Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Stories
Title: Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Author: Carmen Maria Machado
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Year: 2017
ISBN: 9781555977887
Rating: 4 stars
Trigger warning: this book does contain some topics that can be very upsetting such as animal death, rape, and infectious disease. I mention these elements in the review, but don’t go in-depth.
This is a little off the beaten path for Women’s History Month, but this collection of stories is centered on women, so I thought it would be a good pick. Many of the stories in this collection could fit into the horror genre, but I think to simply call it a collection of horror stories would be reductive. Most of the stories have elements of fantasy as well.
My favorite story was a novella called, “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU.” This story is told in 12 seasons of fake episode synopses of Law & Order: SVU. In this version of the show, Benson is haunted by the ghosts of murdered girls with bells for eyes and she and Stabler must track down and defeat Henson and Abler, their doppelgängers who are star cops. Some of the episodes are wryly funny, and many of them remind me of TV scripts written by AI. It manages to be surreal, funny, and moving all at once. In several episodes, Benson goes to the grocery store, buys $300 worth of fruit and then puts it in her fridge where it rots without being eaten. Before going back to the store for more fruit, Benson bags up the rotten fruit and throws it away in a public trash can so the waste isn’t associated with her. In a weird way, this flagrant consumption made me think of SVU as a whole. For what it’s worth, Law & Order: SVU is one of my favorite shows (though I do realize it has problematic elements as well). I can watch it for hours on end, and for me one of the draws is that Benson and Stabler take women seriously. They believe them and fight for them in a system that often seems stacked against them. However, it occasionally hits me as I watch that in order to see the police take women and children seriously and advocate for them, I am watching hours of mostly women and children being brutalized, assaulted, abused, and killed. In that way, it sometimes feels like letting the fruit rot for the experience of buying fresh fruit…
I also really enjoyed the story “The Resident” about a writer’s experience at a Writer’s Residency near her former Girl Scout camp. This story felt like classic horror à la The Haunting of Hill House and had a thought-provoking discussion of colonialism and whether the creation of art can and should be separate from existing in society. There was some animal slaughter in this story that I didn’t love, but it served a purpose and added to the story.
In another of the stories, the narrator recounts her sexual history and in those stories, the reader watches a pandemic seize and destroy the country. Another story mentions Swine Flu, so perhaps that was the inspiration behind this one, but it reads much differently after living through COVID. This story really stuck with me because of the way it was about the narrator’s relationships and experiences rather than about the collapse of society (even though that collapse is clearly seen in the narrative). I don’t really care for dystopian fiction, especially dystopian fiction that feels especially plausible, so this wasn’t one of my favorite stories despite its sticking power. I did think it was an interesting commentary on how even as the world falls apart it is human nature to view it through the lens of mundane experiences in our own lives.
It seems to me that the protagonists of all of these stories identify as women and are comfortable in their gender identities. Many are also queer and are comfortable with their sexuality. This book isn’t really about questioning if they are women or how to be women, but instead their experiences of the world and those around them as women. In many of the stories, Machado’s commentary isn’t hard to parse out: in “The Husband Stitch,” she retells the classic horror story of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck, in “Real Women Have Bodies,” there is a mysterious epidemic where women have started to literally fade and disappear from existence, in “Eight Bites,” a woman undergoes weight loss surgery and then has to make peace with her former body, and in “Difficult at Parties,” where a woman is struggling to resume intimacy with her partner after what is hinted to be a possible home invasion and rape. As the two epigraphs of this book make clear from the start, these stories aren’t going to sugar coat the female experience. There is feminine rage behind a lot of these stories and I am always here for angry women.
I also loved Machado’s writing. It is weird and wry and haunting. While her writing style is cohesive, her range is so wide that I forgot a couple of times that she wrote all the stories in the book and went looking for a list of contributors. She is a very talented and engaging writer and I look forward to reading more of her work.