Here, Machado is riffing off a heaving, seething mass of tales: not just that old horror story “ The Green Ribbon,” but also an urban legend about a hook-handed man, a folk tale about a feral girl raised by wolves, a fairy tale about a woman who cuts out her own liver to feed her husband. She tells him not to touch it, but during sex he pins her to the bed and takes the ribbon in his hands. “The ribbon is not a secret it’s just mine,” she responds. “A wife should have no secrets from her husband,” he tells her. It features a woman who always wears a green ribbon around her neck, and who finds herself constantly protecting her ribbon from her husband’s encroachments. That entitlement is explored to its most sinister effect in “The Husband Stitch,” the strongest and most celebrated story in the collection. There is always her body, and there are also always all those other parties who believe they are entitled to it. That’s the problem, isn’t it? A woman’s body never exists in isolation. Specifically, everything always comes back to women’s bodies, and all their attendant neuroses: the shame associated with women’s flesh, with fat the way the body stores trauma the physically embodied joy of holding a baby all the many attacks and encroachments a woman’s body suffers. In Carmen Maria Machado’s dazzling debut short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, the Vox Book Club’s pick for April, everything always comes back to the body. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.
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