In Extenso

Carmen Maria Machado’s subject is, first and foremost, the trauma of two years of invisible abuse leveled by a partner of the same sex – but it is also, importantly, the silence of such abuse in the archive; this document is an act against that silence.

Machado is an author who understands herself and knows her purpose, who can somehow trace the fractured lineage of her emotions and experiences through scattered yet precise retellings of her story – as “Chekhov’s Gun,” as “Man vs. Nature,” as “Sanctuary,” as “Stop Gap Measure.” She enriches and makes her psychological abuse impossibly more nuanced with discussions of the few recorded cases of wlw violence in the American annals, analyses of the film Gaslight or an episode of Star Trek.

Throughout the text, she uses footnotes, mostly referring to tropes in folktales, to render her writing even more rich, to find fragments and shadows of what she experienced with her lover not only in her childhood, not only in prior relationships, but in the very architecture of the stories we as humans have always told. There are other actors in the memoir – like Machado’s roommates John and Lauren – but they exist only in the occasional soft moment, underscoring the extent of Machado’s ultimate and complete loneliness wrought by her lover.

Her work is complex and urgent: to act as an archivist, an archeologist, excavating her heart and memory, locating herself within a genealogy that hardly exists. But her offering to this genealogy is unspeakably precious, fragile, important. Even when, near the end of the memoir, Machado is free of the relationship, she feels a sense of loss, of wanting. The struggle is not over; now the making of meaning, the autopsy, the search through the past careful as one might look for sea glass in the sand. I hope that what Machado has given us in this memoir, though she calls it a “rough, working attempt at a canon,” can figure into the body of what we know of queer women and their lives.