Author Patricia Highsmith at home, in 1977. Photograph: Liselotte Erben

Twisted brilliance: Patricia Highsmith at 100

Forbidden desires, strange obsessions and a singular talent for suspense... Carmen Maria Machado on the dark allure of the writer behind Ripley

Carmen Maria Machado

Saturday 9 January 2021

T

here has always been something fundamentally difficult about Patricia Highsmith. And not difficult in the way that most people mean it: ironic, quirky, feminist (“Well-behaved women rarely make history”, and so on). I mean truly, legitimately difficult; a well of darkness with no discernible bottom.

Which is not to say that she wasn’t, in her own way, endearing. She was, after all, a genius, a bona fide eccentric. She loved animals, particularly snails, which she kept by the hundred as pets and took to parties clinging to a leaf of lettuce in her handbag. Writer and critic Terry Castle describes how she once “smuggled her cherished pet snails through French customs by hiding six or eight of them under each bosom”. She was famous for her wit and wicked sense of humour, and she wrote compellingly of loneliness and empathetically about disempowered housewives and children.

The Best Books of 2019 / The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2019-in-review/the-best-books-of-2019

Ocean Voung

The Best Books of 2019

According to our book critic

By Katy Waldman
December 2, 2019

Since 1983, it has been customary for nearly every State of the Union address to include the line “The state of the union is strong.” That rote confidence, though perhaps misplaced in politics, seems warranted in the world of books: there are always good books being written. But is it possible that, in 2019, there was a slightly greater number of them? I had a terrible time whittling down my top ten this year. There was a longer than usual tally of titles, reputed to be excellent, that I wanted to read (but have not, yet), with the result that the ballot below may be more reflective of idiosyncratic consumption than objective judgment. The lineup is heavy on fiction, memoir, fiction that behaves like memoir, and memoir that impersonates fiction. The books of 2019 may be slippery to categorize, but the state of them is strong—a luscious year, like 1997 for Brunellos—and I’m thrilled that my job calls upon me to share some of my favorites, rather than my assessment of the nation’s affairs. To the list!

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“Mostly Dead Things,” by Kristen Arnett

This début novel follows a taxidermist, Jessa-Lynn, who lives in central Florida and is mourning the death of her father. Jessa-Lynn’s lover, who is also her brother’s wife, has run off. Her mother is taking apart her father’s specimens—he, too, was a taxidermist—and turning them into erotic art installations. Black humor meets lush prose; Arnett’s Florida—a world of sensuousness and danger—expresses the freedom that her characters seek, as taxidermy itself becomes a figure for queerness, sex, art, and loss.

“The Divers’ Game,” by Jesse Ball

This dystopic fable imagines a society riven in two, with the upper class empowered to murder members of the lower class, for any reason. Characters are given varying degrees of self-awareness; spare, simple language evokes innocence maintained at too high a price.

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“Trust Exercise,” by Susan Choi

Sarah and David, teen-agers at a prestigious performing-arts high school, conduct their love affair under the watch of a manipulative and charismatic drama teacher. The students are all sweat, hormones, and painful self-consciousness. The novel, tense and lovely as a dancer’s clenched muscle, explodes into a mid-act twist, which brilliantly foregrounds questions of authorship and appropriation.

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“Ducks, Newburyport,” by Lucy Ellmann

This stream-of-consciousness novel, most of which unspools over a single sentence, is an inquiry into how we live—and think—now: drowning in information, aghast at the news, yet captive to the mundane details of work and family. Ellmann’s unnamed protagonist, a middle-aged housewife in Ohio, is at once conventional and specific, not to mention funny. Her litany of fears and yearnings acquires an almost sacral quality.

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“Girl, Woman, Other,” by Bernardine Evaristo

Evaristo’s eighth novel, which shared this year’s Booker Prize with “The Testaments,” by Margaret Atwood, creates a symphony of black womanhood. Each chapter centers on a different character—a feminist playwright, her goth-alien daughter, the “separatist lesbian housebuilder” dating her friend—and their connections emerge gradually. At different times, Evaristo’s tone is either ringing or confiding, amused or stricken. Her language spills over the page in free verse that suggests Ntozake Shange but lays down its own rhythms.

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“How We Fight for Our Lives,” by Saeed Jones

Jones’s tale of coming of age in the South as a black, gay poet has a startling immediacy. He writes of college lovers, the threat of hate crimes, and his self-possessed mother, who supported him but struggled to talk about his sexuality. The book, which is slim and focussed, quakes with a nervous energy that often erupts into euphoria.

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“In the Dream House,” by Carmen Maria Machado

This memoir, which tells the story of Machado’s abusive relationship with another woman, is an act of personal and formal bravery: a narrative refracted through multiple genres—“Dream House as Creature Feature,” “Dream House as Word Problem”—that explores vulnerability but vibrates with power. Machado heightens a sense of dislocation by seeming to practice literary criticism on herself. (Right before her prologue, she writes, “I never read prologues. . . . If what the author has to say is so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What are they trying to hide?”)

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“Valerie,” by Sara Stridsberg

In this whirling, poetic mashup of a novel, Stridsberg takes liberties adapting scenes from the biography of Valerie Solanas, the feminist who shot Andy Warhol. (Behold Valerie, languishing on her deathbed, sparring with the book’s narrator, who was not there.) The emotional through line is Stridsberg’s longing to know her mysterious, self-contradictory subject.

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“Axiomatic,” by Maria Tumarkin

The book is comprised of restless, gorgeous essays, each of which uses an aphorism—“time heals all wounds,” “you can’t enter the same river twice”—to reflect on Tumarkin’s preoccupations: trauma, the ongoingness of the past, and the unworkability of language. Tumarkin takes up subjects like youth suicide and the plight of homeless people in North Melbourne, but her approach is never maudlin. The book exudes pity, as it’s classically defined— “a sorrowing compassion.”

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“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” by Ocean Vuong

Vuong, a poet and Vietnamese immigrant, studies his upbringing through the lens of his mother, to whom the novel is addressed. This woman, Rose, is both loving and abusive. She cannot read English, and yet her imagined readership is the occasion for the story’s telling. Rose becomes, for her son, a horizon where intimacy and loneliness converge; the grace of the book is to measure distance while acknowledging that few distances are fixed.

THE NEW YORKER

The metafictional, liminal, lyrical ways of writer Carmen Maria Machado

The metafictional, liminal, lyrical ways of writer Carmen Maria Machado

Philadelphia Latina writer Carmen María Machado is making waves. She’s been mentioned, nominated or the recipient of some the most important awards a writer of speculative short stories can aspire to. AL DÍA caught up with her shortly after the announcement that her debut collection of short stories will be published by one of the nation’s leading nonprofit literary publishers.

By Sabrina Vourvoulias
December 03, 2015

Philadelphia Latina writer Carmen María Machado is making waves. She’s the recipient of several Speculative Literature Foundation grants, and has been mentioned, nominated or the recipient of some the most important awards a writer of speculative short stories can aspire to: Pushcart Prize, Hugo, Nebula. AL DÍA caught up with her shortly after the announcement that her debut collection of short stories will be published by one of the nation’s leading nonprofit literary publishers.

AL DÍA: First, you sold your first book! Tell me about that: the book, the process, the challenge. When will it be available? Are you planning to do any readings in Philly? 

I did! My debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was recently sold to Ethan Nosowsky of Graywolf Press.

Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado review – powerful debut collection

Horror, science fiction and fairytale merge in these short stories from a writer of rare daring

Justine Jordan
Thu 18 Jan 2018

“H

ow much to get that extra stitch?” the narrator’s husband asks in the labour room as his wife is sewn up after a difficult birth. “You offer that, right?” “The husband stitch” – the term for an extra stitch to tighten the vaginal opening when repairing an episiotomy – is considered a dark joke from the battlefield of birth, but has been attested to as part of the violence visited on women’s bodies during labour. It’s also the title of the standout story in Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection, a finalist in last year’s US National Book awards: a tense, seductive fairytale about rumour and silence, sex and power, autonomy and being ignored.

The narrator begins as a bold girl in the tradition of Angela Carter: “This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them ... It is not normal that a girl teaches her boy, but I am only showing him what I want, what plays on the inside of my eyelids as I fall asleep.” She takes this young man as her husband, offering him her whole self – all except the mystery of what lies beneath the green ribbon tied in a bow around her throat. “Why do you want to hide it from me?” he asks. “I’m not hiding it,” she replies. “It just isn’t yours.” The ribbon becomes a locus for desire, aggression, control; their child had accepted it as part of his mother, but when he sees the father’s angry attempts to pull at the ends must also be warned away. “Something is lost between us, and I never find it again.” There is only one possible ending: just as Chekhov’s gun must be fired, this ribbon must eventually be untied.

You may recognise the setup from that hoary old horror story “The Green Ribbon” (inexplicably retold for first graders in the US by Alvin Schwartz in In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, thereby traumatising a generation). Machado folds many folk tales into “The Husband Stitch”, from the modern classic about the hook-handed murderer disturbing teenagers who are making out in a parked car to stories of a girl who is dared to go to a graveyard after dark and an old woman who must find a liver to cook for her husband.

Machado’s skill here is to bring out what these communal stories share, exploring their deep roots in women’s experience over centuries and the way they run together “like raindrops in a pond”. At the same time she challenges our individual readings: “That may not be the version of the story you’re familiar with. But I assure you, it’s the one you need to know.” She also gives stage directions, busting the story out from the page: to recreate the sound of an episiotomy, “give a paring knife to the listeners and ask them to cut the tender flap of skin between your index finger and thumb. Afterward, thank them.”

 

There’s a ragged glory to the formal experimentation and erotic fearlessness

None of the other seven stories is as achieved as this one, but there’s a ragged glory to their formal experimentation and erotic fearlessness, and the gusto with which they reinvent horror, SF and fairytale tropes. Sex and death are the dominant themes, with two stories charting passion against the backdrop of apocalypse.

“Inventory” lists a woman’s erotic experiences, from the first inklings of desire in childhood, through memories of lovers both male and female, as a virus depopulates the world and any chance of physical connection dwindles. In “Real Women Have Bodies”, a riff on fashion and the constraints of body image, two young women fall in love as a mystery epidemic causes women literally to fade away. “I don’t trust anything that can be incorporeal and isn’t dead,” says one man, recasting the old misogynist joke about menstruation.

“Eight Bites” is a neat tale about self-hatred and bariatric surgery, with the fairytale promise of transformation: “It will hurt. It won’t be easy. But when it’s over, you’re going to be the happiest woman alive.” “Especially Heinous”, meanwhile, is a baggy monster: subtitled “272 Views of Law & Order: SVU”, this bizarre phantasmagoria of the US TV show is written in the form of surreal episode synopses. Poking fun at cop show cliche (“‘I hate this goddamned city,’ Benson says to Stabler, dabbing her eyes with a deli napkin”) while interrogating the way sexual violence is served up as primetime viewing, it also satirises the tendency of long-running narratives to become increasingly baroque, adding in ghosts, demons, doppelgangers and the conviction that “New York is riding on the back of a giant monster”.

Machado’s manipulation of literary registers can lead to odd and jarring effects, as in the deeply uncomfortable “The Resident”, which uses the fusty language of the Victorian ghost story for a contemporary tale about an artists’ colony that teems with every horror cliche imaginable. We encounter a spooky old hotel, terrible weather, buried memories about the nascent sexuality of pubescent girls, tears “the temperature of blood” and some truly disgusting psychosomatic pustules. Towards the end the mannered veneer cracks open to expose something quietly extraordinary. Like many of these pieces, it falls somewhere between exercise and inspiration, but it signals a writer of rare daring.

• Her Body & Other Parties is published by Serpent’s Tail. 

THE GUARDIAN

Meet the autor / Carmen Maria Machado / ‘I’m interested in messing with genres’

Carmen Maria Machado: ‘I feel like the people who write the most sex scenes are straight white dudes.’ 

MEET THE AUTHOR

Interview

Carmen Maria Machado: ‘I’m interested in messing with genres’

The author of Her Body and Other Parties on the art of writing sex scenes, engaging with dead writers, and the readers who give her flak

Stephanie Cross
Sunday 7 January 2018

Carmen Maria Machado’s acclaimed debut collection of stories, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for America’s National Book award. She is writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives with her wife in Philadelphia.

Women’s bodies – and what they are subject to – seem to be central to this collection…

It was something very personally important to me, which I think a lot about. It’s weird because people keep saying it’s so relevant right now, but our bodies have been oppressed for all of human history.

There’s a lot of sex in your stories, something that’s notoriously difficult to write about well. What’s the secret?

Letting some sex scenes be pleasurable, letting bodies be real. For me, it was important to have a lot of queer sex, because I never see it – I always tell my students you have to write the stories you want to see in the world. I feel like the people who write the most sex scenes are straight white dudes, which isn’t to say that’s wrong or bad, but if you’re getting the sex through the same perspective over and over, of course it’s going to be boring.

Your acknowledgements suggest that you don’t subscribe to the myth of the solitary writer. True?

The longest acknowledgements in the history of mankind! I think that [myth] is a very romantic and fake idea that people love for reasons I don’t quite understand. Some of writing is solitary, but first you should be reading as a writer and then you’re engaging with other people, even if they’re writers who have been dead for a long time. A lot of people on that list didn’t necessarily directly help me as a writer, but created a life in which writing my book was possible.

You also studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

To have two years where I was just letting stuff marinate and letting stuff take off was incredibly important to me. It wasn’t like I was “learning how to write”, because I already knew how to write, but I was finding my voice and that time was so valuable to me.

You were a finalist for the National book award, interviewed by the Paris Review... as a debut author, how have you dealt with that attention?

Trying to get as much as sleep as possible! It’s been very intense. On the one hand, I’m so glad that this book that I love, that I’ve worked on so hard, is getting all this attention. On the other hand, it feels like “I’m not worthy!” as there are so many good books in the world.

Your stories range across fantasy, fairytale, erotica, horror. Where does that variety come from?

It comes from what I love and what I read. I just picked things up as a child – Roald Dahl, Louis Sachar, Shel Silverstein, a lot of horror and thrillers, a lot of mysteries – and there was something very magical about it. Children don’t really have these questions about genres and play in this very organic way – they naturally have a narrative sensibility that’s untethered to traditional narratives. There’s something so wonderful about that, it really speaks to me as an artist.

Have you encountered any prejudice against genre fiction?

No, I actually get way more flak from certain kinds of genre readers – AKA very traditional genre readers – about how my work is insufficiently genre. I’m really interested in interrogating tropes and engaging with genres and messing with them in a way I find satisfying.

Which books would you press on people at the moment?

I’ve loved a lot of books this year, but the two I’d recommend would be Bennett Sim’s White Dialogues and Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, which are both short story collections.

What were your thoughts on the controversy surrounding Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker story, Cat Person?

I don’t think it was a perfect story, but almost no stories are. I really liked it – it captured a very distinctive part of the female experience and that was why people responded to it so strongly. People didn’t seem to understand that it was a short story, which wasn’t the fault of the author. I’ve seen it before, this misunderstanding about the function of fiction: people want to read fiction for a clear moral lesson, which is not how fiction works.

• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). 

THE GUARDIAN

MEET THE AUTHOR

2012

Joyce Carol Oates / 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'

2014

Esther Freud / I realised the book I'd been writing for 18 months was awful

2018

Carmen Maria Machado / ‘I’m interested in messing with genres’

Kerry Andrew on writing supernatural fiction: ‘I had to spook myself out’