The Holy Shiver

**Lauren Brown** (0:02)
Oh, wait, you're listening.

**Lulu Miller** (0:03)
Okay.

**Soren Wheeler** (0:04)
All right.

**Latif Nasser** (0:11)
Radiolab, lab, from WNYC.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (0:19)
Hey, it's Lulu.

**Lulu Miller** (0:20)
Gonna kick off today with a little ghost story for ya. So there's this woman, and she's going through weight loss surgery. And when she gets home, she starts hearing these gurgles and creaks and realizes she is being stalked by the former bits of herself. Her flesh that she has cut away. Or there is a house that is mazelike and haunted by quiet cruelties that occur between you and your partner, and it feels like there is no way out.
These are some of the stories of the prize-winning writer Carmen Maria Machado. Some of them are true, some of them are fiction. All of them are charged with this sense of spookiness.
I have spent hours of my life being pleasantly spooked by her, and so I was totally delighted when she wrote into our show, wondering about something that had happened with her partner of four years, Lauren Brown.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (1:29)
Are you rolling? Yes.

**Lulu Miller** (1:31)
That spooked her.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (1:33)
Should I say?

**Lulu Miller** (1:34)
You can say.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (1:36)
The first time Lauren and I hooked up with each other, I noticed goosebumps on her body right before she had an orgasm. But the pattern was really unusual. It wasn't just universal goosebumps. It was these kind of like leopard spot goosebumps. Sometimes I'll like touch Lauren on the arm and like she'll get goosebumps like where I've touched her.

**Maria Paz Gutierrez** (2:02)
So it's like you leave a trace?

**Lulu Miller** (2:04)
Radiolab reporter Maria Paz Gutierrez.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (2:06)
Yeah.

**Lauren Brown** (2:06)
Yeah.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (2:07)
Wow.

**Lulu Miller** (2:08)
An editor, Sorin Wheeler, who sat in with Carmen and Lauren to hear the tale.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (2:11)
Sometimes you have, you call them crispy ones, which is like, they're really, really, really pointy.

**Lauren Brown** (2:16)
Extra crispy is like, I say that you could like grate Parmesan or like zest a lemon on me. Like they just are like so intense and feel really like sharp.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (2:26)
Right, so like as soon as we started seeing each other, I think I was just like really paying attention. Like I was just like, I've never seen this and this has never happened to me. Like, I mean, you have goosebumps like all day, like in some form or another.

**Lauren Brown** (2:36)
Yeah, I'm pretty consistently getting them.

**Lulu Miller** (2:38)
And what stuck out to Carmen wasn't just how often Lauren was getting goosebumps, but it seemed like they would prickle up in response to almost contradictory things.

**Lauren Brown** (2:47)
You know, watching a sports highlight and music.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (2:51)
But then also like some of it's like moments that are like sad or like, it doesn't actually like the same emotion every time.

**Lauren Brown** (2:56)
Yeah.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (2:57)
And so it was just sort of in my head. And then I was like even more closely watching Lauren and being like, what is this?

**Lauren Brown** (3:04)
Sometimes I think about it and I'm like, if I was a different kind of person, I would be like, I'm haunted.

**Lulu Miller** (3:16)
So Carmen started researching goosebumps and writing about them. She's now years deep into a novel with a title that comes from an old fashioned word for them.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (3:28)
The Holy Shiver.

**Lulu Miller** (3:31)
The Holy Shiver? I like that.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (3:35)
Yeah.

**Lulu Miller** (3:35)
It's a term that's been used by scientists to describe the kind of goosebumps a prey animal gets when it realizes it's being watched by a predator. But also that the predator gets just before it goes in for the kill.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (3:50)
Like it's arousal that like connects things like sex and fear and pleasure and excitement. And so thinking about that, like it was sort of in my head. And then I was like, what is actually happening in your brain that's moving from like, for whatever the reason is, like it's moving from this like sort of some kind of neurological impulse into your body and why.
And then I was like, surely Radiolab has done an episode on Goosebumps that feels like a very Radiolab thing to do.

**Lulu Miller** (4:24)
But it turns out we have not.

**Carmen Maria Machado** (4:27)
And so yeah, so here we are.

**Lulu Miller** (4:29)
So today on Radiolab, we write this wrong and bring you an episode all about.