Review: Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
Review: Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
Paired with the movie adaption Nightbitch, directed by Marielle Heller.
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**This review is full of spoilers, so read at your own risk**
“Was being free to do what you needed and be how you wanted–truly free–monstrous? If so, it was not a wrong kind of monstrous, but a beautiful one. A way of being to celebrate rather than run away from.”
Thanks to my friend Dominique who suggested this buddy read and watch! We read the book together, and then we (and our spouses, who hadn’t read the book) sat down to watch the movie. We had a great discussion.
As the book begins, "the mother” is getting by, sort of but not really. She’s an artist, and chose to stay home to parent because she made less money than her husband. Now “the son” is two years old, and she’s no longer able to tread emotional water. In the midst of figurative drowning, she discovers new hairs on the back of her neck, a cystic protuberance on her tailbone (...a tail?), and canine teeth that are sharper as she runs her tongue over them. She wants to run, wag, bite, kill.
This is a fairy tale of transformation, which is interesting if taken literally, which I suppose you could do in this inventive novel, lending it a horror-esque vibe. However, it spoke to me as a metaphor of a woman’s defense against erasure, from artist/individual to non-artist/mother. At the beginning, I was enjoying the hyperbolic writing style, which gave the text a sort of forced jocularity: Everything is okay here! Nothing to see! I liked the pointed commentary on the transformation that motherhood brings to many of us. I identified with so much of the mother’s emotional life, and also the more straightforward physical challenges of parenthood, like sleep deprivation and what it can do to a body and mind. “If she could just get one entire night of sleep…She fantasized about this, about how her body might feel the next morning, of the dreams she might have. Who would she be with a full night of sleep? Someone else entirely.”
However, it wasn’t those things that made a good novel into something memorable. Rather, it was the middle section, the coming of Nightbitch as a being born of rage that pulled me in. The mother turns animalistic, and she revels in it. And what’s more, she co-opts her toddler son into the doggy life as well. She sets up a dog crate for him and he loves it! He falls asleep easily in the crate, and so she gets a great night’s sleep (when she isn’t wandering the neighbourhood naked and hunting local wildlife before burying it in the backyard). And her husband, with some magical realism cluelessness adding to the fantastical tone of the novel, finds her oh so attractive.
All of that was great too, but doesn’t solve the fundamental issue of motherhood as a transformational disruptor. Nightbitch feels good, for now. She notes of herself: “She is becoming a better mother because she is becoming a better dog! Dogs don’t need to work. Dogs don’t care about art. Why had this never occurred to her before?” Freeing, but another trap.
My busy mind speculated that the emergence of the canine–or, maybe, the intrusion of it–into her life helped her vent her feminine/mother rage into a primal, animalistic self that she could finally show to the world. However, Nightbitch still mostly hung around at the edges of polite society, only fully realized in the times she was truly alone. Nightbitch allowed her to live with the fact that she’d given up her previous life as an artist, a single person, a non-mother. It’s not stable. That rage is still there, and without some sort of balance it goes awry.
“Was being free to do what you needed and be how you wanted–truly free–monstrous? If so, it was not a wrong kind of monstrous, but a beautiful one. A way of being to celebrate rather than run away from.”
Thanks to my friend Dominique who suggested this buddy read and watch! We read the book together, and then we (and our spouses, who hadn’t read the book) sat down to watch the movie. We had a great discussion.
As the book begins, "the mother” is getting by, sort of but not really. She’s an artist, and chose to stay home to parent because she made less money than her husband. Now “the son” is two years old, and she’s no longer able to tread emotional water. In the midst of figurative drowning, she discovers new hairs on the back of her neck, a cystic protuberance on her tailbone (...a tail?), and canine teeth that are sharper as she runs her tongue over them. She wants to run, wag, bite, kill.
This is a fairy tale of transformation, which is interesting if taken literally, which I suppose you could do in this inventive novel, lending it a horror-esque vibe. However, it spoke to me as a metaphor of a woman’s defense against erasure, from artist/individual to non-artist/mother. At the beginning, I was enjoying the hyperbolic writing style, which gave the text a sort of forced jocularity: Everything is okay here! Nothing to see! I liked the pointed commentary on the transformation that motherhood brings to many of us. I identified with so much of the mother’s emotional life, and also the more straightforward physical challenges of parenthood, like sleep deprivation and what it can do to a body and mind. “If she could just get one entire night of sleep…She fantasized about this, about how her body might feel the next morning, of the dreams she might have. Who would she be with a full night of sleep? Someone else entirely.”
However, it wasn’t those things that made a good novel into something memorable. Rather, it was the middle section, the coming of Nightbitch as a being born of rage that pulled me in. The mother turns animalistic, and she revels in it. And what’s more, she co-opts her toddler son into the doggy life as well. She sets up a dog crate for him and he loves it! He falls asleep easily in the crate, and so she gets a great night’s sleep (when she isn’t wandering the neighbourhood naked and hunting local wildlife before burying it in the backyard). And her husband, with some magical realism cluelessness adding to the fantastical tone of the novel, finds her oh so attractive.
All of that was great too, but doesn’t solve the fundamental issue of motherhood as a transformational disruptor. Nightbitch feels good, for now. She notes of herself: “She is becoming a better mother because she is becoming a better dog! Dogs don’t need to work. Dogs don’t care about art. Why had this never occurred to her before?” Freeing, but another trap.
My busy mind speculated that the emergence of the canine–or, maybe, the intrusion of it–into her life helped her vent her feminine/mother rage into a primal, animalistic self that she could finally show to the world. However, Nightbitch still mostly hung around at the edges of polite society, only fully realized in the times she was truly alone. Nightbitch allowed her to live with the fact that she’d given up her previous life as an artist, a single person, a non-mother. It’s not stable. That rage is still there, and without some sort of balance it goes awry.
There’s an audacious scene of the demise of the family cat that I absolutely loved (and was impressed that Yoder included–beware, it’s gory). It shows that Nightbitch is one solution to suppressing one’s needs, but maybe not the best. When she's at a multi-level-marketing party that she’d been invited to by Jen, another mom whose surface cheer belies her desperate interior, Nightbitch can’t help her thoughts from spirling. “To be Nightbitch meant always to be on guard, to doubt and confront, to critique and question, her husband, her motherhood, her career, these women, capitalism, careerism, politics and religion, all of it, especially herb-marketing plans. But–and she truly couldn’t believe she now felt this way–she needed this, needed other women, other mothers, and even if these weren’t exactly the right ones, they were a start. The cold terror of the cat murder left her desperate for some kind of equilibrium, to return to her self, or at least to a transformed self that owned her dreams and desires, but wielded her power with even determination.”
Ultimately, it’s the third part of the book that made memorable into really fantastic. Yoder crafts an arc that allows the mother to integrate her various selves into a whole: artist, mother, spouse. And also human and dog. What I expected, perhaps a taming of Nightbitch, or the occasional emergence of the dog-self when needed while the mother gets on with things, is nowhere to be seen. Instead of a neat, circular plot that resolves everything to the “normal,” Yoder flies off the trajectory, drawing a line that leads somewhere new entirely.
The mother’s artistic life and her canine life become something creative and new, even as she arguably loses some of her human-ness. It's a really compelling resolution to a complex issue. It feels fantastical to me, bringing in the fairytale element, with her husband drawn into Nightbitch’s realm. Looking at her husband near the end of the book, she says, “In that face she could see that he loved her and was in awe of her, of what she had made. That he had never meant for her career to be quashed. That he had always wanted for her happiness, and art, and that now he saw all she had become and saw it was hers was that she existed as a creative force independent of him or their son but also in control of them.”
Her art show, the culmination of this complex merging of her selves, is beautifully written and powerful, and involves her son at the end. Motherhood is fierce, and her love for her son is fierce, even if she had to become something else to see it, even if it has damaged her former self in the process. To become something new is to leave something behind, to let it go. I felt it a hopeful ending, wildly aspirational rather than reliably attainable. But beautiful nonetheless.
“Here was a woman who now knew that life unfolded through mystery and metaphor, without explanation, who looked upon her perfect son in front of her, a person who had made with her strongest magic, standing right there in a blinding spotlight as if he weren’t a miracle, as if he weren’t the most impossible thing in the entire world.”
***
We paired our reading with a movie night, and asked our spouses to join us. They hadn’t read the book, and it was neat to have a male perspective. Dominique and my opinions were similar. We both liked the book, with slightly different interpretations and some things that worked more and less for each of us. However, we both felt that the movie’s first half was well done and true to the book. Amy Adams as The Mother did a fantastic job. However, the second half went off the rails. The plot took an entirely different direction, and it was annoying because the power of the novel was lost to a movie-of-the-week marital problems narrative. It felt pedestrian as compared to the novel. The book took risks, the movie really didn’t.
I suspect that our dissatisfaction with the movie’s second half may hinge on having read the book. Both of our spouses liked the movie, and the banality of the revised plot didn’t land badly for them. They also both felt that even though the book was from a female perspective, the difficulties of parenting felt relevant to them too, as fathers.
Overall, reading Nightbitch and then watching the screen adaptation was a fun bookish project, made better by interesting discussion about the book, and a movie night with all four of us. Highly recommended!
Ultimately, it’s the third part of the book that made memorable into really fantastic. Yoder crafts an arc that allows the mother to integrate her various selves into a whole: artist, mother, spouse. And also human and dog. What I expected, perhaps a taming of Nightbitch, or the occasional emergence of the dog-self when needed while the mother gets on with things, is nowhere to be seen. Instead of a neat, circular plot that resolves everything to the “normal,” Yoder flies off the trajectory, drawing a line that leads somewhere new entirely.
The mother’s artistic life and her canine life become something creative and new, even as she arguably loses some of her human-ness. It's a really compelling resolution to a complex issue. It feels fantastical to me, bringing in the fairytale element, with her husband drawn into Nightbitch’s realm. Looking at her husband near the end of the book, she says, “In that face she could see that he loved her and was in awe of her, of what she had made. That he had never meant for her career to be quashed. That he had always wanted for her happiness, and art, and that now he saw all she had become and saw it was hers was that she existed as a creative force independent of him or their son but also in control of them.”
Her art show, the culmination of this complex merging of her selves, is beautifully written and powerful, and involves her son at the end. Motherhood is fierce, and her love for her son is fierce, even if she had to become something else to see it, even if it has damaged her former self in the process. To become something new is to leave something behind, to let it go. I felt it a hopeful ending, wildly aspirational rather than reliably attainable. But beautiful nonetheless.
“Here was a woman who now knew that life unfolded through mystery and metaphor, without explanation, who looked upon her perfect son in front of her, a person who had made with her strongest magic, standing right there in a blinding spotlight as if he weren’t a miracle, as if he weren’t the most impossible thing in the entire world.”
***
We paired our reading with a movie night, and asked our spouses to join us. They hadn’t read the book, and it was neat to have a male perspective. Dominique and my opinions were similar. We both liked the book, with slightly different interpretations and some things that worked more and less for each of us. However, we both felt that the movie’s first half was well done and true to the book. Amy Adams as The Mother did a fantastic job. However, the second half went off the rails. The plot took an entirely different direction, and it was annoying because the power of the novel was lost to a movie-of-the-week marital problems narrative. It felt pedestrian as compared to the novel. The book took risks, the movie really didn’t.
I suspect that our dissatisfaction with the movie’s second half may hinge on having read the book. Both of our spouses liked the movie, and the banality of the revised plot didn’t land badly for them. They also both felt that even though the book was from a female perspective, the difficulties of parenting felt relevant to them too, as fathers.
Overall, reading Nightbitch and then watching the screen adaptation was a fun bookish project, made better by interesting discussion about the book, and a movie night with all four of us. Highly recommended!
Great review Trish! Your perspective on who Nightbitch is and how she evolves, are so insightful. I really enjoyed the book, even as a vegetarian 🙂
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