Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado, 2017
Trigger Warnings: A lot in here is horrendous! Child abuse, domestic abuse, sexual violence, body mutilation, eating disorders, gore, death.
I think of Machado’s collection as a sort of American Horror Story coded literary fiction, eight short works that explore the internal feelings of fear and alienation manifested externally to expose the horror of the real world, specifically the experience of being female in a male-dominated universe, or queer in a heteronormative universe.
Of the eight, the four that stuck most with me (having a week of distance from the book) are The Husband Stitch, Especially Heinous, Eight Bites, and The Resident. I’ll say a bit about each (and then a bit about the others that I didn’t totally connect with).
The Husband Stitch
The story recounts a woman’s progression through aging as she meets a boy, falls in love, they marry, have children, build their lives. The story is called The Husband Stitch because following the birth their child, he requests she get the “extra stitch” for his more pleasurable experience during sex. The two seem to have a happy marriage, though largely governed by their arousal for one another. The horror of the story is in how she desires to hold on to a small piece of her identity, just for herself. This is shown in the plot as a ribbon around her neck. Machado’s point is that the boundary can not be upheld, as the design of being in a heteronormative relationship with a man is that he will never be satisfied, he will always want more. Further to Machado’s point is that once the woman acquiesces, once she gives him her all, his satisfaction is very short lived. At the end of the story, she agrees to take off the ribbon. “After these many years, is that what you want of me?” He is aroused when he says yes. She allows him to pull it, and immediately, as is true of the horror genre, her head begins to roll off. Machado includes his initial reaction to this consummate moment: “my husband frowns….” Simple, and true in that it is only seconds after she is fully vulnerable, as he’d asked of her, as he’d been asking for years, that he is disappointed and dissatisfied. The visual of Machado’s craft is profound. Instead of seeing the head roll off the shoulders, we see the scene from the head’s perspective. The husband’s face “falls away,” she is seeing the ceiling and the wall, and, most brutally, the last thing said is that as her head rolls off the bed, she feels “as lonely as [she has] ever been.” Forget the pain of the severed head, it’s the alienation of showing someone all of you just to see their disappointment that is the memorable mark.
Especially Heinous, 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU
This is a paragraph by paragraph (or sometimes as small as one sentence) retelling of the most noteworthy parts of 272 episodes of Law and Order: SVU. What’s great about this is that it does tell a narrative, so there’s something to be followed even for readers who have not watched the show (like me). Through the repetition of the rapes and murders and violence against women, it becomes clear early on that Machado’s purpose is to highlight how strange it is, and harmful, for pop culture to be so preoccupied with violence against women that we are, potentially, normalizing it—for Benson and Stabler especially, who, it would at least seem by the television viewers, have no life outside of witnessing these horrendous crimes and battered women, and maybe tucking their families in for bed at the end of the night. This may be a second part of Machado’s purpose, bringing to light the absurdity of how demanding it is to be part of the American workforce.
There’s one scene where Benson is running barefoot on blacktop. The narrator says “she should be afraid of broken glass but she is not.” Right? This is hysterical, because here are two government workers given superpower status, saving girls’ lives episode by episode in completely unrealistic, and possibly demeaning ways. These people really must be fearless. The story isn’t even about the victims, it’s about Benson and Stabler, who are by and by the victims. Interestingly, both characters reflect different responses to such emotionally and spiritually demanding vocations. Benson (female) begins to be haunted by the ghosts of the dead girls, and Stabler (male) becomes increasingly numb to them. Both characters create a dissociative, alternate double, able to enjoy life outside of work, while the characters themselves drown further and further into it. These are made from Machado’s imagination, not in the real television series. Anyway, despite this short story being the least traditional and the most unstructured (along with Inventory, which I’ll write a few words on below), it to me is the most compelling, with the clearest, least ambiguous purpose, and possibly the most unique criticism on pop culture of all the stories in that it directly confronts a television show that you, or if not you, many people you know, have watched as if with addiction.
Eight Bites
Ahh, the pressure of body image, being the bigger sister, and reproducing negative cycles for our daughters! This story I think is the most touching of the bunch, though I may be biased. The protagonist is the last of her sisters to receive bariatric surgery—this is after she observed, with judgement, on how they looked to be “dying,” “diseased.” The story begins with a few paragraphs on the experience of anesthesia, which I think is beautiful in that Machado reminds us you have to literally lose consciousness, be put under, nearly dead, to allow the process that you expect should inevitably bring you new life. You literally kill the self of before. (“As they put me to sleep, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon”). She gives a short recounting of how she got here—how her mother told her and her sisters they only need eight bites to adequately experience their meal, how in private those eight bites would become sixteen, then twenty-four, then the rest of the plate and what should be tomorrow’s leftovers waiting there in the pot on the stove. The night before her surgery, she treated herself to a lone dinner at a restaurant as her “last meal.” Incredible, like those on death row, she makes the comparison about the “moral compass, or lack thereof.” Her sister comes unexpectedly, looks at her plate, gulps on water; it is a terrifying, traumatic, uncomfortable dynamic between them. Her grown daughter will not talk to her, and when she does, she cries, “do you hate my body, mom?” In the end, she knows her grandchild only on holidays; her daughter never changed her mind (see, this is the story that needs to be told). She dies when she is seventy-nine, and even on that day, she is confronted by the physical manifestation of her weight, which has haunted her as a dark presence in her home since right after the procedure. It begs a sort of weird, probably unnecessary, but oddly spiritual question of when you shed so much fat, where does it go? And its essence, with feelings of shame, of excess, of being undesired, darkly unloved, just lingering somewhere around you?
Resident
Resident was maybe the most fun! It had the feel of being a campfire ghost story. Girl drives into a mysterious woods that she hasn’t been to since she was in girl scouts as a child when some catastrophic event happened, except now she’s a writer, going to an artist’s retreat. Each artist has their own niche and characterization. She and the photographer grow somewhat of a friendship, which is colored darkly when the photographer asks to photograph her, and then unexpectedly tells her to slump off the chair, as if she is dead. She does this and enjoys the feeling, doesn’t want to lift back up. The story altogether becomes eerier, and her relationships become more tense (not, though, really crossing a line). It feels that she is going mad, losing sense of time, reminiscing too much about her childhood, her loneliness. We get the sense that even her writing isn’t necessarily enjoyable to her. While working, she fixates over what it is to be a resident of your own mind, and then a colonist of it. She recalls what happened to her as a girlscout—the campers took her, sleepwalking, into the forest, and left her there; the counselors sent her home, saying that she was unfit to be there. This is remembered between scenes of the climax, where she finds a dead animal on the stoop of her cabin and brings it to the other residents. They are repulsed, angry; one of them leaves. She drives home, back to her wife, thinking about the dissonance that comes from being a “resident” of a mind where things inside are senseless. She’s raving sort of madly, or does she just have clarity? She gets home and doesn’t recognize her wife, and then she addresses the reader personally to say what happened that night as a girl scout was a gift, as most people are never pushed alone in the dark with only themselves.
To me, this is the story of the artist’s alienation, maybe something deranged in her that is necessary for artistry. She is completely alone at the end of the story, wondering if the woman in her yard is her wife. It leaves us very unsettled—seems like if this is Machado’s conception of what it is to be an artist, she isn’t convinced it’s worthy of praise.
Quick Takeaways From The Others:
Inventory: Definitely fun and interesting to read her list of people she’s slept with (in that people are naturally, vastly different from one another) but I wasn’t totally sure of the meaning of the piece until the last few paragraphs when the apocalypse she’s in becomes dire, and in the face of knowing the world is about to end, she begins making lists. This, actually, despite my not putting it in my list of four tops, is stunning: the idea that our life is measured by the small experiences that there are so many of. Her examples are “every teacher beginning with preschool,” “every job I’ve ever had,” “every home I’ve ever lived in,” “every person I’ve ever loved,” “every person who has probably loved me.” These are things we wish we could always remember. And then she notes, unnervingly, that “the world will continue to turn, even with no people in it.”
Mothers: I’ll admit I don’t remember much about this one, despite it being only a week ago that I read it. Trying to go through my notes to remember, but I’m finding I didn’t write? Skimming through the story isn’t totally refreshing my memory either. There felt like more distance between the narrator to the reader in this one; much more of a nebulous plot, and much more of a nebulous way of storytelling, as we aren’t sure if the narrator is mentally sane, so it’s hard to tell if the “baby” she is mothering is real, and where it came from, as she is grieving the end of an abusive relationship with a woman. It’s like she’s observing the baby as a “thing,” disconnected from it. Although this isn’t one I was initially touched by, I see it has the potential to be heavily analyzed and amazed by, maybe for someone who gives it more time.
Real Women Have Bodies: Okay, yeah this one was cool! An incredibly cool concept. There’s an epidemic-type thing going around, where women are literally fading. Their bodies are disappearing, but their outline can still be seen. The protagonist works in a retail boutique with a seamstress, and sees these faded women begging to be sewn into the dresses. At the end, she watches a bunch of girls fade around her, and they all cease movement. I take this story to be anecdotal for consumerism, how girls literally fade from who they are to become what they consume. We mold into media, into trends. Scarily so. At the end, when she is watching the faded, motionless, it is meant to show that these lifeless women are so lost within the retail fads and consumerism that they are unable to engage with the world.
Difficult At Parties: This one I couldn’t get into, differently than Mothers. After a sexual assault, a woman in recovery gains the ability to listen to the internal thoughts of people in porn videos. This is meant to show how she dissociates from herself, and now, being on the outside of sexual experience, can objectively observe others. I somehow wish there were more. There’s something lacking in maybe the characterization or setting, or something that didn’t completely pull the story together, that kept me from fully immersing emotionally into the plot, horrific as it is.
