Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
Short story collections are a weird genre for me…
Sometimes I am totes down for them and love reading them…other times the thought of them stresses me out and I avoid them like the plague.
I have ups and downs with my attention span, yall…I am sure MANY of you can relate, formally diagnosed or not lol
Sometimes short stories just scratch that itch of giving me just enough plot and characters to get into, but not too long of an investment on my end.
But sometimes the effort of engaging with one storyline right after another, right after I *just* got into the groove of the one before triggers alll KINDS of anxiousness in my soul.
I was kinda toeing the line in between these two spectrums when I started listening to this book, which could have been foreshadowing of how was going to feel when I finished 😆
While all the short stories in these pages are different, they are all about women and women’s bodies…the beauties and the tragedies, the traumas and the triumphs, the personal and societal issues associated with them.
Some were more introspective and abstract then others, which I’ll address in a second, but all of them have deep meanings and statements to get your mind processing and your heart feeling….this is NOT a light or easy read AT ALL.
I am trying to only read darker/scarier books for Halloween season but this one was a tad different than the others I have ingested this past month….LOTS of genres at play here. Horror, dark humor, sci fi, fantasy…that’s just a few.
The first story was about a woman with a green ribbon around her neck that was an adult twist on a familiar story for me…and could be for you too if you are a GenXer or a Xennial!
There was a book I checked out from my elementary school library A LOT called “In a Dark Dark Room”, which was a collection of scary stories. I can still see the hand drawn cover art in my head, an open door to a bedroom with creepy characters around it, all peering in….
One of my favorites was the story this first tale was based on.
If you haven’t read it I wont ruin it for you by telling you what happens at the end, BUT this author’s interpretation of the story was GREAT….it was all commentary on how all the things that are supposed to be just about a woman ONLY, just for HERSELF and HER NEEDS and HER WANTS, are manipulated into being about the men in her life instead (ESPECIALLY her husband). It’s about ignoring her inner voice and her inner desires and just acquesing to satiate and comfort someone else….and the lasting traumatic impact that can have on her and others.
Ooooffff. Profound.
There were a couple other stories that I enjoyed….one about how women just start to slowly vanish was quite memorable…but then there were others were I had zero idea what was going on the entire time.
One story was about women being able to reproduce without men….and at first I thought “ok..this could be good…I’m following and I’m tracking…”….but then I got lost.
So so lost.
I never did find my way and figure out quite EXACTLY what the eff was going on.
Same thing happened with the novella in this book where she retold the entire Law & Order series…..yall, I felt CLUELESS.
That feeling continued into the next story too….lots of “HUH???” going on in my brain!
Look, I’m all for weird and unusual stories….I truly love books where the meaning isn’t exactly straightforward and brain power is required for processing the words in each chapter….
But when I feel more perplexed than entertained it totally takes down the enjoyment level of the book as a whole for me.
This read was just a solid “IDK” for me….
I’ll give it two heavy “Mehs” as well.
Mad props to the author though for her writing style and powerful statements. She is quite talented I will say.
Even if I don’t understand half of what she said 😆