer Villainy chapter, she Carmen talks about The Little Mermaid and how that is like inherently queer because it was written by a queer man and remade into a Disney movie by another queer man. And so kind of looking at the way that The Little Mermaid didn’t feel like she was really seen in her community and she went outside of her community to be seen, but sort of losing her voice in that that was something that that Machado talks about.

And then another one that I thought was really interesting was the tale of Bluebeard, which was one that I didn’t really know about much beforehand. Like, obviously, I think everyone knows a Little Mermaid because of Disney. But the tale of Bluebeard is about a man who kills his wives and remarries and keeps the bodies of his ex-wives locked away after he kills them.

And so each time he marries a new wife, he gives them a key that can open all the doors in his house. And he’s very rich. So he has a really big house and a lot of stuff in it. And he tells them that they can have anything that they want and everything is for them except for opening that room.

They can’t do that. So that’s like the one thing that he sort of tells them at the beginning. And a lot of times the women would eventually get curious about that room and open it and find the bodies of his former wives and after they would find the bodies and he would kill them too, and move on to his next wife.

But it sort of talks about how there was kind of for for the wife to, to avoid being killed, it was she was kind of forced to endure great suffering in order to be deemed worthy of his love and how she would just continue enduring the terrible things that he would do to her such as telling her to dress a certain way or behave a certain way or telling her not to speak or telling her different things that kind of limited her until she was basically not able to do anything at all, but she would be deemed worthy of his love in doing those things.

And so kind of going along with Machado’s relationship with the woman in the dream house and how she was, she really endured a lot of stuff. And she I think for the longest time thought that what she was doing was trying to be worthy of the woman in the dream house and trying to be worthy of love. Because I know a lot of times she was talking about how at the beginning of her life she was not in very many relationships.

And she she found that she would often wish that she was prettier or thinner or anything like that to sort of be beloved by other people. And how she she would think that if she changed those things about her, she would be worthy of their love and so it kind of looks at how she endured a lot of terrible things from the woman in the dream house and how she was sort of wanting to be worthy of the love, but being completely harmed by it when it it was clearly a very toxic relationship that she shouldn’t be in.

GABLE: Join us next month where we’ll be reading All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson.

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