Question 1

What are the best stories in Her Body and Other Parties?

Accepted Answer

'The Husband Stitch' — a retelling of the classic horror campfire story 'The Green Ribbon' about a woman who always wears a green ribbon around her neck, told as a feminist deconstruction of the ways women's bodies are controlled and contained by the demands of marriage and heterosexual femininity — is the most celebrated story in the collection and has been widely anthologized. 'Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU' is the most formally inventive story: it takes the form of episode descriptions for every episode of the first twelve seasons of Law & Order: SVU, each description transformed into a surreal feminist horror story about women's violence and trauma. 'Real Women Have Bodies' is a quiet horror story about women disappearing, literally, into the fabric of evening gowns. 'Eight Bites' is about weight loss surgery and the body that is left behind. 'The Resident' is about a writer at a residency and the horror that accumulates in institutional spaces.

Question 2

What is "The Husband Stitch" about?

Accepted Answer

'The Husband Stitch' opens Her Body and Other Parties and is a retelling and transformation of a classic horror campfire story — 'The Green Ribbon,' in which a woman always wears a green ribbon around her neck and refuses to tell her husband why; when she finally allows him to remove it, her head falls off. Machado places this story in the context of a woman's entire married life, narrating her courtship, marriage, childbirth, and aging from her own perspective, with editorial stage directions in brackets that periodically interrupt to instruct the reader in how to read the story (suggesting alternative female voices, different emotional registers). The story uses the campfire tale's horror logic — the ribbon is the body's secret, the husband's insistence on knowing is violence — to make an argument about how women's bodies are treated as objects for men to know and possess rather than as subjects with their own interiority. It is one of the most accomplished and discussed feminist horror stories of recent years.

Question 3

How does Her Body and Other Parties use genre conventions?

Accepted Answer

Machado uses horror, science fiction, fairy tale, and fantasy not as escapist genres but as languages for speaking about female experience that realism cannot accommodate. Horror is particularly useful because it externalizes and literalizes the fears and dangers that women navigate as ambient facts of everyday life: the creeping sense of being watched, the danger that lives inside domestic spaces, the body's vulnerability and unreliability. By placing women's everyday experiences of threat inside horror's generic conventions, Machado makes visible what those experiences actually feel like rather than what they look like from the outside. The stories also interrogate their own genre conventions: 'Especially Heinous' takes the form of SVU episode descriptions in order to examine how a television procedural represents women's victimization and what cultural work that representation does.

Her Body and Other Parties Reading Order

Complete Her Body and Other Parties Book List