Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
“[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay
“In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen Russell
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.
Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
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Community Reviews
What Bookclubbers are saying about this book
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Readers say reviews of "Her Body and Other Parties" highlight Carmen Maria Machado’s compelling exploration of women’s experiences, sexuality, and soc...
The author is skilled at writing, but her ideas seem to need editing more often than not. Some stories were strong, others were bizarre in an irredeemable way (Especially Heinous was a bad idea and also executed terribly, yet was the longest story of the book—just skip it).
These stories would certainly generate ample discussion for a book club, in part due to how incomplete some stories seemed (Mother, as a call out).
If the point of art is to have an insight into how someone else expresses their emotions, Her Body and Other Parties is a piece that paints all sorts of emotions born from women’s experiences, emotions that even women are afraid to sit with and observe too closely. I cannot exactly articulate why it was so fascinating, and here I am attempting it anyway.
The very first story, The Husband Stitch, is by all accounts a proper story, and a damn good one at that. It’s probably one that’ll end up as a favorite of everyone who reads this collection.
The next one, Inventory, at first felt just musings about past lovers, but once I knew what I knew, it made me feel so deeply, and I eventually broke into sobs.
Mothers, honestly, this was my least-liked story of them all, not because of a lack of depth, but because it just felt disorientating.
Especially Heinous is 12 seasons of SVU episodes summarized. Frankly trippy. I didn’t know what was happening, but I was hooked till the end.
Real Women Have Bodies, the concept of this story is brilliant, unique, and absorbing, but it left me feeling that something was missing.
Eight Bites is relatable, illustrative, and also timely. Irrespective of the age or location of the woman reading it, it addresses something almost every woman has had to learn to fight, accept, or embrace.
The Resident, even if I don’t remember anything about it, there is just one short monologue from it that’ll remain with me.
Difficult at Parties, the one I didn’t want to continue reading because of the trauma trapped within these 20 pages, but I read it anyway.
DNF. I only got ~40% through it before putting it down for a second time. I don't think I'll pick it up to finish it, unless it's a book club read. I can understand why others enjoy this book of short stories, but I really struggled with how incomplete, tangential, and honestly confusing they were. The first story was pretty good and got me hooked, but it was downhill from there, with "Especially Heinous" being the story I could not get through not once, but twice.
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