Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

"One of these stories, ‘The Husband Stitch’, really launched her into public consciousness. Suddenly, everyone was talking about her. What I love about that story, and what solidified her role in this contemporary Gothic vein, is that its very melodious, very seductive. It opens with a set of instructions for how you should imagine each character’s voice. The story subverts tropes and gender norms from fairytales and myths. But it does that in a way that is just so sensual, and that sensuality becomes increasingly troubling the longer you’re in the story. Again, you’re complicit in what happens to this woman from the outset because you just cannot look away. Essentially, the story follows a woman who wears a green ribbon around her neck. She lives her life, and marries, has a very fulfilling sexual life with her husband. Likewise she has a fulfilling maternal experience, and gives birth to a son. But the whole time her husband is saying: what’s with the ribbon around your neck? Eventually, she says, okay, fine, take it off. And he takes it off, and her head comes off. I love the texture of the prose and how it’s structured as a story. But I also love that the title comes from this real, disturbing medical trend where, in repairing the tears that so frequently occur during a vaginal birth, the doctor would sew up the vagina with an extra, unnecessary stitch so it would be tighter than before. The idea that penetrative sex would now be more pleasurable for the husband. I remember reading the story and the context around it, and thinking My god, the brutality of that: the systemic misogyny, and how that impulse was facilitated by the body of medicine. All of that is captured in this image of one small stitch in a woman’s genitals: an act of what should have been one of care and repair becoming an act of betrayal. And, although a woman can of course be simultaneously maternal and carnal, the husband stitch forcefully transitions the female body from this vulnerable, maternal moment back into its supposedly primary carnal function. Of course, the protagonist’s voice is not fully conscious of the violence that’s happening to her. She’s not really parsing it. I think that gives a good overview. I remember when I lived in New York by myself for a summer when I was 21, and I saw Law & Order Special Victims Unit for the first time, and I thought: oh my god, there’s an entire series of this? And yes, there’s season upon season upon season of these heinous sex crimes, all handled in these 20- to 30-minute episodes. Machado has explained that she was drawn to that form for a couple of reasons. One is that there’s something deceptively therapeutic about the idea that you have these white knights, so dedicated to sex crime. Because, as we know, sex crimes are often not handled with same diligence, or finesse, or care, that homicide or other serious crimes might be. Then there’s this sense of justice: people are prosecuted, you see that, and it’s over. As a viewer, you have this cathartic loop. So I was interested in her drawing on that as a form, but drawing it out to its logical conclusions. Because of course, dealing with this quantity of sex crimes, with this frequency, that would bear down on a person. An investigator would have to be taking such good care of themselves, in psychological terms. In the story, the constant exposure to all manner of violation results in all sorts of strange hauntings—terrible images of ghosts, girls without eyes… I loved how she subverted the form without making a mockery of it. She’s actually taking it quite seriously, not discounting the catharsis it might offer. She’s not saying, ‘we shouldn’t be looking at true crime, we shouldn’t’ be looking at gratuitous TV shows of a sexual nature.’ She’s just questioning their role in popular culture, and seeing what they can provide in a literary fiction space, which I think is very cool."