'Her Body And Other Parties:' Be Your Own Madwoman
Carmen Maria Machado's new collection takes young female online culture — LiveJournal and Tumblr, ghost stories and urban legends — and reinforce the uncanny power and reach of those stories.
"What's worse, writing a trope or being one?" the narrator of Carmen Maria Machado's story "The Resident," asks. She is at an artists' colony, and one of the other residents — a "poet-composer" named Lydia — has snidely announced that the narrator's autobiographical writing plays into the madwoman in the attic stereotype, not to mention the crazy lesbian stereotype. "It's" says Lydia.
