Her Body and Other Parties

The session opened on the form itself, since not everyone in the group reads short story collections and for some this was the first. That gave us a way in: whether the order of these particular stories works as it stands, whether we would rearrange them, and how much work the title is doing to hold them together. Several reviewers file the book as horror, which turned out to be useful. We spent a while on what the collection actually made us feel rather than only on what it is about, and on whose writing Machado’s style reminded us of.

We went story by story where it mattered. The green ribbon in “The Husband Stitch” and what it stands for. “Especially Heinous”, the retelling of Law & Order: SVU, which lands differently depending on whether you have ever seen the show. “Eight Bites” on bariatric surgery, “Inventory”, “Mothers” and whether the baby is real at all, and “The Resident”, the one about the writer, and how autobiographical it might be. Machado has said she wanted to end the collection on a hopeful note, so we asked whether “Difficult at Parties” reads that way.

The characters gave us the clearest through-line. What the women across these stories have in common, with passivity the first answer offered, and what to make of the male characters, Paul in “Difficult at Parties” among them. From there we talked about how relationships work in the stories, romantic or otherwise, and how sex is portrayed. Which took us back to the title: when it comes to women’s bodies, what are other parties entitled to? That question, more than any single story, is where we landed on what makes the collection feminist and on what it is criticising about the society around it.

We came out of it partly quite confused, and still glad to have read it: magical realism with horror elements, a book whose vibe we loved, and one that covers a broad width of the struggles women face in society now and across the past century. “Real Women Have Bodies” is our favourite of the stories. “Especially Heinous” was the one most of us were not hyped for, and the one we enjoyed considerably more in retrospect once we had talked it through, which turned out to be true of most of the stories and of the collection as a whole. The positive twist at the ending that Machado has mentioned is the one thing we could not find. And we loved how the queer aspects are woven in without ever being made the main act.

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