The narrative branches along various paths, typically through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages. The term 'Choose Your Own Adventure” is another name for a gamebook, that is, “a work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices. The most obvious way that this chapter illustrates the toxic cycle that entraps victims of domestic violence is its structure. You don’t remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. When you turn over, she is staring at you. You think to yourself, this is the kind of morning you could get used to. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes, and clothes, and dishes.

, you wake up, and the air is milky and bright.

The particular chapter analyzed here, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure,” introduces the abusive relationship as a rough awakening from dreaming: Thus the irony of the book’s title: living in a dream house should mean living in a house where you are loved, at peace, and, most importantly, happy that was not the case for Machado. Noting Machado’s fragmentation of its narrative through the use of “short chapters and frequent shifts between genres,” Katherine Connel compares the novel to a “haunted structure” where the reader becomes disoriented like a character in a horror film. Machado calls her memoir In The Dream House to show the transformation of the cabin she shared with her ex-girlfriend from the home of her dreams to a house of nightmares. In this chapter, Machado portrays domestic abuse as imprisonment. Listening to Machado's chapter “Choose Your Own Adventure ” from her memoir In The Dream House resonated with my own pain, uncertainty and isolation.

My aunt’s physical, emotional and mental violence created a monster in me what she did hurt me so deeply that it still haunts me and will not let me leave in peace. I was a minor and therefore not able to do anything until my mom came from my home country, and none of my family members outside of her household wanted to help because they did not believe that she would do such things. She always put me down in front of all her other kids, and I was given chores while others were outside enjoying the weather. I lived with my aunt and a family of five for five years, during which she physically and mentally abused me. I was only eleven years old when I arrived in the United States from the Dominican Republic to live with one of my mother's sisters. Carmen Maria Machado’s chapter “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure ” from her novel In The Dream House read by Zoë Winters as Act Two: You Can’t Go Your Own Way of episode 703-“Stuck!” of the radio program This American Life.

Carmen maria machado the resident