The book is skilful at elucidating the doublethink necessary to stay in a bad relationship – the constant shuttle between wanting to leave and wanting to stay the internal litigation one does to disprove the evidence of one’s own eyes the sympathy one has for one’s abuser. The basic dynamic of any abusive relationship is the tendency of the victim to blame herself Addressing herself in the second person, as she does throughout the book, Machado looks back and observes that, “part of the problem was, as a weird fat girl, you felt lucky”. She is confident, assertive and socially at ease – all the things that, at that age, Machado is not. She has a “dazzling smile” and “a raspy voice that sounds like a wheelbarrow being dragged over stones”. The woman is “short and pale and rail-thin and androgynous”. When Machado meets her abuser – the woman is never named – she is completely smitten. And yet, she says, one of the bleaker side effects of writing the book was the realisation that “Oh, damage can be permanent.”

At 33, she is as far from the version of herself depicted in the book as it is possible to get: happily married to a woman called Val employed at the University of Pennsylvania, and with a thriving literary career – Machado’s short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the US National Book Award in 2017. Machado is sitting across from me in the bar of her hotel in New York, on a brief visit from her home in Philadelphia. The book, which is divided into fragments each cleaving to a different literary genre, is an attempt, at some 10 years’ distance, to make sense of the experience of her early 20s, when she was not only trapped in a house with a woman who gave every appearance of wanting to destroy her, but trapped in a relationship trope – an abusive lesbian partnership – not widely recognised as even existing.

C armen Maria Machado is by temperament a fiction writer and writing In the Dream House, her memoir of surviving an abusive relationship, was in some ways a long and horrible experiment.

Book in the dream house