Nightbitch was first published in 2021 (and is also a film right now) and presents us with a magical realism story about a struggling stay-at-home mum who has left a career behind and is convinced that she sometimes turns into a dog. She calls herself Nightbitch.
Her husband has to work away most weeks to support their new life. She tried daycare with a newborn, and it appears to have fought against every instinct she has. She loved her former life, her career, her passion for art, but the child forced a reconsideration, as children have to do. What we are left with is Nightbitch.
‘She was hair and blood and bone. She was instinct and anger. She knew nothing but the weight of her body and the pull of the earth against it, the particular wetness of the night air, the bats that flew through her periphery, every movement of the paws and legs and heads around her. She searched the night with her mouth, wanting to sink her teeth into anything.’
This book spoke to me on so many levels. As a mother who finally left a professional career I’d been fighting to stay in when my second child came along (we have better maternity leave and marginally better flexible working here in the UK) I felt seen. This book, although very funny in parts, cut through to me. The desire to stare at a wall, the snacking on random food you can find, the need to just have a second of alone time or an independent thought that isn’t interrupted: it’s all palpable here.
What I loved most about the storytelling in this novel was the way we are presented with the new ‘making it work’ family: husband was the higher earner, so it makes sense for him to keep working. Childcare is too expensive and she has to pump at work all day between meetings and calls, so she’s scatterbrained and forgetting her things, even leaving milk on the barrier at the car park. It’s chaos, and in the midst of it is a new mother who barely knows herself but is desperately clutching at the old life, the one she was good at. It all sounds so familiar, doesn’t it? Anyway, after a few months of trying the daycare/office work/pumping-between-meetings-that-could-have-been-an-email balance with an infant, she finally decides staying at home to raise the baby will be easier.
It’s anything but. The kid just wants to play trains. She never gets to wash her hair. Her husband works away most weeks, all week, and when he is home he is tired and not intuitive to her needs. The child still sleeps in the bed with them into toddlerhood because it’s easier to keep him there than to try and condition him to accept his own bed. Easier for who? We wonder.
And then she’s also convinced she turns into a dog sometimes.
‘Maybe this was what happened to all moms and no one had told her, just like how she hadn’t known her feet would widen and extend after her son’s birth and her hair would come out by the handful in the shower. Maybe it was one of those secrets of motherhood.’
This is Rachel Yoder’s debut novel and it is a feminist thriller exploring the feral creature inside all of us: the one who just wants to exist. It’s a book that makes no attempt to hide the fact that motherhood will take your identity and hide it at the bottom of a toy box, and you’ll be so busy you’ll almost forget to dig it back out.
How Nightbitch resonates with the modern mother:
I’m a mother of three on my third career. I didn’t get here by accident.
There’s no loneliness like motherhood. There’s no transformation like motherhood.
In the distance, she heard her husband in the backyard call for her, but she was not that woman anymore, that mother and wife. She was Nightbitch, and she was fucking amazing.’
Motherhood is one of the hardest and most rewarding things I have ever done but there were so many parts of this book that knew right where to hit me. There is a scene where the mother (our unnamed narrator because of course) is trying to reclaim some of her artistic passion and invites her toddler to paint a picture on the floor. Despite being magical in its nature, this book has plenty of very realistic scenes such as this one. The child gets carried away and spreads the paint everywhere: floor, cupboards, sofa, you name it… I have been there. I have had a cupboard full of half-finished craft projects that I haven’t had the time or the mental energy to complete. Her helplessness is palpable. It’s not a simple situation of well can’t the husband just do more? or Can’t she just call her parents? There is so much more to the problems that come with motherhood today. You choose it, and it still demands sacrifice and sanity.
‘she wanted to bite him by the throat or pummel him with a baseball bat or scream at the top of her lungs, but instead she’d started washing the dishes he had dirtied from breakfast.’
Nightbitch and feminism.
The minute people see ‘feminism’ they might conjure up ideas of bra-burning, man-hating lesbianism and activists who desire anarchy above all things, but it really is for everyone.
My understanding and experience of feminism in my everyday life tells me that feminism is everyone’s business. Dad doesn’t want to have to work away from his family 22 our of 24 weeks, does he? Does Dad enjoy the burden of supporting wife, child and cat on a wage that is certainly not the same as his grandfather’s might have been?
This book made one thing clear: no one is winning. In the developed world, economies have adjusted and they demand two wages from every household. Since the 1970s, women have been told they can ‘have it all’ but having it all is exhausting, emotionally draining and expensive.
I implore everyone to read this book.
This story reminded me so much of The Feminine Mystique and The Bell Jar, and I loved both of those books. It’s perhaps harrowing to know that Betty Friedan first published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and we’re still chasing our tails when it comes to some kind of balance in the modern world of marriage, mortgages, mothering and parenthood as a whole.
It’s been a long time since I finished a book and had a full page of notes and quotations to talk about.
I don’t read fiction with the main intent of seeing myself in it, but this book reached deep inside and no one’s ever going to put me back together.
‘A child’s first act of violence against the woman who created it. Yet the mother loves the child with the most powerful love known in the universe.’
Yoder really brings the body of motherhood to the forefront with Nightbitch’s transformation into something she has full control over: herself. Her new self.
‘Too much power makes a woman dangerous, and that is her project: creation and power.’
This book was an adventure. Inside, we all have a cupboard in a spare room full of things that belong to the woman you were, the woman you are, and the woman you want to be.
Read this book if you want to laugh, cry, worry, and eventually: feel empowered.
Have you read Nightbitch yet? What did you think?
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There’s no loneliness like motherhood. There’s no transformation like motherhood.
I don’t read fiction with the main intent of seeing myself in it, but this book reached deep inside and no one’s ever going to put me back together.
Nightbitch was first published in 2021 (and is also a film right now) and presents us with a magical realism story about a struggling stay-at-home mum who has left a career behind and is convinced that she sometimes turns into a dog. She calls herself Nightbitch.
‘In the distance, she heard her husband in the backyard call for her, but she was not that woman anymore, that mother and wife. She was Nightbitch, and she was fucking amazing.’
Motherhood is one of the hardest and most rewarding things I have ever done but there were so many parts of this book that knew right where to hit me. There is a scene where the mother (our unnamed narrator because of course) is trying to reclaim some of her artistic passion and invites her toddler to paint a picture on the floor. Despite being magical in its nature, this book has plenty of very realistic scenes such as this one. The child gets carried away and spreads the paint everywhere: floor, cupboards, sofa, you name it… I have been there. I have had a cupboard full of half-finished craft projects that I haven’t had the time or the mental energy to complete. Her helplessness is palpable. It’s not a simple situation of well can’t the husband just do more? or Can’t she just call her parents? There is so much more to the problems that come with motherhood today. You choose it, and it still demands sacrifice and sanity.
This book was an adventure. Inside, we all have a cupboard in a spare room full of things that belong to the woman you were, the woman you are, and the woman you want to be.
Read this book if you want to laugh, cry, worry, and eventually: feel empowered to carry on.
Full review available at: https://hannadelaneyauthor.com/author…
Hanna Delaney is the author of five books including Oceanus, a science fiction thriller inspired by The Tempest. She is also the author of the Muldoon supernatural thriller series set in 19th century Liverpool.
Other articles:
- Nightbitch review: Magical realism, motherhood and transformation.
- Ghosts, Gothic mansions and Ancient Egyptian Curses: The Shade In The Sands.
- Interview with AP Murphy, speculative literary writer of bizarre and horror fiction to name a few things.
- A surprising, short history of coffee.
- Things no one tells you about releasing your first book.
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