There are books that I’ve been avoiding lately, and others that I’ve stared down from across the room, unable to look away. There’s a compulsion to this avoidant-attached approach: I both want to be emotionally destroyed by a book and, simultaneously, want to feel nothing. These books I’ve been avoiding and courting—each details the effects of trauma, domestic abuse, and how the body holds memory.

Since first reading about Carmen Maria Machado’s in-progress memoir In the Dream House a couple of years ago, I’ve been waiting. When it arrived in the post a few months ago I pushed it to the top of my TBR pile. The book starts, ‘Sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place.’ Machado’s memoir details her life behind the curtain: the before, during, and after of an abusive relationship with her ex-girlfriend. This is a book about the stories society tells us don’t exist, the stories other people tell us don’t exist, the stories we don’t let ourselves believe exist. I have lived this life, people I love have lived this life, and yet we have collectively been shushed into forgetting. What happens when our bodies remember?