The Book Guy

Her Body & Other Parties

by Carmen Maria Machado

(Serpent’s Tail)

Carmen Maria Machado’s début short story collection, Her Body & Other Parties, which was nominated for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, is a blazingly original, erotic, weird, unsettling, queer, uncanny and completely engrossing collection of work. Not since Joanna Walsh’s 2015 collection Vertigo has such memorable and icily clear prose run through me. Each of Machado’s characters inhabit our world, but it’s a world that’s slightly off -kilter and even dystopian; spirits, violence and illness stalk characters that nd themselves in situations that are often as baffl ing to them as they are to the reader.

The collection opens with ‘The Husband Stitch’, which centres on a woman whose bodily autonomy is sacrifi ced for her children and her husband; the ‘stitch’ of the title refers to an extra suture sometimes given to women after labour to re-tighten their vaginas. The woman has a green ribbon around her neck that she refuses to remove for her husband and, despite giving so much of herself away physically and psychologically, he still insists she give him this one last thing.

In ‘Inventory’, a woman catalogues her sexual partners as a pandemic sweeps across the US, while ‘Eight Bites’ focuses on a Stepfordian group of sisters obsessed with their weight and slimming down through surgery. ‘The Resident’ is a mist-draped tale set in a remote writers’ retreat where an author returns to the scene of her teenage torment. In the brilliantly titled ‘Diffi cult At Parties’, a woman attempts to reclaim a normal life following a devastating assault.

The story that has perhaps garnered the most attention in the collection is ‘Especially Heinous’, a virtuoso piece that re-imagines, in short synopses, the fi rst 12 seasons of Law and Order: SVU. Using the show’s real episode titles, the two main characters, Benson and Stabler are haunted by ghosts with bells for eyes, while their doppelgangers named Henson and Abler also roam the streets. Lampooning the hackneyed tropes of the hard-boiled detective genre, the story also takes a dead serious swipe at the use of sexual assault and murder victims as desensitising entertainment.

Mark my words, you won’t come across anything quite like Her Body & Other Parties this year; it’s essential reading.

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