Book Club Guide

Her Body and Other Parties

by Carmen Maria Machado · 2017 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The female body as a site of horror, desire and institutional control
Genre conventions and what happens when they are pushed to breaking point
Silence, disappearing and the women no one is looking for

About this book

Eight stories at the intersection of horror, fantasy and the everyday lives of women — including an extended riff on Law & Order: SVU and a novella about a green ribbon. Machado's debut collection is formally inventive and politically sharp, using genre conventions to illuminate what the female body endures and what it desires.

Published in 2017, Her Body and Other Parties was shortlisted for the National Book Award and won the Bram Stoker Award. Machado has described it as growing from her desire to write horror that acknowledged what women already experience in ordinary life.

Discussion questions

The Green Ribbon story — an extended, disturbing riff on a folk tale — opens the collection. What does Machado achieve by making this familiar story so unsettling?
The 'Especially Heinous' section imagines descriptions of every Law & Order: SVU episode. What is Machado doing with this extended formal experiment — and what does it say about the cultural consumption of female victimhood?
Many of the stories feature women who disappear, are controlled, or are harmed. How does Machado use horror conventions to make visible something that realist fiction normalises?
The collection is explicitly aware of the genre traditions it is working in. Does this self-consciousness strengthen or distance the reader from the emotional material?
Her Body and Other Parties was shortlisted for the National Book Award. What does it do that earns serious literary recognition — and what might the literary establishment resist about it?