Stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch”

As I thought about texts for my “Monsters, Race, and Comics” course, Jaydn DeWald suggested I read Carmen Maria Machado and Dani’s The Low, Low Woods, a graphic novel that deals with issues of patriarchy, sexual assault, and trauma. He was teaching Machado’s collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, in one of his courses, and he let me borrow the book. I haven’t read all of the stories yet, but after reading “The Husband Stitch,” the opening story in the collection, I knew I had to include it in the course. While the story does not deal with issues of race, it serves as a good lead in to The Low, Low Woods and the themes present within that text. I plan to write more about The Low, Low Woods in future posts. Today, I just want to focus on “The Husband Stitch.”

I do not know, right now, how to fully unpack Machado’s “The Husband Stitch”, but as I reread it in preparation for class, I started thinking about how we tell stories and how we determine what is true or not. The woman narrator of the story details her relationship with her husband, how she knew from the moment she saw him she would marry him, to the birth of their son and to their son leaving for college, leaving the woman and her husband in the house alone. The woman peppers, amongst the moments of her relationship with her husband and son, tales, what we may call folk tales or…