Books
Queer author Carmen Maria Machado draws raves for ‘Her Body’ short story collection
Writer says family storytelling tradition, collegiate experiences inform her fiction
Author Carmen Maria Machado says her love of reading and the storytelling tradition of her family deeply inform her work. (Photo courtesy Tom Storm Photography)
All fiction writers need imagination. Carmen Maria Machado’s is so vivid, she sometimes passes it on to her characters.
“Sometimes I sat on the porch and gave imaginary interviews to NPR personalities,” says the narrator of “The Resident,” a short story in Machado’s debut collection “Her Body and Other Parties.” “”When I write, I feel like I’m being hypnotized,’ I told Terry Gross. ‘It was at that moment I knew everything was going to change,’ I told Ira Glass.’”
For most writers, such daydreams remain mere fantasies. Few authors become literary superstars or suddenly find themselves under the spotlight on NPR. Yet this is what happened to Machado, a 31-year-old queer writer.
Her short story collection “Her Body and Other Parties” (Graywolf Press), released in October, has received the attention usually bestowed on the work of literary giants such as Toni Morrison or Michael Cunningham. “Parties” was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. It won the Bard Fiction Prize. It’s her first full-length work though she has had many of her stories published in various outlets.
“Parties” is unlike any previous short story collection. Women’s bodies, queerness and feminism pulsate through the tales in “Parties” from “Inventory” to “Difficult at Parties.” Yet the book isn’t didactic or the least bit doctrinaire. Like the horror movie “Get Out,” the stories pop with horror and comedy.
Women have joyous sex, even as people die worldwide from a virus spread by physical contact. A sexual assault survivor hears the inner thoughts of characters in porn. A novella “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU,” is a piercing, but hilarious send up of “Law & Order: SVU” and its fascination with sexually traumatized women.
“The collection is that hallowed thing: an example of almost preposterous talent,” the Los Angeles Times said of “Her Body and Other Parties,” “that also encapsulates something vital but previously diffuse about the moment.”
Storytelling, Machado says during a Blade phone interview, is part of her family tradition. Her paternal grandfather came to the U.S. from Cuba; his wife was from Austria. They met as immigrants in New York. Her mother’s family is white.
“Storytelling, especially on the Cuban side of the family, is important,” Machado, an Allentown, Pa., native who now lives with her wife Val in Philadelphia, says. “My grandfather has dementia, but we can still recite stories back to him and he remembers.”
She incorporates that oral storytelling tradition in her work. Her love of reading and writing, as one might imagine, has deep roots.
As a child, Machado read voraciously. She went to the library and devoured books like candy, reading at breakneck speed, she says.
“All kids write stories. I wrote them and typed them out. I always loved the idea of being a writer.”
Machado sent her stories to publishers and authors. Her letters yielded no publishing offers, but, “my wife who works in publishing says that some delighted interns at the publishing houses must have loved my letters.”
To her surprise and delight, Machado heard back from Livia Bitton-Jackson, a Holocaust survivor and author of the memoir “I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust.”
“In the book, Bitton-Jackson talked about how the poems she wrote were left behind when she was taken by the Nazis,” she says. “I wrote to her and asked what happened to her poems. One day, my mom, who was confused by it, said, ‘There’s a letter for you from Israel.’”
Bitton-Jackson told Machado that she didn’t get her poems back, but that she’d kept on writing.
“She asked me about myself,” she says. “It felt magical that a real person — a writer — wrote back to me.”
When she was young in the 1990s, Machado didn’t understand that she was queer.
“I had crushes on girls, but I didn’t think of it in that way. I didn’t have any framework,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone who was out and queer until I went to college.”
Machado graduated from American University in 2008 with a degree in visual media. During her years in Washington, she read the Blade as she was coming out.
“I thought, ‘Oh this is who I am,’” she says. “My parents were pretty chill, though they were a bit confused because I was lesbian/bi. They didn’t quite understand why I would date a guy, but they were great about it.”
Attitudes about being queer were different for some of Machado’s extended family.
“Some of them were very religious,” she says, “but I didn’t have to deal with a lot of that kind of nonsense. I feel extremely lucky.”
Machado went to college to study journalism, but quickly realized that wasn’t what she wanted to do, so she switched to literature and photography.
“I wanted to get loose with my sentences,” Machado says. “I didn’t have the blood thirst, the nose for news, to be a reporter.”
After graduating, Machado moved to Berkeley, Calif., working random jobs during the recession and enduring a bad break-up, which she says made her miserable. But she didn’t stop writing. A creative writing teacher, whom she calls “a lovely human being,” encouraged her to keep writing stories.
Her stint at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 2010-2012, where she earned a master’s degree, changed everything professionally for her.
“Suddenly, I was getting paid to be in grad school and write,” she says. “I didn’t have to worry about finding jobs. I had good health insurance. I could go to therapy and figure out my aesthetic.”
And, of course, her success with “Her Body” has helped fuel ongoing efforts. “House in Indiana,” a memoir about same-sex domestic violence is due in 2019.
“Same-sex violence isn’t talked about,” Machado says. “I wanted to talk about it.”
Kathi Wolfe, a writer and a poet, is a regular contributor to the Blade.
Books
Something’s off about Dad. When is it time to step in?
‘When Memory Fades’ can help when families face dementia
‘When Memory Fades’
By Nathaniel Chin, MD
c.2026, St. Martin’s Essentials
$30/422 pages
Mom called you in a panic the other day.
She’d lost her keys and by the time you arrived to help, she’d found them. In the refrigerator.
These kinds of things keep happening, not often but often enough, and you don’t know quite what to worry about. But in the new book “When Memory Fades” by Nathaniel Chin, MD, you’ll learn about the journey ahead, for both of you.
You can’t remember why you walked into a room. You got lost last week, going to the bank. Popular wisdom says that things like that are normal as we age, but Chin says that’s not true – although the answer may not be a worst-case scenario, either. Yes, memory problems could just be signs of stress, dehydration, or lack of sleep – or is it time to see a doctor?
Chin says maybe, yes.
He was working his way through medical residency when his father, a geriatrician in Madison, Wisc., was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Chin, now a geriatrician, was blindsided, but that diagnosis also changed his life.
Here, he writes about the brain, and how Alzheimer’s and dementia are diagnosed, explaining that dementia has many faces and, depending on a doctor’s evaluation, memory problems might be slowed or improved. He shares his father’s illness with readers, but he also writes about his mother, a steadfast, steady caretaker.
Her story reminds reader-guardians to care for themselves, too.
Know how to talk the talk, so that you can have “a more productive” conversation with your doctor. Understand that there’s nothing “normal” about dementia or Alzheimer’s. Know the statistics – African Americans are affected with dementia twice as much as whites – and know how to lower your risks. Learn here what questions to ask, how to break the news to everyone, and any legal matters that will be important soon. And know how to tend to you.
Says Chin, “The best action you can take is to educate yourself… The more you understand, the better equipped you are to make sound judgments.”
Something’s off about Dad, just a lot of little things that don’t add up. When is it time to step in? “When Memory Fades” can help you decide.
Wise, wide-spread, comprehensive, and compassionately helpful, this is a book you can read and then take it to the doctor with your loved one. It’s a book that makes sense when nothing else does, and its biggest feature is that it smoothly transitions from easy-to-grasp science and charts, to gentle coaching for caregivers. Author Nathaniel Chin, MD writes with storytelling, humility, grace, and experience from both sides of the Alzheimer’s/dementia issue, and his words are reassuring but also urgent. Learn, but don’t wait, he says. Know how to safeguard yourself. See your doctor, and don’t fear testing. Watch for signs of depression. And never, ever stop asking for help.
Read those last seven words, and find “When Memory Fades” now. It’s a book to have on your shelf, whether you’re 45 or 95 because, as you’ll see, dementia happens and knowledge is key.
Books
New book chronicles gay man’s life in hippie commune
Vietnam War-era tale a serious, sexy, joyous memoir
‘Qtopia: A Memoir of Love, Land and Liberation’
2026, University of Wisconsin Press
By Juda Bennett
Duffel packed, the new high school graduate could not fall asleep. “On the night before my departure, I stared at the duffel bag as if it were a body bag. We lived close to Dover, where the dead from Vietnam were shipped.”
It is 1971, and Charles was leaving home to join a hippie commune in rural Virginia. “I kept imagining bodies fitting into the bag and popping out in the middle of the night,” Juda Bennett writes in his memoir, “Qtopia: A Memoir of Love, Land and Liberation.” During Bennett’s high school years from 1968-1971 some 35,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in the Vietnam War, the vast majority processed at Dover Air Force Base.
Young Bennett was clueless about what lay ahead but he had a commune’s brochure in his pocket, certain his destiny was not in the military. “My father was a walking recruitment center, and my mother could have worked for the USO. Uncle Sam and the Andrews Sisters had nothing on them.” Inspired to find his way out of suburban Wilmington, Del., he boarded a Greyhound bus to Lexington, Va., and communes yet unknown. “Qtopia” is a serious, sexy and joyous memoir about a young man who knows he’s different in search of chosen family and, over coming decades, his own queer Utopia.
“We are leaving; you don’t need us,” was the popular refrain in the day from the Crosby, Stills & Nash song “Wooden Ships.” Communards like young Charles (going by the moniker C.B. with a full beard covering his handsome, androgynous features) were living it. How far this is from urban queer stories of the ‘70s. For this reason alone, it is marvelous reading about hot naked hippies farming together in the country, living and loving in secluded teepees when everything seemed possible. Novels like “Drop City” by T.C. Boyle (2003) and “Arcadia” (2012) by Lauren Groff set in hippie communes had no gay characters, only free-love for straights. When C.B.’s parents arrive to visit his back-to-the-land commune North Mountain bearing gifts like the orange powder Tang and Frosted Flakes, he “maintained” as the saying went. “It was a great time for visitors to see how hard we had worked—fields of sorghum swaying in the breeze, acres of vegetables in neat rows with beans, tomatoes and peppers hanging down….I was still thin as a matchstick, but I was a strong and muscular matchstick,” he tells the story of his development. By contrast, he had considered suicide before leaving home; this memoir fills in the pain, too.
There are times when C.B.’s voice as a teen communard with a secret is so authentic and rich, it is like reading fictional stories of American innocents on journeys of their own like J.D. Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield or Demon Copperhead from rural Virginia by Barbara Kingsolver. He tells us there was this guy Mark at North Mountain who had been pressuring him to sleep on the mattress next to his. C.B. was known as the only gay at North Mountain. One of the hippie women warned him Mark is “a square, the biggest downer.” Stepping out of the memoir, C.B. directly addresses the reader about the Mark issue, “I don’t want to write about Mark anymore because he’s not important to my story, and I didn’t even like him.” Got it. Hitchhiking with C.B. is like that, too.
“I got my best ride of the whole hike from a truck driver named TJ….If an eighteen wheeler…is willing to stop for you, it is because the driver wants something from you…I will forever remember this trucker as the most beautiful man I could have had sex with if I weren’t so innocent.”
North Mountain required the hippies work one week a month in Richmond to earn cash for the commune. For C.B., this translated into seven communards living in one small apartment on this cultish mission. It was in a Richmond park where he meets a stranger who would sexually abuse him over a month until C.B. ends it. Furious, the man threatens to shut down the commune if he does not obey. In a state of panic, C.B. attempts suicide by overdosing on every pill he can get his hands on. The memoir takes the reader through the author’s horror by deepening the shadows. What was the specific nature of the abuse? How did this stranger have credible power to threaten the commune? Entitled “What It’s Like to Die,” the chapter is a skillfully told, expressionistic turning point from an innocent’s hell to salvation at the intentional queer Lavender Hill commune in Central New York. C.B. desperately needed to “find my people.”
He’s a resilient young man after living in three communes by the time he hit San Francisco. His two gay neighbors on Ashbury Street—Crow and Moonsnake—pressure him to get a new “hippie name.” Walking home from Golden Gate Park he zeroes in on a passing streetcar, “North Judah.” Goodbye “Charles,” Judah will be his new hippie name. Crow and Moonsnake, approve: “If that’s what the Universe called out to you.” If you remember the Sixties…
“Too often,” Bennett writes, “we think of dropouts as withdrawing from life, but in truth, I think they are in a heightened state of seeking their rightful path and purpose. Nothing stays the same.” Juda Bennett remains a believer to this day, “Always putting my faith in my journey to Utopia”.
(Charles Francis is president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., and author of “Archive Activism: Memoir of a ‘Uniquely Nasty’ Journey.”)
Books
Liza’s book a tale that’s better than most celebrity memoirs
‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!’ dishes on marriages, heartbreak
‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! My Memoir’
By Liza Minnelli, as told to Michael Feinstein
c.2026, Grand Central
$36/ 421 pages
Twenty feet In front of you, and you can’t see a thing.
Even the closest faces are in shadow – lit, but not quite enough for you to see for sure what the people there are thinking. Still, you can hear them, their gasps, their laughter, and applause. Such is life, on-stage. Now read “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! My Memoir” by Liza Minnelli, as told to Michael Feinstein, and read about it beyond the spotlight.
Almost from the moment she was born, Liza Minnelli was famous.
It was inevitable: her mother was Judy Garland. Her father was director Vincente Minnelli. Her godparents were Hollywood glitterati, her neighbors were famous, her playmates would be famous someday, too.
But her life wasn’t all starlight and happiness.
She made her stage debut as a toddler. She became her “mother’s caretaker” at age 13.
At 16, she had a growing career of her own – one that her mother tried to stop. But, she says, “In her own way, Mama was wonderful to me. Try understanding – she was my mother, not a movie star…. I knew her as the person who loved me and always would.”
At 19, Minnelli was working, happy, and madly in love with the man who’d become her first husband, and life was wonderful – until she came home one day to find him in their bed with another man. Before they were divorced, she lost her beloved mother, and became “engaged” to two other men simultaneously, neither of which made it to the altar with her.
She married her second husband, the son of one of her mother’s former co-stars, in 1974 but her love affairs and addictions led to a second divorce.
Her third husband was a stage manager.
She doesn’t have much good to say about her fourth, and last, husband.
Overall, she says, “You gotta play the comedy for all it’s worth and leave ‘em laughing. Even when your heart is breaking.”
Are you expecting bluntness, sass, or attitude here? Good, because that’s what you get inside “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” It’s strong on honesty and don’t-give-a-flip. It’s wonderfully edited, so it moves fast. It’s eye-opening and funny and a pleasant surprise for a first, and only (so far), memoir.
Even better, author Liza Minnelli (with best friend, Michael Feinstein) is really quite candid and nicely gossipy, starting from the beginning. There are some Hollywood folks, in fact, who are feeling edgy because of what’s inside this book and the secrets spilled. Minnelli and Feinstein seemed to have fun telling her story, and they comfortably lure readers in.
That’s not to say that it’s all a cabaret. Minnelli tells about her addictions and recoveries, her marriages and why she wed two gay men, and the losses she endured, including miscarriages, deaths, and broken relationships. The bad balances well with the good for a tale that’s several notches above most celebrity memoirs. “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” is, in fact, a real joy to read, a genuine bright spot.
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