Illustration by Hailey Kim.
“Her Body and Other Parties” is a short story collection and the book debut of American author Carmen Maria Machado. Machado brings into this anthology an uncanny and playful imagination when creating stories that are surreal, yet reflective of the world in which we live. She utilizes magical realism and descriptive poetic language to tell stories linked to all things haunted. There’s no need for fantastical world-building. Instead, Machado twists and turns and imagines the worst possible violences that women face. Magical realism is the perfect choice of genre for the ambiance of these stories because one of the genre’s main qualifiers is there being no explanation for the appearance of the uncanny or fantastical. Machado certainly doesn’t explain herself.
This collection includes eight short stories — “The Husband Stitch,” “Inventory,” “Mothers,” “Especially Heinous,” “Real Women Have Bodies,” “Eight Bites,” “The Resident,” “Difficult at Parties.” Machado retells the tales she loved growing up. These retellings include fairy tales, urban legends, ghost stories and stories inspired by true crime. Machado strives to make readers feel uncomfortable and scared. Some of the stories have holes that allow a bit of the uncanny to slip into the real world we recognize. The horrors in Machado’s stories are almost too familiar, as recognizable as the real horrors in the world.
This is a phenomenal debut. It’s erotic and visceral. Machado mixes the seductive with the perverse, and at some point, the reader can no longer tell them apart. The reader is in the dark until the very end, just like the main characters of the stories. Sex is a significant part of all the stories, Machado said in an interview with “Autostraddle” that she’s interested in writing about queer sex in an explicit way, specifically from a queer woman’s perspective, to elevate women’s desire into literary art.
Each story features a protagonist who is either lesbian or bisexual. In “Inventory,” the protagonist narrates her story through a list of sexual encounters, with both men and women, in chronological order. It’s a recollection of her experiences throughout her life, focused on the romantic partners that she’d had and the sexual encounters she’s experienced. She tells the reader her life story through sex, and while the years pass and the lovers leave the page, a disease is slowly spreading and killing all of humanity.
What I enjoy most about “Her Body and Other Parties” is the way Machado describes the grotesque, like her use of body fluids, in a seductive context. This subverts our expectations. She makes the reader wonder what is intended if the narrator is enjoying what is happening, and if it is consensual. The horrifying aspects of the work merge with the more vulnerable aspects. It is ambiguous.
The stories in “Her Body and Other Parties” linger and haunt the mind. Themes and motifs in the collection include queerness, fluids, sexuality, the haunted, disappearance, echoes, ghosts, fairies, fashion, relationships, true crime, infidelity, and eating disorders. There is a content warning for violence, abortion, child abuse, miscarriage, self-harm, and sexual assault.
“Her Body and Other Parties” is in turns both amusing and tragic but contains underlying pain. I was unsettled while reading “Her Body and Other Parties” because I could see myself in the women and I strongly identified with their experiences. Machado’s work has a gothic element to it — she’s dark and doesn’t spare any details. The reader is left with a feeling of disgust but can’t stop turning the page.
