Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado (review)

We begin by being vulnerable. Jacqui Germain’s succint metaphor—“My body is a haunted / house that I am lost in. / There are no doors but there are knives / and a hundred windows”—captures the brilliance that is Guggenheim Fellow Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties. A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Writing (among several others), this book unearths burdens, recounting immense pain through unforgiving lust and a delicate tension exploring the violence perpetrated against women and marginalized peoples. Through Germain’s knives, through windows of perception, we travel deep into the abhorrent realities so many have chosen not to see or to believe. Machado’s eight-story collection voices the need for us all to reckon with the question: will we ever believe women?

Machado’s opening piece, “The Husband Stitch,” clues readers into misogyny and violence enacted by men in the name of love and marriage. In this story, Machado embraces the impact of repetition, writing: “if you read this story aloud, please use the following voices: / ME: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same … ALL OTHER WOMEN: interchangeable” (3). She returns readers to similar refrains throughout the story—a technique that is often paralyzing. Machado’s surgical prose builds the story of an empowered woman, certain of her path, who acts upon her desire and marries the man of her choosing. However, her marriage underscores the prolonged violence of patriarchy, the injustices perpetrated by men, and yes, even good men. The narrator, as in Machado’s other pieces, reveals that these stories are an interchangeable force of lived experience demanding attention.

Throughout her first piece, Machado expertly weaves enthralling stories by having her narrator recount different women’s struggles for bodily autonomy and safety. In Machado’s collection, unnamed narrators inhabit the burdens that can sometimes be associated with mother, sister, wife, and daughter. Indeed, one such character (a young tourist in Paris) pleads for help. She thinks herself mad because not one of the hotel employees believes her story about traveling to Europe with her sick mother. This moment, akin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” highlights how women who express their pain often find barriers rather than sympathetic or empathetic audiences in men. Here, readers might feel the need to reexamine any and all assumptions of how women navigate the dangerous realities of patriarchy.

Even with the #MeToo movement, with more awareness about women’s experiences, patriarchy still coerces people to scream for evidence—a story is not enough. The women who do share stories of survival find themselves forced into self-doubt, into fear, into believing sharing is far more dangerous than burying. Consider Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, whose positionality as a Yale-educated white woman, lawyer—a seemingly unquestionable pedigree when navigating institutional racism—still could not persuade men of her story. Or just remember that there are currently twenty-two women who have told their story about #45 and yet we’ve done nothing.

Move forward into the half-brujeria half-sci-fi capitalist critique “Real Women Have Bodies,” where a condition changes some women into apparition-like ghosts; whatever their path, women will eventually transform from whole-bodied women to faded women. These women find themselves woven into the fabric of the everyday from literally being woven into clothing to committing protests by inserting themselves into ATMs and electrical systems. In this story, readers wrestle with the implications of the body as a husk of the self, with inhabiting the liminality of disappearing. Machado writes in tensions: “I come fast and hard, like a bottle breaking against a brick wall. Like I’ve been waiting for permission” (132). Similarly, readers ask permission to swim through violent desires and the eerieness attached to faded women.

Then there is the violence of weight. If you’re Latinx, you’ve probably had...