I'm very late to the party, I know.
I read Nightbitch on the heels of my first and only child turning two, so one might say I am the "target" audience. Though I might be so bold as to suggest that every person ought to read this book, at the very least, to understand the level of derangement (and "the product" therein, in this case, this book) that can (and should) occur when a person casts aside who they used to be and adopts the persona of Mother. Yoder wrote this book in the throes, and it shows. I am very grateful she did.
The work attempts many things: A call to arms in the name of art, an examination of the modern-woman-who-can-and-should-do-all-the-things, a Coming of Rage, an exploration of the liminality of early motherhood, the utter ferality that stems from the (delightful!) synaptic pruning that occurs postpartum. Yoder interweaves these ideas into a narrative that, yes, grows increasingly absurd and eventually flies off its hinges and culminates in a very meta end-performance that, personally, left me slack-jawed in awe.
The tour de force aspect of Nightbitch, for me, really lies in the book's finale. The Mother, after months of confronting her inner dog, transmutes that feral, instinct-driven, societally-challenged Creature into Art. Specifically, into a performance piece that marries intent with experience and, in so doing, informs you, the Reader, about what you've just witnessed as you've progressed through the book.
A spectacle, primordial, perennial.
Did you walk away, confused or disgusted? Shake your fist in anger? Scoff at its surreality? Stare transfixed? Weep with recognition?
You can't rate a book like this. Yoder is hilarious, unorthodox, uncanny in her ability to convey nuanced details of social interaction cross-species.
Yes, the novel went places that made me uncomfortable. No, I didn't relate wholly to the experience of embodying a dog. But, but! We can all agree that a dog is an animal, right? And in that most basic of definitions, animal as living thing, I did wholly relate to Yoder's ideation of how primal the Mother-Child bond is, how terrifying the "regression" to Animalhood when you've spent the last however many decades cultivating a Self you were proud of and probably enjoyed.
The pages kept turning, turning, turning ("No, surely she's not going to...oh. my. god. She did, she absolutely savaged the family cat.") and I finished with an almighty exhale. In my body, that peculiar lightening occured that happens when Somebody sees You.
There's no non-dramatic way to put this: Nightbitch allowed me to recast my shame around "How much I'd changed," "How hard it was for me to function (as a modern woman should)," "How much more difficult of a go I'd had than other mothers appeared to," into something close enough to self-respect, pride in having allowed those unsavory bits of early motherhood to temper me (along with the natural beauty of bonding with your child) into something solid (sorry! I'm selfishly subverting this review for my own Hallelujah moment), something worthy of celebrating.
I would go so far as to suggest that the Performance and reactionary subtext to it is the moral of the story: Matrescence is deeply uncomfortable, to the point where whole societies, loved ones and even the Matrescent themselves would prefer to reject the Shadow Side when it comes to call, turn away in disgust at the nastier bits, and pretend that everything is perfectly fine, thank you very much and yes, of course, I love my baby with all of my heart, and that's all there is to it.
If it read like a fairy tale, a fever dream, I would surmise that was entirely Yoder's intention. The function of fairy tales is to allow us to transgress the boundaries of Time and Culture via the fantastic. To allegorize the primal instinct and violent urges of the Mother as Dog, the Book Babies Moms, the Jens and their MLM pyramid scheme as the modern Motherhood Matrix where Positivity and Empowerment are the only nodes worth squaring was sheer brilliance.
My cap's off. Endless gratitude to Rachel Yoder for channeling this work and allowing countless Mommies to feel all the feelings and integrate them however they see fit.
Link to the Goodreads review.
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