Pleasure Principles: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties is Carmen Maria Machado’s first collection of short stories, but Machado is no novice: her writing is prolific and varied, from essays on higher education and retail consumerism, fiction on clairvoyance and the afterlife, and criticism on Leonora Carrington and Game of Thrones. In Her Body, Machado flexes that versatility as her characters navigate the emotional landscapes of love, sex, and grief within the contexts of pandemic narratives and ghost stories. Throughout each of the book’s eight stories, Machado uses elements of the fantastic as a vehicle for better understanding the complications and challenges of reality.

Machado and I spoke over the phone at the end of August, as she was preparing to start the semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the artist in residence, and just before her collection was named to the longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Our lively conversation took us from Victorian England to Law and Order and a lot in between.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s start at the beginning. What prompted you to start writing?

MACHADO

I have been writing basically my whole life. My family read to me a lot, and my grandfather’s Cuban, so there was a lot of storytelling in our household. I learned and sent a letter saying, Here’s a chapter of my novel. Please let me know if you would like more of it.