Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
“How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.”
Nightbitch (2021) is the debut novel by American author Rachel Yoder. While this is Yoder’s first full-length novel, she heralds from an impressive literary background and career. Her writing has been awarded The Editors' Prize in Fiction by The Missouri Review and notable distinctions in Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is also a founding editor of draft: the journal of process.
The premise of Nightbitch, on the surface, is nothing entirely new: a middle-class woman struggles with her sense of identity after giving up her art career to become a full-time mother; an absent husband, whose week-long work trips see him fulfilling his role as breadwinner and little else; a relatively quiet life in suburbia, surrounded by other middle-class mums. Our narrator is unhappy, and she shares the depth of her happiness through her inner thoughts with us. It’s the type of narrative we’ve welcomed and celebrated from many similar authors in recent years: Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy.
And yet, Yoder subverts the narrative and presents us with something significantly more feral.
We are thrown into the thick of it in the opening pages. Beginning to realise her discontent fully, she notices she may be transforming into a dog. Yoder merges the surreal with reality, as the mother physically begins to take on dog-like characteristics.
After discovering thick patches of hair and lengthening canines, she points out the emerging transformation to her husband:
“I think I’m turning into a dog; she said to her husband when he arrived home after a week away for work. He laughed, and she didn’t.”
The ‘he laughed, and she didn’t’ becomes a repetition throughout the mother’s unravelling story, as we learn she’s never fully taken seriously. Even when she presents her husband with the emergence of a small, moving lump at the base of her spine - a possible tail - her husband goes along with her transformation. The mother ends up dubbing herself Nightbitch.
At first, Nightbitch is paranoid and anxious about what’s happening to her. On a visit to the local library, she discovers a book, A Field Guide to Magical Women, which clarifies the questions she is only just beginning to explore:
“To what identities do women turn when those available to them fail? How do women expand their identities to encompass all parts of their beings?”
A Field Guide to Magical Women details other women who have transformed in animal-like ways, eschewing the traditional narratives and social constructs available to them as mothers. Emboldened by these tales, the mother begins to lean into her own primal, dog desires. She embarks on nightly escapades, stripping naked to haunt her neighbourhood and the woodland behind. She spends her nights urinating on the neighbours’ gardens, digging and hunting small mammals, delighting in shedding her mother mask to become something else:
“Not iron deficiency or episode. Nothing ‘wrong’ with her. Just one night. One night of violence was all she needed. One night to not care what anyone thought, to shit where she pleased, to not be needed by any living thing, and to be only a body in motion in the dark, a shadow, a ghost of herself, who listened only to the mandates of her body.”
Her young son begins to emulate her doggy behaviours, sleeping in a kennel, insisting on wearing a collar and playing dog-like games in the park. Nightbitch discovers an ease to parenting by giving into these whims, rejecting the stares and uncomfortable comments from those around her.
Attempts to overcome her loneliness see Nightbitch attending a babies book group in the local library and making a friendship with some of the other mothers. These mothers are glossy, social media-ready visions with perfect hair and skin. Yoder plays with the narratives of transformation, juxtaposing Nightbitch’s own dive into becoming a dog in order to claim back some of her identity with the other mothers’ pursuit of wholeness through an MLM essential oils scheme and other capitalist pursuits.
Nightbitch’s transformation goes largely unacknowledged, or when it is, it’s not seen for the potentially disturbing process it is. On attending a toddler group, Nightbitch is unwashed, body hair feral, dressed in a ripped kaftan and shoeless. Another mother, who runs the essential oils group, comments:
“Oh my God! You are so boho! I love what you’ve done with yourself.”
As a novel, Nightbitch shines best when highlighting the inequalities and impossible constructs women find themselves contorting into near-impossible shapes in order to fit into, especially once they become mothers. Even amongst other women, friends from art school who have secured success, Nightbitch feels the pressures of inequality because she chose to become a mother full-time. The age-old question of ‘can women have it all’ torments Nightbitch as she feels she has tried and failed to have anything substantial for herself at all.
The humour in Nightbitch borders on slapstick at times, but it further helps to highlight the outlandish expectations that are heaped upon mothers across contemporary society. In terms of answering the questions of how women can expand their identities to encompass all parts of who they are, Nightbitch manages to secure some success - fully leaning into her transformation and using it to be who she has always wanted to be; authentically herself.
Nightbitch is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. While the themes are well established, Yoder’s exploration of them is utterly unique and compelling.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
