Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Graywolf Press, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-1555977887

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

Carmen Maria Machado centers women, and especially their bodies, in this genre-bending collection of stories. Her story “The Husband Stitch”, which appears in this book, has been generating buzz (and admiration) for years. Now that I’ve read it, I can say that it deserves the attention. Framed around the urban legend “The Green Velvet Ribbon”, anyone who knows that story will predict the ending, but, narrated by the woman in the story, there is so much more inside. “Inventory” starts out as a list of one woman’s sexual experiences, but against a background story of a spreading pandemic, it starts to take on a feeling of dread and inevitability.  “Mothers” is a hallucinatory story with an unreliable narrator that involves a fragmented relationship between two women that may also involve a baby. “Especially Heinous” recounts surreal, fictional summaries of episodes from 12 seasons of Law and Order: SVU. This particular story, even with supernatural elements, doppelgangers, and interpersonal drama, was far too long. I feel like in “Mothers” and “Especially Heinous”, Machado was experimenting with style, and maybe this worked for some readers, but not for me. “Difficult at Parties”  about the effects of trauma and rape on the body, mind and intimate relationships, is very different from the other stories, which have a slightly surreal or fantastic feel to them. Other stories include “The Resident”, “Eight Bites”(this gets into eating disorders), and “Real Women Have Bodies”.

One thing I really loved about this book was the way Machado writes about sex. Her characters aren’t passive. They enjoy sex, sometimes paired with love and sometimes casual, both with men and women. It’s so refreshing to find this! She does a skillful and fluid job of describing sex and passion. Her writing is unapologetically feminist and queer, but her way with words is lyrical and it all flows into the story. I kind of want her to write about the early days of Mary Shelley’s love affair with Percy Shelley after reading this!

Her Body and Other Stories is an uneven collection: it has a few outstanding stories, a couple of reasonably good ones, and some I don’t feel the need to revisit. Machado does a good job at creating a sense of the uneasiness and dread that come from, and are felt by, women’s bodies, and it’s a collection well worth visiting. I’m adding “The Husband Stitch” to my list of “favorite short stories”, and this is the perfect time of year to read it. Recommended.

Contains: sex, violence, descriptions of pornography, references to rape, domestic violence, eating disorders