This Is My Body, Given For You by Heather Parry
Fresh off her debut novel Orpheus Builds A Girl, Heather Parry returns with her gory, unsettling debut collection This Is My Body, Given For You
Where her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, asked questions of bodily ownership and public spectacle after death, Heather Parry’s newest collection, This is My Body, Given For You, turns unflinchingly to the spectacle of the living body. A six-armed wrestler binds his additional appendages into submission; a woman earns a precarious living as a live gynaecological demonstration doll; a father in mourning kidnaps a boy with his stillborn son’s eyes; a nun poisons an abusive congregation by spiking their food with her bodily fluids.
The author's voice guides the reader through 15 tales of warped corporeality, prefacing the eight sections with a direct address; these are your tragedies, these are your love stories, this is your happy ending. Despite the reassurance that the collection is structured for your comfort, this insistent narrator creates an unsettling sense of being observed as you wade through her words. Although the stories drip with a dark surrealness, Parry’s unsqueamish descriptions of bodily functions are decisively familiar, from clotted vaginal discharge to the dead weight of an arm devoid of blood.
In the collection’s epigraph, Simone de Beauvoir asserts that the body is not a thing, it is a situation. Similarly, Parry presents the body as experiential; something to be suffered through, rebelled against, or escaped from altogether.