Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado, book review: Not stories that are easily dismissed
Following in the footsteps of Angela Carter and Helen Oyeyemi, the eight tales in Carmen Maria Machado’s exciting, if a little uneven debut, Her Body and Other Parties, are twisted fairytales from and for the contemporary world.
Loosely based on the grisly children’s fable ‘The Green Ribbon’, the opening story ‘The Husband Stitch’ tells the story of a woman who must deter her husband from untying the mysterious green ribbon around her neck. “Why do you want to hide it from me?” he asks, claiming that a married couple shouldn’t keep secrets from one another. “I’m not hiding it. It just isn’t yours,” she replies. It’s the first example of a theme that runs through the collection: the bodies of Machado’s women are constantly under attack. Not that what they're dealing with is as obvious as the threat of a big, bad wolf. “He is not a bad man,” thinks the woman with the ribbon of her husband, “and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt. He is not a bad man at all. To describe him as evil or wicked or corrupted would do a deep disservice to him. And yet—” The silence says it all, as it does in other stories. In ‘Inventory’, which is told via an account of the narrator’s sexual history, an unnamed disease that’s spread by human contact ravages America. “If people would just stay apart—” one of the narrator’s lovers sighs, as they lie entwined making post-coital pillow talk. ‘Eight Bites’ sees a mother’s decision to get bariatric surgery widen the rift between her and her daughter: “ ‘Do you hate my body, Mom?’ she says. Her voice splinters in pain, as if she were about to cry. ‘You hated yours, clearly, but mine looks just like yours used to, so—’ ”.
Meanwhile, in ‘Real Woman Have Bodies’ the threat is all the more insidious because the cause is unknown. Women are mysteriously fading away into nothing: “She was naked, and trying to conceal it. You could see her breasts through her arm, the wall through her torso. She was crying.”
Actual violence has a part to play too, of course. In ‘Difficult at Parties’ a woman who’s been physically assaulted, finds she can hear the thoughts of the actors in the porn films she watches. Then there’s the centrepiece of the collection, the almost novella-length ‘Especially Heinous’ that re-writes the episode synopses of 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit so that the crimes are set amongst an eerie world of ghosts and doppelgängers. The concept behind it is inspired, but I found myself quickly growing bored—it was too long, and too fragmentary to grip my attention. By comparison, some of the shorter, more coherent stories packed more of a punch. Overall, it’s a book I wanted to like more than I actually did. Nevertheless, Machado’s verve shines through: macabre, erotic, and never quite what they initially seem, these aren’t stories that are easily dismissed.
Published by Serpent’s Tail, £12.99
