I put off reading In The Dream House for years because I knew it would hit too close to home re: narcissistic abuse. It, uh, hit even closer to home than I expected! But also was so monumentally, earth-shatteringly good that I wish I'd read it sooner.
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“...abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
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“She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood---a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we had created together.”
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“Why do we teach girls their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?" I would yell. I want to reclaim these word. After all, melodrama comes from melos, which means music, honey. A drama queen is nonetheless a queen.”
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“As the ground gets farther and farther away you swear to yourself that you're going to tell someone how bad it is, you're gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening, but by the time the ground is coming toward you again you are already polishing your story.”
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“your words are very pretty. And yet they cannot obscure the simple fact that I have seen your zoo.”
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that's the chapter that made me stop and stare up at the sky on an empty street corner for a minute not gonna lie
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anywho I simply cannot even fathom how incredibly valuable and validating this book must be for survivors of abuse within a queer relationship, because even as someone whose abuser was a cis dude I have never read anything that captured the experience more wholly and rightly
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