Her Body and Other Parties
— Yael van der Wouden
That may not be the version of the story you’re familiar with, but I assure you, it’s the one you need to know.
— ‘The Husband Stitch’
This collection came out last week and my feed has been flooded with reviews that I haven’t read. I wanted to go into it not expecting anything, and all I knew was: Magic, realism, women, queer women—a list that’s more or less my dating profile. When I started reading I thought I knew what I’d bought, and why. I was prepared. (Narrator voice: she was not prepared.)
The fourth story in the collection is titled, ‘Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU’. It’s written in the form of 272 episode descriptions of several seasons of L&O: SVU, which if read all together make for a narrative. The narrative is more or less: officer Benson and officer Stabler investigate murders, most often of women. Most often of prostitutes. The ghosts of these women appear in Benson’s bedroom with bells for eyes. Stabler hears a heartbeat in the ground. Doppelgängers of the two are sabotaging their lives. Stabler’s wife was once kidnapped by aliens, but then it turns out: she wasn’t. A DA falls in love with Benson. The ending is, I believe, a happy one—though the word ‘happy’ seems entirely misplaced when talking about Machado’s writing.
That’s the narrative, more or less, but the story itself it something far more expansive. It’s partly down to the format: each episode has a title, and the description can be a single sentence, can also be three paragraphs. It sounds a simple enough set-up, but what it allows Machado to do is (and I don’t want to overstate this, but whatever, I’m in love with this collection so here goes) phenomenal and bends an entire genre of fiction. It clicks micro-fiction to fanfiction to flash to the novella, mechano elements that then work together in making a wholly new kind of monster. Some episodes fit into the linear narrative, the one about Benson’s girls with bells for eyes, the one about Benson’s wife and the beating floor, and others are just: Season 1, Episode 11: Stabler and Benson will never forget the case where solving the crime was so much worse than the crime itself.
Or, somewhere in season 5, Benson doesn’t think about the moon very often, but when she does, she always undoes her top four buttons, tilts her throat up to the sky.
Or, Stabler runs into the street and stares up at the sky. ‘Stop,’ he begs. ‘Stop reading. I don’t like this. Something is wrong. I don’t like this.’
The third story of the collection, ‘Mothers,’ reflects on how love and obsession and also abuse can haunt and distort one’s understanding of the past. A story within that story is a segment that’s several pages long, describing each corner of a shared living space. Again, the kind of writing I never thought I’d want, but now it’s all I think of. My favourite one, the fridge:
Pickled cucumbers and green beans crowding ridged jars, two glass containers of milk, one good, one sour, a carton half-and-half, a near-black eggplant, […] sweet Italian peppers tense as hearts, soy sauce, bloody steaks hidden away in the dry fold of paper, leaking shamefully, a cheese drawer with balls of fresh mozzarella floating in their own milky water broth, […]
–and on it goes. The way the narrating character obsesses over her memory of her previous life—while nursing a phantom child—stands in stark contrast to how blurry her memories are of the abuse itself, reduced to a single moment in a school bathroom. To a crack in a wall. The baby cries and she doesn’t know why.
And that, I think, is a good summation of most of the stories in Machado’s collection. They give you something you haven’t had before, and then leave you very, very thirsty. I say stories, which make them sound singular, which they are not. I mentioned I hadn’t read any reviews, but I’d seen them come by. I remember a title (not the author, forgive me) that spoke of stories within stories. And to that I would like to add: and each about something you want, something you fear, and something that’s both at the same time.
Would recommend to: people who’ve just moved away from home, lost someone, found someone. All women.
To read: while the tv is on but on mute, in a room full of plants, no-where near bells.