Book Reviews: Machado's In the Dream House and Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

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Welcome back!

I'm doing something new today: I will be reviewing Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking in the same post as my review of Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House. I'm doing this because I read both books at the same time, and now, as a result, the two books are so thoroughly related in my mind that I decided, rather than unjumble them and attempt to review them separately, I would prefer to directly link the two by reviewing them together.

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Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) (hereinafter referred to as The Year) is a memoir chronicling the death of Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, as well as a series of health complications experienced by Didion's daughter, Quintana, prior to and after Dunne's passing. The book explores grief as an abstract concept and the personal grieving process that Didion underwent in connection with these events. It was recognized as the 12th best book of the 21st Century in the New York Time Book Review's 2024 review of books published in this century.

Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House (2019) (hereinafter referred to as Dream House) is a memoir of a different nature, but which nonetheless explores similar themes to The Year. It is the narration of Machado's relationship with her ex-girlfriend - who is referred to in the story simply as "the woman in the dream house" - and the abuse perpetrated against Machado by that individual, the bulk of which abuse took place in the "dream house," or a home in Bloomington, Indiana which becomes indelibly imprinted in a surreal way with the unique character of Machado's relationship with the woman. Like The Year, Dream House conceives of the narrator as a woman isolated from the world and incapable of moving past a traumatic series of events. Yet the two are distinct: the emphasis of The Year is on the effect of such trauma on the narrator and Dream House is structured more as a chronology of events and (since Dream House is written in the second person) the emotional toll that each event took on "you."

The Dream House makes it clear from the outset that it is a memoir, and it states explicitly the function of a memoir (and accordingly, the function of Dream House): "The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat." (5.) And Machado wastes no time in the course of her meaning-making. In a chapter entitled "Dream House as an Exercise in Point of View" (italics in original), Machado breaks from the second person perspective and writes, "You were not always just a You. I was a whole - a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts - and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved[.]" (14.)

And this point was made well, and repeatedly throughout the book: the point being that the most salient impact of Machado's abusive relationship was on her identity; on who she was as a person. Forced to grapple with the trauma of her abusive relationship, Machado, to the eyes of the world, overcame it: she got married, achieved success with respect to writing, and moved on with her life. But a less public version of Machado could not move on from the events of the dream house, and this version of herself stagnated and, haunted by the effects of abuse, degenerated into an entirely different person, one who "cried in front of many people ... tried to tell your story to many people who didn't listen ... [and] made a fool of yourself, in more ways than one." (14.)

The prose of Dream House distinguishes it from other memoirs. While the book is ostensibly about an abusive relationship, Machado's ornate figurative language injects a literary element into the book. It's dreamy at times, as here: "I'd never seen a sky like that, unstained by city light. The Milky Way was stunningly clear; starmatter smeared across the black." (33.) Events that the narrator experiences, especially when the narrator's viewpoint is warped by the consumption of intoxicants, take the form of "bright, distant fragments" (53) that crystallize into a coherent narrative only later.

And the narrator recalls her fantasies, her dreams: "You wonder if, at any point in history, some creature scuttled over what would, eons later, be the living room [of the dream house], and cocked its head to the side to listen to the faintest of sounds: yelling, weeping. Ghosts of a future that hadn't happened yet." (69.) Machado is analytical about her experience; she attacks it from all sides and picks it apart. She connects her experience to other experiences of domestic violence: generally; as it affects the LGBT+ community disparately; as it affects women with respect to men; and how certain themes or norms are so implicitly interwoven into society that they were recorded even in centuries-old fairy tales.

One passage that Machado writes particularly well comes as she links her experience with abuse to the experience of abuse writ large in the context of the history of the term 'gaslight.' It is informative; it is insightful; and it meshes with the otherwise dreamy tone of this section of the book in a very nice way. (93-94.) Placing her experience with her abuser in the context of a more universal abuser-abused relationship is not a novel innovation on the part of Machado. But what is new is the way that Machado straddles the fine line between abuse-as-though-in-a-dream, and abuse-as-a-very-real-and-present-danger. Artful prose and unique stylistic elements engender a dreamlike quality, the veil of which Machado then pierces through connecting her time in the "dream house" to literature on domestic abuse, and to statistics, and to historical analyses of misogyny and subjugation and the mechanisms that give power to one person over another.

I read Dream House on the plane, and as I flew over many millions of people, living their lives, I couldn't help but wonder at the number of people whose lives have been shaped by abuse; whose stories bear a degree of similarity to Machado's. Machado's story feels foreign to my life, because it is.

And the events depicted therein felt impossible to Machado, too; dream-like. But they were painfully real.

I landed in Portland, Oregon, and the next day, I picked up The Year. It had been praised by the New York Times' Review of Books, and it came recommended to me by my mother, with the caveat that it is a book that was written for people far older than me.

Something I found myself remarking on early in my reading was Didion's reliance upon grief literature or quotes from people who have experience with grief to contextualize, or otherwise to justify, her own feelings in the wake of her husband's death. And the passages she quotes in The Year are beautiful at times, and some made me stop and try hard to place myself in her shoes. As in the following, which is actually an excerpt of a letter from a friend rather than a section of a scholarly article, as many other quoted sections of The Year were. "We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections." (27.)

I came away with the sense that mourning is a time of metaphor; of removing yourself from the situation with an apt comparison; of convincing yourself the pain you feel is all a dream. Didion refers to a "sense of illogic" (31) that was spurred on by her grief. I can only imagine that Machado could understand that.

Didion, too, focuses on how impossible tragic, traumatic events feel. Made all the more impossible because these events stem from such banal normalcy: they begin during "a normal day" or with a "clear, blue sky" vexed to gray, and made abnormal, by whatever tragic event is causing the narrator such grief.

Didion draws a comparison to how shocked the country was in the wake of the events of September 11th: how the way in which she operated in her grief "was one more case of maintaining a fixed focus on the clear, blue sky from which the plane fell." (67.)

The Year was linked more strongly to Dream House in my mind after reading this passage, which I think is quite beautiful, and which prompted me to flag it with multiple sticky notes: "Several years ago, walking east on Fifty-seventh Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues on a bright fall day, I had what I believed to be an apprehension of death. It was an effect of light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling (but from what? were there even trees on Fifty-seventh Street?), a shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright. Later I watched for this effect on similar bright days but never again experienced it. I wondered then if it had been a seizure, or stroke of some kind. A few years before that, in California, I had dreamed an image that, when I woke, I knew had been death: the image was that of an ice island, the jagged ridge seen from the air off one of the Channel Islands, except in this case all ice, translucent, a blued white, glittering in the sunlight." (76.) The juxtaposition between beauty and death, a sense of foreboding and the impossibility of seeing death coming; the beauty of the imagery and lovely phrases like 'a blued white': they all serve to elevate this passage in my mind.

I finished The Year quickly, and was left feeling as though something was missing; something integral to the story of grief was omitted. But having limited experience with grief, I had (and have) no idea what that was. I enjoyed both books, and my experience was made better by reading one so quickly on the heels of the other. Dream House I would recommend to anyone, while The Year, a book I liked and which I'm glad to have read, I would have more reservations endorsing fully.

That being said, I have immensely enjoyed certain snippets of Joan Didion's writing that I have read in the past, and I look forward to reading more by her in the future.

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That's all for now.

Thanks for reading, and, as always, I welcome reader engagement! Please write to me at will.b.eaton.00@gmail.com to discuss these books, other books, writing, or any other subject you believe would be of interest to me.

(Main Image: Cover of The Year of Magical Thinking as published by Vintage International.)