Her Body And Other Parties

Unforgettable and truly terrifying. This is modern female gothic at its very best. Excited to read more of her work.

I heard so much about this book, and I so very much wanted to like it more than I did.

There are stories hung loosely on narratives that are really just lists of things, or a description of lists of things. An inventory of sexual experience during a rando plague of some sort. Descriptions of Law & Order: SVU plots, but not really the plots; and I would rather have read a story with what was going on rather than what I read, because that got incredibly tedious. There were some more formally structured short stories with slight horror elements, but the ends delivered no punch. There was cleverness abounding, but it did not signify enough. And that's a shame.

Also, multiple times in the first few stories, there were references indicating popping cherries. HYMENS DON'T WORK LIKE THAT. I'm over cherries being popped, because they aren't.

I'm fine with the erotic elements, the anger, the bitterness. Those are what I like. I just wanted better stories and less gimmick.

I'm not usually one for anthologies but I'd heard too many good things about this book to not give it a try.
I felt like I was reading a Black Mirror episode with every story in the best way possible.
We started off strong, hit a bit of a bump in the middle but ended pretty well.
As a whole I would say I enjoyed this collection.
Below is a detailed “review” and rating for each of the stories with spoilers. 


The Husband Stitch: 4 stars.  How bizarre of a story. It elicited so much emotion for being as vague as it was. I felt my pulse quickening, my stomach dropping. While involving the fantastical elements of a world that's just slightly different than ours all of the stories our main character tells us still feel so realistic.  The selfishness of her husband, the fixation on her ribbon, the blatant disrespect of her wishes, the very evident connection and illusion to consent, of how men take what is not theirs to be taken.  I'm left confused as to what the ribbons in varying locations of the body indicate, but the metaphor of the ribbon as a whole was beautifully done. 
Inventory: 4.5 stars.  This has no right being as good as it was for how short it was.  We're literally just going through each of our main characters sexual partners throughout her life. But it's such a beautiful slice of life into those most intimate experiences    I don't know if I like the virus aspect more or less than I might have had I read this when it was originally teleased  in 2017 before the Covid outbreak. I actually had to check the publication year because I thought they were referencing Covid. It just makes it hit that much harder though now that we have had that experience. 

Mothers: 2 Stars  This one wasn't for me.  It left me confused and not in a good way like The Husband Stitch. I still don't know what was happening or what it meant and while the writing was still flowery and beautiful it felt like almost too much. 
Especially Heinous: 3.5 Stars Love the concept, little episode summaries that collectively tell a story.  Law and Order SVU meets Twilight Zone. The doppelgänger situation was kind of meh for me but I actually loved that all of the victims wound up in Benson's head telling her how to help them find peace. That was really freaking cool.  Also I looked up the real SVU episodes and they're all the same in the book. Including some of the same plots which I thought was cool.  It got a bit sluggish in the middle and I found myself counting how much longer we had to go. I understand that we're doing every episode in what was 12 seasons (at the time) but it started to drag after awhile.  But at the end it picked up again for me and I liked the end of it. 
Real Women Have Bodies: 3 Stars This one was just real fucking sad. It made me think of couples where one of them has cancer and is slowly withering away.  It was just heartbreaking.  And on a deeper level so meaningful and terrifying g that women are just randomly fading away and no one knows why or even really cares.  Because that's just how society would be if there was something that actually caused our female population to randomly wither away. Most of them wouldn't give a shit and wouldn't try to fix it. 
Eight Bites: 4 Stars I don't know how to put my thoughts into words about this one.  I just loved the message of how even when you hate your body she still loves you. Like our bodies are so amazing with all the things they can do and no matter how much we may dislike what we see when we look in the mirror are body still keeps doing everything she needs to do to keep us alive. She keeps us going no matter how awful we are to her. Until one day she cannot keep going anymore and that apology at the end was like a knife to the heart.  Our bodies deserve so much more love than we can ever give them. 
The Resident: 3.75 Stars I am a sucker for camp and retreat stories. I eat them up. So this was right up my alley. And it had me. Until the end. I didn't like the ambiguous ending. I didn't quite get it. I have theories that our main character was never actually married, she was actually insane after all and had stalked this woman she thought was her wife. But then it all just ended, so abruptly without explanation.
Difficult at Parties: 3.5 Stars This one was also confusing. But I think I understood what it was trying to say. Maybe it's up for interpretation and I just interpreted it a certain way? But it made it impactful for me. Seeing our main character truly become a shell of herself was truly heart breaking.

“Eight Bites” will haunt me until the day I die.

This collection is so dark and subversive and unsettling and AMAZING. I will definitely read the entire book again, and still may not feel like I quite grasp everything the author wants to convey. Standouts for me include Inventory; The Husband Stitch; Eight Bites.....but there is not a single story I don't want to experience again. Completely absorbing. Very recommended.

Ah, this one just didn't do it for me. I'm not sure if it was the writing, or the length of these stories or what. Most of them fell very flat. I did change my mind- I do see why this shows up on horror lists, there is a ton of body horror here.
I maintain that “Inventory” is one of the best things I have read in years. It read like an episode of Black Mirror. That one is worth the price of admission. The rest...eh. Glad to finally get it off my TBR list, where it has been for a long time.

This week I learned that Matt had never heard the story of the woman with the green ribbon around her neck! I don't know if this is because his family is normal while my dad liked to tell weird and freaky stories to us as kids, or if this is one of those knowledge gaps that you think everyone knows but somehow he missed it.

That story re-telling, The Husband Stitch, was one of the strongest. I also really liked Eight Bites, and Real Women Have Bodies. My biggest issue with this collection was that too few of the stories had actual conclusions/endings. Some were too ambiguous, or strange enough as to be inconclusive, and I needed just a tad bit more. Even just a sentence!

(I read a few pages of the SVU story, Especially Heinous, before skipping over it, since I've never watched an episode of Law and Order, and didn't know what I was supposed to be getting out of it.)

Gripping, original, haunting, and brilliant. All of the stories stood strongly on their own and pulled me in instantly, although the resident was my favourite. Definitely one to re-read, 4.5 stars