Hey, this is Anna. I want to let you know that this episode is about and includes descriptions of intimate partner abuse.

If you need them, we have resources at our website, deathsexmoney.org.

I think, you know, it's created a sense of skepticism in me that I didn't have before.

I can identify sort of certain patterns and things like I think that I couldn't before,

sort of rubbed a little bit of the sheen off of the world.

And for better or for worse, like it's the person that I've become.

This is death, sex, and money. You're going to get in here and give me a kiss.

The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot.

Maybe I should stop paying you.

And need to talk about more.

Do I have to tell you how close we are to plumage into our deaths?

I'm Anna Sale.

Writer Carmen Maria Machado's latest book is a memoir of a relationship in her 20s, one that she now calls abusive.

When you say, like, I was abused or, like, my ex abused me, people get very nervous.

Like, there's just, like, the word creates a lot of anxiety in people in all kinds of directions. But it's much, it's a useful shorthand when it's, like, do you have four hours, do you have one second? Like, I can say to you, I could tell you the whole thing, or I could just say to you, like, I wasn't an abusive relationship. And, like, it sort of encompasses a lot of different experiences.

And I think it, I believe that my experiences fit into that category.

Landing on that word, though, was not easy.

Carmen's relationship, she writes in her book, in the Dreamhouse, didn't fit into the images

of what comes up when you say abusive relationship.

She was with a woman, and for the most part, their fights were verbal attacks. The wounds didn't leave marks.

Dream House as epiphany, she writes at one point, most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

Carmen is 33 now and has been with her wife for seven years.

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