“The Husband Stitch,” the first story in this collection, became a kind of shorthand for the women in my workshop to describe how the nuances of women’s lives are worthy of close examination and depiction how these nuances have the weight of life and death. There’s a satisfaction for women who read Machado at being seen, understood, known. She tackles topics we’re told are off limits (and who decides the limits anyway?!) and she makes them new. She writes them into relationships with women and men–relationships that are casual or serious, healthy or dangerous. Machado writes unapolagetically about women in their bodies. I followed the buzz to Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. Raise your hand if you’ve been told that a queer protagonist will limit your access to a mainstream literary audience. By Kate Tighe-Pigott Raise your hand if you’re a writer who has been chastened away from the subject of sexual violence.
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