Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Product Information

a story about sexual encounters during a pandemic quarantine is hitting a bit too close to home for me right now.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? A woman’s body never exists in isolation. There is always her body, and there are also always all those other parties who believe they are entitled to it. Do you ever worry about writing the madwoman-in-the-attic trope?” asks the annoying antagonist of “The Resident,” a Victorian-inflected horror story about an artist’s residency in the Catskills. The narrator, a writer we know only as C.M., responds at first by protectively describing her autobiographical protagonist as simply “in her own head a lot.” Later, she signs herself madwoman in her own attic. My debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was published by Graywolf Press in 2017.In 2018, the New York Timeslisted Her Body and Other Parties as a member of " The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." A television show based on Her Body and Other Parties is currently in development at FX. This is the first short story collection we’ve read in the book club! How do you feel about it? Did you like it better than our usual novels? Satisfying: 1/5 because I really, really wanted to know more about this world and the ribbons but it is a short story so it ended RIGHT when i got invested. As short stories usually do for me. Oof.I loved "The Husband Stitch" (this is the story I had read before), maybe even more so the second time around: this inventive rumination on what secrets women are allowed to keep made me mad and sad at the same time. This story felt like a punch to the gut over and over and over. Words can be so powerful, and Carmen Maria Machado has perfected the craft of writing, I swear. Women in this world fade slowly and eventually become invisible. We get to see a dress shop, that puts youth and beautiful before all else, and a few of the workers are grasping to those values. Growing older, and feeling less valuable because of it, is a concept that many people in this world can’t deal with, without having to turn invisible. And I’m not going to lie to you and say that when I read that one of the characters of this book was twenty-nine that I didn’t try to suppress that visceral feeling that I don’t even have words for, but I wish so badly that I didn’t feel. There’s been some critical debate over whether Her Body is playing more with fairy tales or urban legends. Do you think the distinction is meaningful? Where do you fall? It is sometimes very strange how sex and coming are the most important things in scenes where it seems like far more important things are happening. It made it especially difficult to read through "Inventory", which is little more than a repetitive listing of unsexy sex throughout a woman's life. The third entry begins with our narrator being handed a baby created by herself and her former female lover, and frankly, beyond this point, the rest of the story is a combination of beautiful, poetic narrative, and absolute chaos in the form of one of the most genuinely unreliable narrators I've ever read. If you enjoy unreliable narration and being left to piece things together for yourself, this will be right up your alley, but it was just a little too blurry and grey of an ending for my taste. One thing I will give Machado the utmost credit for in this story, though, is the incredible way she writes an abusive relationship. There were so many lines that were brutally familiar, but so cathartic, because they felt so raw and genuinely.

I was really looking forward to this book, ever since I saw a review by Roxane Gay for this; then when I read and loved one of these short stories earlier this year I was even more excited - and I was not disappointed in the least. I absolutely adored these stories and what Carmen Maria Machado has to offer. She writes just the kind of slightly unsettling and very upsetting short stories that I just adore. Her stories are twisted and mean but also beautiful beyond words. They have a core feminist message while also being stylistically awesome and never losing sight of the humanity at the core of them. The stories are highly inventive, can be read both as a social commentary and often as love stories, her characters feel real and her language is precise and wonderful. What’s your favorite story in the collection? Least favorite? I generally think “Difficult at Parties” is the weakest, but I can be convinced otherwise. This is a very metaphorical story that starts out with a woman being given a baby by her female lover that they created unbeknownst to the narrator. And I use the word narrator very loosely, because this story is very unreliable. You will constantly be unsure of what is real and what is not, but you slowly get to see a story unfold. I also wholeheartedly believe that this story is very open for interpretation, and what I got from it could be, and probably is, something very different from what you were able to take from it. And that in and of itself is beyond words beautiful. Inventory - A list of sexual encounters inside the context of a world falling apart due to a virus. This might be my favorite!Not that I'm against equality, but this story has a serious beef against the male gender generally in our society. While some men would behave in the way the men do in this story, I don't think it's fair to paint all men with the same brush. A story of a woman’s sex life as a plague destroys her world. Honestly, I don't even know what this was. Okay, I do; it’s an exploration of how sex alone can reflect an environment. There's this sort of raw quality to it, but I can't say it ever really got under my skin, and the character work could’ve been far stronger. This story is one of women who become translucent over time. I really appreciated it; the detail is visceral and the emotion raw. It is far more metaphorical than I tend to prefer, though.