Naomy’s Reviews > In the Dream House > Status Update

“you save the voicemails incase you need to get a restraining order. When you upgrade later they are lost”

there’s a quiet grief in how deeply i relate to machado.

“i would have told him anything, anything at all. but i believed i could see five lights.” there were only four lights.

reflecting on the idea that when you’re suffering abuse and they tell you that is love, you make yourself believe it is love. sometimes believing is the only way the mind knows how to stay alive, and that’s terrifying.

I haven’t read a book that captures the emotions of an abusive lesbian relationship with this much honesty. The prose doesn’t just recount events it moves through the feeling of loving within something that is quietly, progressively violent, easy to justify when you’re inside it and devastatingly clear from the outside. I feel seen in ways I didn’t know were possible. and i still have more to read. wow.