Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Short stories and the fantasy (is this the right word for Machado? Not quite sure, but am open to suggestions!) genre are two things I don’t read a lot of, but everyone who reads Carmen Maria Machado loves her, so I knew I had to try it out. Spoiler: I was not disappointed. In addition to all of her stories featuring women, all of them featured queer characters and points of view, which was such a refreshing thing to read. In spite of the spookiness and on-edge feeling of the stories, I felt safe in them, in reading them. Machado exposes men’s and society’s treatment of women and the double standards we face flawlessly, each word was perfectly chosen and each sentence perfectly crafted. In my favorite story, a woman with a ribbon around her neck has the perfect life: husband, child, etc. But her husband keeps begging to untie the ribbon, and spoiling any semblance of happiness they might have, and she keeps telling him that it is simply a part of her, and not for him. In the end, she allows him to untie the ribbon, signaling her (their) demise. Machado’s other work, a memoir, is sitting on my shelf in a TBR pile, here’s to hoping I will get around to it soon.
Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
Zauner’s memoir not only chronicles her mother’s sickness and eventual death, but also the relationship they had while she was alive, which was oftentimes fraught and difficult, and frankly, super relatable. The perfect mother-daughter relationships portrayed in series like Gilmore Girls are not entirely realistic for most of us, and Zauner’s depiction of coming to terms with who her mother is, and then was, all while dealing with the guilt of what should/could have been and the trauma of her mother’s death is painfully felt on the page. Zauner talks about being half formed when her mother died, as she was only in her mid 20s, and having to figure out who she was and how to be in the aftermath of her mother’s death, and having to do it alone, as her father took off to Thailand shortly after. Her memoir finishes on a high note, with her achieving success in the music industry and even reuniting with her mother’s family in South Korea, leaving the reader with the sweet feeling of a happy ending.