The Most Emotionally Resonant Book I’ve Read This Year is About a Woman Who Thinks She’s Turning Into a Dog
A (perhaps) too personal, non-exhaustive review of Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
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Rarely has a book been this much of an easy sell for me.
I became aware of Nightbitch less than two weeks ago after making a playlist of YouTube videos to serve as background noise for whatever menial task I had at hand. It might have been the chore of sorting through the mountain-load of debris I call notes or mopping the constant travesty that is my living room or simply playing Candy Crush, an activity I refuse to deem a distraction since I probably put more effort into winning Episode Races than Olympians do into going for gold.
One of the videos was ‘10 INSANE Movies You Won’t Believe Are Getting Made’ by WhatCulture, a channel I’ll defend to the death against accusations of being a content farm because sometimes the only thing between me and walking into traffic are the life-affirming end messages by Jules, one of its many charismatic presenters. Anyway…
Nestled between mentions of Kung-Fury 2, whose original still awaits my viewing an entire decade after that RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME trailer went viral way back when, and El Conde, a satirical black comedy-horror depicting Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire seeking death, was Nightbitch – an upcoming Amy Adams vehicle set to release on Hulu. Instantly, I had to read the source material!
The mother-as-monster (or woman-as-monster) trope is far from a novelty but as someone who is 73-89% sure that I’m already dead and what I now experience as my life is actually a faux reality made of absurd fever dreams conjured by my expiring mind as it succumbs to my untimely passing, the demented notion of a woman thinking she’s turning into a literal dog spoke to me long before the author’s words did.
Sure enough, it only took the first few pages of Nightbitch for the protagonist’s state of mind to feel uncomfortably familiar to my own, admittedly milder, um…shall we say, alternative sanity.
Warning: Minor spoilers for Nightbitch ahead!
The novel opens with the main character, a 37-year-old mother of a 2-year-old, referring to herself as Nightbitch. It’s just a joke but this “good-natured”, “self-deprecating” moniker may as well have been a prophecy or the calling of a curse because shortly thereafter, the mother finds a patch of coarse black hair sprouting on her neck. And so begins this ferocious, deliciously bizarre, psychological horror-comedy.
Within the first few paragraphs she tells her husband, whom we see characterised as a rational solution-driven engineer with little regard for the fanciful, and he laughs, disappointing the mother who had hoped he’d “ask for clarification.”
Now, empathetic though I may be to the experience of facing ridicule when having voiced potentially deranged claims (since this is an occurrence true and common to my personal life), it is objectively insane for someone to think they’re turning into a dog.
Beyond the Whatculture video, I went into this blind and so, having not looked at any reviews or discussions about it, I continued to read Nightbitch with the belief that it fell within the genre of realistic contemporary fiction and the mindset that the mother was absolutely and very obviously going crazy.
Beautifully, Yoder’s tale, which I realised during my reading falls within that speculative world of literature where magic realism and fantasy make story babies, deftly challenged my preconceived notions as assuredly as it confirmed them.
The question of whether or not the mother’s dog-ification is true or imagined hangs throughout this feral novel, not only because it’s told by an untrustworthy third person narrator who is a projection of Nighbitch’s limited perspective, but because crazy people aren’t supposed to know they’re descending into madness. Or are they?
Nightbitch is a character fully aware of the visceral oddity of thinking she’s turning into a dog, how strangely juxtaposed this perhaps real, perhaps not metamorphosis is to normalcy and how it is too far removed from what should be typical that she couldn’t possibly share her supposed canine turn with another person and still passably feign being sound of mind.
Indeed, a reader can’t help but wonder if the changes Nightbitch experiences – e.g. further instances of scruffy hair appearing where it shouldn’t, sharp teeth that previously weren’t as pointed, increasingly wild and violent impulses, a craving for raw meat, and more – are evidence of a dog-sformation or the disconcerting delusions of a woman who spends too much time alone, if you don’t count the son she cares for as a defacto single mother. Her husband, who takes long absences away from their home due to the nature of his work, certainly fuels the reader’s suspicions this is a story about a woman going nut nut with his casual, often condescending dismissals – for instance, designating the tail Nightbitch believes has emerged on the base of her spine as merely a cyst.
Though questioning Nightbitch’s sanity is part of the fun in this thrill-ride of a book, Yoder’s gift is utilising the WTF-ness of her story’s premise to explore the actual and well-documented terror that is present-day motherhood (or, at the very least, the white, American suburban version of it) – something she meditates on in a number of intriguing ways that I don’t think would be charitable to call exquisitely bold and provocative.
The most piercing commentary, to my mind, is Yoder’s deliberation on the identity of not just Nightbitch but all mothers. Motherhood, after all, is a phantom for all womb-kind. Whether we do it, whether we can (physically or otherwise), whether we even want to do it…motherhood is something we are either awaiting or rejecting.
In concert with what use we are to men at large or the ones in our immediacy, our existence as adult women is so invariably tied to whether or not we have fallen into motherhood – a condition or lack by which the world assigns us an identity and that, we too, formulate and evaluate other facets of who we are.
And if motherhood arrives, be it by choice or coercion or cruel force, it becomes the primary lens by which women with children are defined and by which they frequently define and torture themselves:
‘Am I doing it badly?’ ‘Am I doing it the way the world says I should?’ ‘Am I ruining this child through the way I’m raising it?’ ‘Is this all I am?’
Regarding the latter of these neuroses, the never-named protagonist perfectly encapsulates the sort of mother who’d ask such a thing.
Previously an art curator and artist, things given up with pragmatic reasoning and intention in order to be a stay-at home mother, we meet Nightbitch as a woman who, in addition to having to contend with her doggening, is thoroughly depleted by child-rearing and the vacuum left by the former selves she no longer is, despite her efforts. But alas, Nightbitch refuses to let go of both her new howling identity nor the previous creative one(s).
Nightbitch’s defeat by the yes of this subtextual concern (of whether a mother is all she is) and her rebellion to such a conclusion informs much of the macabre, can’t-look-away, tragi-comic and frequently cringe nature of Yoder’s narrative in which we follow the increasingly not-normal escapades of a woman desperately caged by her state of motherhood yet set free by it’s gruelling, impossible demands.
It’s a tale that harkens back to past feminist-lit about female lunacy such as the seminal The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, the former of which is explicitly referenced in a hilarious scene in which Nightbitch, after discovering her alleged tail (LMFAO!), goes online and searches for “pictures of canines” to compare her own to. She also googles “humans with dog teeth”, “do humans and dogs share a common ancestor”, “werewolves” and “real werewolves in history” amongst other funny-haha search prompts. Then she looks up The Yellow Wallpaper, rereads it and afterward stares “blankly for a while at nothing in particular while sitting on the toilet.”
Yoder’s novel is more than just a Yellow Wallpaper for the (perchance) disturbed bitch of our times, of course, and I’m sure I’ll share more of my favourite aspects of it through my substack notes but fearing that I risk losing your attention, after all these words, I must unfortunately take leave with a summation of why I found Nightbitch, book and character, so stirring:
Though I am childless, and plan to stay this way until my death (if it hasn’t already happened, that is), I can’t help but relate to a woman who, in her mostly solitary state, finds madness…doubts it, questions it, fears it, becomes unmoored by it and then, possibly (okay fine, almost definitely) against her better judgement…leans into it as a truth glossed over by most others.
So seen have I felt by this book that close friends and I have taken to calling my alternatively sane antics and curious courses of action as nightbitching.
TLDR: Nightbitch is a lurid and dizzying contemplation of the savagery we call modern motherhood and, for this reader at least, the incongruous instability and serenity of being a woman who is mad and perfectly aware of it.
