Her Body And Other Parties

This anthology is very tricky to pin down, which in many ways is probably intentional. It is horrifying and funny and deeply strange. Carmen Maria Machado's protagonists exist in ways that allow them to be barely attached to reality, and yet they still manage to fall in love, to feel fear, to fuck with exceptional gusto. Reading this is a bit like stepping through a veil, and occasionally getting confused and tangled up in the drapes.

The stories I loved, like really loved, are probably in the minority. Those are definitely “The Husband Stitch,” a re-telling of the urban myth of the girl who won't take off the ribbon around her neck, and “Real Women Have Bodies,” a story of a woman working in a dress shop as the world endures of a plague in which young women are literally fading away. I thought about “The Husband Stitch” for days afterward. I never thought of the story of the girl with the green ribbon as a morality tale about consent, but it absolutely is. They should tell that story in sex ed class. “If your girlfriend tells you no, think of that ‘no' as a green ribbon around her neck,” is what I would say if I was a my 9th grade sex ed teacher. Would that be too much? Would I traumatize kids with that? Of course, I definitely would not recommend this story, as Machado tells it, to teach, because wowzers is it a sexy story. It's a little bit weird to reduce what in any other circumstances is a healthy, happy couple with a good relationship down to their sex life. Machado would let you believe that the only thing these two did for eighteen years was fuck. But more than that is the betrayal at the core of the story - that regardless of how much you love and respect a man, he can still do you irreparable harm by not respecting your boundaries. The fact that this is something that good men are perfectly capable of is an important point to put at the front of this anthology.

“Real Women Have Bodies” is one of the stories in this collection that reflect Machado's interest in unusual apocalypses, and I appreciate when an author discusses the end of the world in such matter of fact ways. It's hard to say what conclusions Machado wants us to draw from this story, but perhaps its simply more about what it is like to not exist anymore, and whether as woman that's good thing or a bad thing. “The Inventory” is similar, though a little more literal, as it is about a woman recounting her series of lovers while an unnamed plague sweeps across the nation, killing her friends and family, decimating civilization, and forcing her deeper into hiding. Like with “The Husband Stitch,” “The Inventory” makes me feel like I've been unbearably prudish with my life, while also showing how someone can feel so alone while being intimate with others, and how they can feel loved and a part of whole when isolated from the rest of the world.

Stories like “Mothers,” “Eight Bites” and “Difficult At Parties” sat in a middle ground for me. Though I am quite intrigued by the device of “Difficult At Parties” where a woman develops the ability to hear the thoughts of performers in porn films after enduring a sexual assault, what Machado did with that concept I found more frustrating than anything else. “Mothers” is a fascinating, evocative story about a woman who somehow conceives a child with her abusive ex-girlfriend, that gets increasingly more abstract and by its end I couldn't tell what was up or down. “Eight Bites” is more straight forward, a magical realism perspective on a woman getting bariatric surgery. While I liked this story, as a woman who has been thin all her life, there's probably quite a bit that went over my head.

Then there were stories that I just didn't know what to make of. “Especially Heinous,” a kind of bizarro fever dream fan fiction of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, was clever and funny and strange at first. And then it kept going and I felt like I was being sucked down a strange USA marathon K-hole. “The Resident” likewise I struggled to get into, though it does possess what is quite possibly my favorite paragraph that I have read this year:

“It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said. “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them...You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.”