And once unearthed, there is no containing the memories. Machado audaciously pushes the boundaries of the memoir form, reshaping the very definition of it to suit the thrumming drum of her remembrance. In every sense, this memoir is a masterpiece. Into this “archival silence”, Machado screams, and the sound crashes, breaks like a wave and floods the pages with all the force of the ocean. In her memoir, Machado joins her account to the ones before her, long kept under a pall of silence.
How its silence is so loud it can blast a blanket of quiet that smothers queer relationship trauma.
This is, Machado explains, “the violence of the archive”, how it wells up and pulls so many stories under, in ways foreseen and unforeseen, as often denied as acknowledged. Hers, like many others, is a story like a cry into empty space, with no walls to throw a lonely echo back. But it isn’t an easy feat-“putting language to something for which you have no language.” Machado couldn’t find a language for her wordless agony, and like many other queer people in abusive same-sex relationships, she’s had to gather up the silence like a mantle and carry it along with her, step by step. Writers like Machado offer up their ability to communicate the inexpressible through language. It’s mental self-flagellation: the prying open of one’s life, the splitting of the past like a cracked egg, the choice to trap yourself in the mirrored halls of your own memory, the equivalent of digging a nail into an open sore.
Very few works of writing are more fraught, more difficult, than a memoir. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the Crawford Award. Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W.
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