Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection “Her Body and Other Parties” invites readers into a world where the boundaries between reality and fantasy blur into a mesmerizing haze. With her unflinching exploration of women’s bodies, desires, and traumas, Machado crafts stories that are simultaneously horrifying and tender, grotesque and beautiful. This collection establishes her as a formidable voice in contemporary fiction, one that refuses categorization while embracing elements of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and literary realism.
A Tapestry of Female Experience
Throughout these eight stories, Machado demonstrates a remarkable ability to reveal the unseen violence and invisible constraints imposed on women’s bodies. Her characters navigate worlds that mirror our own while containing surreal elements that expose deeper truths about female experience. What makes this collection so compelling is Machado’s refusal to flinch from depicting both physical and psychological horrors, even as she infuses her narratives with moments of unexpected tenderness and dark humor.
The stories range widely in style and structure, but each carries Machado’s distinctive voice—sensual, intelligent, and uncompromising. Her prose alternates between clinical precision and lyrical beauty, often within the same paragraph. This stylistic versatility allows her to capture the complexity of her subjects, whether she’s narrating a woman’s sexual encounters during an apocalypse or reimagining every episode of “Law & Order: SVU.”
The Stories: Dissections of Body and Mind
“The Husband Stitch”
“Her Body and Other Parties” opens with this masterful retelling of the folktale about the girl with the green ribbon around her neck. Machado transforms this urban legend into a meditation on marriage, autonomy, and the parts of ourselves we must keep sacred. The narrator, whose green ribbon is a source of fascination and frustration for her husband, guides us through her life from adolescence to motherhood. What elevates this story is Machado’s metafictional framing, providing stage directions for how different voices should be read aloud, acknowledging the performative aspect of gender roles.
The ribbon becomes a powerful metaphor for women’s autonomy, the one part of herself the narrator refuses to surrender, even as she willingly gives everything else. When her husband finally unties it, the consequences are as devastating as they are inevitable—her head literally falls off. Machado brilliantly repurposes a childhood horror story into a profound commentary on marriage and bodily autonomy.
“Inventory”
Perhaps the most formally innovative story in “Her Body and Other Parties”, “Inventory” presents a catalog of the narrator’s sexual encounters against the backdrop of a mysterious plague. The stark, numbered entries read like clinical documentation, yet collectively they form an intimate portrait of a life defined by desire and connection even as society collapses.
Machado demonstrates remarkable restraint here. Rather than focusing on apocalyptic spectacle, she keeps our attention on the human connections that persist amid devastation. The result is a poignant exploration of intimacy in isolation, with each sexual encounter serving as both escape and affirmation of life.
“Mothers”
This hallucinatory tale follows a narrator’s relationship with a woman called Bad and their impossible baby. Machado blends surrealism with emotional realism, creating a dreamlike narrative that explores queer parenthood, toxic relationships, and the complexity of desire. The story’s ambiguity—is the baby real or imagined?—serves its emotional truth, capturing the disorientation of a relationship defined by gaslighting and manipulation.
Machado’s skill with ambiguity is on full display here. By leaving the nature of the baby deliberately unclear, she creates a story that works simultaneously as psychological portrait and supernatural tale.
“Especially Heinous”
In the collection’s most experimental piece, Machado writes doppelgänger episode summaries for all 272 episodes of “Law & Order: SVU” (seasons 1-12). What begins as a clever formal exercise evolves into a haunting alternative universe where detectives Benson and Stabler are haunted by girls-with-bells-for-eyes and their mysterious doppelgängers, Henson and Abler, who solve cases with supernatural efficiency.
This novella-length piece might initially seem impenetrable, but its accumulative power is undeniable. Machado uses the familiar procedural format to explore the desensitization to sexual violence that such shows can foster, while creating her own mythology of ghosts and doubles. The result is both a critique of our cultural obsession with sexualized violence and a genuine ghost story in its own right.
“Real Women Have Bodies”
Set in a world where women are mysteriously fading into incorporeality, this story follows a clothing store employee who discovers faded women sewn into prom dresses. The premise functions as a brilliant metaphor for the social erasure of women, particularly when they fail to conform to expectations of femininity. Machado balances this speculative concept with tender moments of connection, as the narrator falls for the daughter of the seamstress who binds the fading women into dresses.
“Eight Bites”
After gastric bypass surgery, the narrator discovers the physical manifestation of her former self living in her basement. This entity, made up of all she has discarded, becomes both menace and mirror. Machado expertly explores body image, self-loathing, and the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, all while creating genuinely unsettling horror from the premise.
The story’s strength lies in its refusal to offer easy redemption. The narrator’s relationship with her discarded flesh is complicated, violent, and ultimately unresolved, reflecting the complex reality of body image issues rather than providing a neat resolution.
“The Resident”
The longest conventional story in “Her Body and Other Parties” follows a writer attending an artists’ residency in the mountains where she once attended Girl Scout camp. As she works on her novel, her grip on reality loosens, and childhood traumas resurface. Machado blends gothic tropes with psychological realism to create a disorienting meditation on creativity, mental illness, and the thin boundary between past and present.
This story’s strength comes from its unreliable narrator, whose deteriorating mental state leaves readers questioning what is real and what is hallucination. The result is a powerful exploration of how trauma echoes through life, particularly for women whose lived experiences are often dismissed as hysteria.
“Difficult at Parties”
“Her Body and Other Parties’ closes with this devastating story of a sexual assault survivor who discovers she can hear the inner thoughts of porn actors. As she tries to rebuild her life and relationship, this strange ability becomes both burden and insight. Machado unflinchingly depicts the aftermath of trauma, capturing how it reshapes perception and intimacy.
What makes this story remarkable is Machado’s refusal to make the supernatural element a simple path to healing. Instead, the protagonist’s ability to hear these thoughts becomes another form of invasion, complicating her recovery rather than facilitating it.
Strengths and Weaknesses
What Shines:
- Inventive premises that serve as perfect vehicles for exploring deeper themes of bodily autonomy, desire, and violence
- Prose that shifts effortlessly between clinical detachment and lyrical beauty
- Unflinching examination of female sexuality that refuses to moralize or simplify
- Genre-bending approach that draws from horror, science fiction, and literary realism
- Queer perspective that feels authentic and integral rather than tokenistic
Where It Stumbles:
- Experimental forms occasionally prioritize concept over emotional resonance, particularly in parts of “Especially Heinous”
- Ambiguity sometimes crosses from productively mysterious to frustratingly opaque
- Uneven pacing in some stories, with brilliant beginnings that don’t always sustain their momentum
- Recurring themes can feel repetitive across the collection, with some stories covering similar emotional territory
A Bold, Necessary Voice
Despite these minor shortcomings, “Her Body and Other Parties” announces Machado as an essential voice in contemporary fiction. Her work invites comparisons to Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell, but maintains a distinctive perspective rooted in queer female experience.
For readers familiar with speculative fiction that explores gender and sexuality, Machado’s work might evoke Octavia Butler’s body horror, Helen Oyeyemi’s folkloric sensibilities, or Carmen Maria Machado’s own literary descendant, Kristen Roupenian, whose “Cat Person” captured similar anxieties about female bodies and desire.
What sets Machado apart is her refusal to soften her darker insights with comfortable conclusions. These stories linger, burrowing under the skin like parasites, compelling readers to reconsider their relationships with their bodies, desires, and the unseen forces that shape them.
In a literary landscape that often still struggles to center women’s experiences without sanitizing them, Machado’s unflinching gaze feels not just refreshing but necessary. “Her Body and Other Parties” dismantles the false boundaries between literary and genre fiction, between horror and romance, between the body and the self. The result is a collection that will unsettle, arouse, and haunt readers long after they turn the final page.