Her Body and Other Parties

When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.

Her Body and Other Parties is blurbed as a book that “blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism”, and that sounded kind of awesome to me; I am always interested in efforts to expand the boundaries of fiction in new and interesting ways. But reading this collection of short stories, I realised that I wasn't quite getting what the blurb promised, and when I later learned that author Carmen Maria Machado is a product of the Iowa Writers Workshop, I was able to say to myself, “Aha, so that's it. Machado is different in the same way as all those other Iowan po-mo fabulists.” With that caveat thrown out for the benefit of other readers, I will say that this collection was as uneven as any book of short stories – with some totally engaging me and some boring me silly – but with similar themes and frequent callbacks occurring throughout, the stories also “have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond”. I'm glad I read this book, but don't think it added anything to my understanding of the world. Slightly spoilery ahead.

The first story, The Husband Stitch, was definitely my favourite. Using as its framing device the folk tale sometimes known as The Green Ribbon, it inserts many of the urban legends and fairytales that we women have been conditioned with since girlhood to keep us in line. Expanded to this length, it's maddeningly obvious that the husband has no right to the one thing his wife wants to keep for herself, and by naming the story after the “husband stitch” that we all wish was an urban legend, it references the ways in which women find ourselves helpless in the hands of the dominant gender. I especially liked Machado's use of stage directions:

(If you are reading this story out loud, force a listener to reveal a devastating secret, then open the nearest window to the street and scream it as loudly as you are able.)

After that impressive beginning, I felt let down by the next couple of stories: Inventory (a woman's list of all the lovers she's had in her life which eventually reveals that she's found herself in post-apocalyptic isolation, making lists of everything that's been lost from the world) was uninteresting to me, and The Mothers (an unreliable narrator either is or isn't trying to care for a baby that her ex-lesbian-lover insists is theirs) was just confusing:

Don't leave the faucet on. You'll flood the house, don't do it, you promised it would never happen again. Don't flood the house, the bills, don't flood the house, the rugs, don't flood the house, my loves, or we could lose you both. We've been bad mothers and have not taught you how to swim.

So, just when I was wondering when this book would get good again, I arrived at Especially Heinous. 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU. This is a faux-synopsis of every episode in all twelve seasons of this show that I don't watch, and while I suppose it's meant to demonstrate the tedium of consuming violence against women as entertainment, at sixty pages of boring or fantastical blurbs, I couldn't wait for it to end. But then the book did get good again: I really liked Real Women Have Bodies, and if that title is supposed to be a push back against the fashion industry, it seems appropriate that when women start fading into a barely-there existence, they would descend upon a seamstress to be sewn into haute couture gowns. This story is one of several that feature lesbian couples, and when the narrator's partner begins to fade, it recalls the final partner's illness recounted by the narrator of Inventory.

In our room, we watch the news, our bodies curled together in the soft blue glow of the television. Pundits point fingers at each other, screaming as the cohost between them shimmers and wavers under the studio lights. They are talking about how we can't trust the faded women, women who can't be touched but stand on the earth, which means they must be lying about something, they must be deceiving us somehow.

“I don't trust anything that can be incorporeal and isn't dead,” one of them says.

With this reference to that awful saying, “Never trust anything that can bleed for a week and not die ”, this story says as much about men's discomfort with women's bodies as it does about our own. This is followed up by the similarly themed Eight Bites; in which a middle-aged woman decides to get bariatric surgery after her three older sisters appear happier after having gone through the procedure themselves. Despite fighting with her lesbian/feminist/overweight daughter over getting the surgery (“You hated your body, clearly, but mine looks just like yours, so – ”), and despite her female surgeon responding “Don't make me cut out your tongue” when she confesses uncertainty on the operating table (which harkens back to the “husband stitch” and other fears as we lay prone and helpless), while the woman is pleased with her new body, she is haunted for the rest of her life by the extra mass that she has shed, which pretty much takes the form of the faded women in Real Women Have Bodies, and which promises to outlive the all-too-corporeal woman in the same way:

By loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she has become immortal. She will outlive me by a hundred million years; more, even. She will outlive my daughter, and my daughter’s daughter, and the earth will teem with her and her kind, their inscrutable forms and unknowable destinies.

This is followed by The Resident, in which a lesbian writer attends an artists' colony in order to finish her novel and the setting forces her to confront a traumatising event from her youth, and I enjoyed this long story very much – it nicely walks the line between the literal (a writer plumbing her memory for inspiration) and the metaphorical (those memories coming to life). By bringing up the “Brownie Story” (Twist me, and turn me, and show me the elf; I looked in the water, and saw myself) that seems meant to condition little girls to be more helpfully domestic around their homes, we're back in the realm of The Husband Stitch and all these stories running together like raindrops in a pond. But because the narrator this time is an author – someone in charge of the stories that will be passed down – there is a metaness to her acknowledging the stories we are told and embracing them for making her who she is:

Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray that one day, you will spin around at the water's edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.

But, as much as I liked that one, I didn't get much out of the final story, Difficult at Parties; in which a woman is trying to cope with the aftermath of a trauma (probably a rape in her own home), and while she thinks it will help to watch porn videos, she's distracted by her ability to hear the actors' mundane thoughts. (It is mildly interesting to note that the narrator in The Resident adds “difficult at parties” to her wife's list of complaints about her.) 

So, while that was certainly an uneven reading experience overall, I did like more than I didn't; and the stories that I liked, I liked a lot. I don't really think that Machado pushed any boundaries here – everything just feels so workshopped– but there were moments that really touched me, and for the sake of my own enjoyment, I hope these represent the direction she'll be working toward in the future.