Her Body and Other Parties: The New “Handmaid’s Tale?”

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Macho

Watch out world. Carmen Maria Macho’s award-winning collection, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press) will become a television series. Her phantasmagoric short stories, all about sex and shifting genders, are coming to a small screen near you. In development for FX, the series will be written by Gina Welch, known for her work on “Feud,” the story of the legendary rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Welch is also the executive producer for Her Body, and Machado is the producer. The expected series has been described as a female version of the hit technological dystopian show “Black Mirror” on Netflix. In this haunting series, black screens never turn off, they stare back and shape lives in usually catastrophic ways. It’s all about being a woman, isn’t it? That’s what “The Handmaid’s Tale” was about — the narrowed role of breeding and obeying a man in Margaret Atwood’s own dystopia. Shopping, babies, and sex. Her Body and other Party’s stories take being a woman a step farther, into unsettling prisms that reflect back how being female can be…different. Machado’s stories mix horror and fantasy, often beginning with something normal that quickly shifts away beneath our feet. A dress shop, with gowns haunted by disembodied women. A baby, created by bad lesbian love. A memory of teenage experimental sex, an event that catapults the world into a  rapidly spreading plague. No matter what topic, the stories are always edgy, grabbing and unconventional. The story, “Especially Heinous,” is an eerie compilation of brief descriptions of hundreds of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” episodes. Since published by Graywolf Press in 2017, the book, “earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious,” won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the American Booksellers Association’s Indies Choice Book, among other honors. Named by the New York Times as one of the 15 remarkable books by women in 2018, it was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2017 PEN/Robert Bingham Award. Machado’s writing has been compared to Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter and Kelly Link. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta and Lightspeed Press and her stories have been included in a number of science fiction anthologies. She now is an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and working on a memoir to be published in 2019. Her Body and Other Parties is now available to purchase.

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