“You are being tested and you are passing the test sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are look how loyal, look how loved.” That is how scary, Machado means to say, how incongruous and entrapping an abusive relationship can be.

“This is how you are toughened,” Machado writes to the fairy-tale wife and to a younger version of herself. Though it frightens her, this fairy-tale figure manages to convince herself that it’s completely normal. Take, for example, this nightmarish moment from a fairy tale, described by Machado to show her reader the contradictory, illogical feelings she had about her then-girlfriend: the mythical Bluebeard’s young wife watches, horrified, as her new husband dances with the corpses of his former wives. One question is persistent throughout Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir about an abusive same-gender relationship: How did we get here? Followed, usually, by: Is this the last straw? They’ve survived.In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado They’ve adapted they’ve learned to conceal themselves. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually-the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other-I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I know I should have a very specific political response to them. “I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them.

In the dream house carmen maria machado