Carmen Maria Machado

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

—Zora Neale Hurston

.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth recording of a child’s early life or—like Europe and its Stolpersteine, its “stumbling blocks”—a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death.

I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.

Leah Horlick, “Ghost House”

Norman Mailer once said, “The sniffs I get from the ink of women are always,” among other things, “too dykily psychotic.” In other words, one woman writing is mad and a woman-who-loves-women writing is mad squared. Hysteria and inversion, compounded like interest; an eternally growing debt. Mailer’s use of the adverb dykily suggests that, for him, disinterest in his dick must be a species of psychosis.

Narratives about mental health and lesbians always smack of homophobia.

Bennett Sims has a wonderful horror story called “House-Sitting

You have always been interested in demon and possession narratives, no matter how cheesy or silly they are. It’s the perfect intersection of your morbid curiosities and the remnants of your religious upbringing; a reminder of a time when you believed in that sort of thing.

But this inability to conceive of lesbians has darker iterations too. In 1892, when Alice Mitchell slit her girl-lover Freda Ward’s throat in a carriage on a dusty Memphis street—she was enraged that Freda had, with the encouragement of her family, dissolved their relationship—the papers hardly knew
what to do with themselves. In her book Sapphic Slashers, Lisa Duggan writes, “Reporters found it difficult to sketch out a clear plot or strike a consistent moral pose: was Alice a poor, helpless victim of mental disease, or was she truly a monstrous female driven by masculine erotic and aggressive motives?…A love murder involving two girls presented an astonishing and confusing twist that confounded the gendered roles of villain and victim.”34

A year before I was born, the band ’Til Tuesday, led by Aimee Mann, came out with the single “Voices Carry.”

Despite all of this—the suppressed representation, the hackneyed ’80s weirdness of the video—“Voices Carry” portrays verbal and psychological abuse in a clear and explicable way. The mania of abuse—its wild emotional shifts, the
eponymous cycle—is in the very marrow of the music: dampened, minor-inflected verses without a clear key resolving into a shimmering major chorus before locking back down again. It is not the ironically upbeat prettiness of the Crystals’ “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)”—produced in 1963 by Phil Spector, who later murdered actress Lana Clarkson for spurning his advances—though that is its own musical metaphor. Both songs, despite the darkness of their subject, are catchy and endlessly singable.