I’ve come late to the Carmen Maria Machado party, having only started to read her work in the last couple of years. I love her memoir In the Dream House, which I played as an audio book on a long car journey. Machado read it herself and the story was mesmerising, so now I know her voice and I think of her as my friend. Which of course she’s not. I could have chosen any of the stories from Her Body and Other Parties, but I opted for ‘The Husband Stitch’ because of its form and its power. Machado speaks directly to us as readers, which is so compelling, as she weaves the story of desire and horror, of a green ribbon around a woman’s neck and the desperation of a husband to see what is underneath. This is a deeply unsettling, multi-layered story, it touches so many aspects of female experience whilst using an old campfire tale as a loose structure. It feels very true. It’s an incredible piece of writing.
First published in Granta, 2014, and available to read here online. Then collected in Her Body and Other Parties, Graywolf/ Serpent’s Tail, 2017
A Personal Anthology 