Lydia Mathis is fascinated by the body. In a new essay for her website, she recommends five books that obsess over flesh, change, possession and decay, arguing that the physical self is worth more attention than most fiction gives it.
Mathis, who studied creative writing in college, says she kept returning to the body while reading and writing. “Where is the body in all of this?” she asks. “What was the body doing, how was it moving, where and when did it excrete and vomit and laze and bleed, move minutely, stay still impossibly?”
The result is a reading list titled “Embodied, Unbodied, and the Body Destroyed: Five Books About the Body,” in which she picks novels that treat the body as central rather than incidental.
Justin Torres and the Stolen Book
Justin Torres’s Blackouts opens with a book inside its pages. That book is Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, a real work by George W. Henry, which Mathis describes as “essentially stolen” from the groundbreaking research of queer journalist and researcher Jan Gay. Straight scientists appropriated Gay’s work, and Torres’s protagonist receives the book from his dying mentor, heavily redacted.
The layers of meaning matter to Mathis. She wonders what it means for reproductions of ourselves to be taken and misrepresented.
“I am intrigued by the idea of how much reproductions of ourselves are ourselves, and what does it mean for those reproductions to be taken, misrepresented?”
Jesmyn Ward’s Ghosts of Mississippi
Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing is set in Mississippi and deals with loss caused by racism and its consequences. The ghosts in the novel are the unbodied, history that refuses to be refused. Mathis quotes a passage from the book:
“I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain’t never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin.”
The haunting is not abstract. It is the lingering of unjust wrongs that demand acknowledgment.
Naben Ruthnum’s Deteriorating Husband
Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet is a horror novel that Mathis admits she would not normally touch, since she is “a baby and prone to nightmares.” But she read it with a friend and found the descriptions of a decaying body compelling.
The horror is understated and observational, she writes, like a Cronenberg-directed nature documentary. The husband’s body crumbles, and the wife watches him deteriorate. Mathis asks what it takes to survive watching a live decomposition.
Sarah Gailey’s Clone Questions
Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife follows Evelyn Caldwell, whose research created a clone named Martine. Martine was made by Evelyn’s ex-husband to get the family he could not get from Evelyn, and when Martine gets pregnant, the questions multiply.
Mathis lists the issues the book raises:
- Self-determination
- Bodily autonomy
- Consent
- Government control over bodies
- Misogyny
The core question is responsibility. If something is made of you without your knowledge or consent, does it belong to you in some way? When does it become not yours?
Ahmed Saadawi’s Stitched Together Body
Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad takes Shelley’s classic to the U.S.-occupied city of Baghdad. Hadi, a scavenger and liar, creates the Whatitsname, a stitched-together body of people killed in bomb attacks. His goal is a proper burial, and by combining the pieces of dead bodies, he hopes the government will recognize them as people.
Mathis calls it a more extreme version of the original question: “If my arm is by itself, the rest of my body lost to it, is it still me? Does some essential element of myself reside in it when it’s left alone?”
The Whatitsname becomes a vigilante, avenging those who harmed its parts, but it also grows hungry for more flesh to survive. The story wraps in an epic form, with epithets for its wide cast of characters and a spiraling plot.
A Quiet Obsession
Mathis’s own fixation is the thread tying these books together. She could not stop thinking about the body even after leaving her creative writing classes, and now she returns to novels that fixate on it too.
The list is a map of what she loves to read. Bodies that excrete and vomit, move minutely, stay still impossibly — these are the stories she keeps finding.
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