Nightbitch

Content Warning: This novel and review contain cursing.

In Rachel Yoder’s fabulist novel Nightbitch, a mother discovers she’s turning into a dog, and what should horrify her delights her. Because she is at odds with her new stay-at-home-mom lifestyle, she begins identifying as Nightbitch—a self-appointed moniker that captures her dog persona. Nightbitch’s canine self is freer than her maternal, human self, who feels caged by societal notions of demureness, femininity, and self-control. Yoder represents Nightbitch’s estrangement from herself via the third-person narration, but this narrator inhabits Nightbitch’s consciousness to present the narrative world according to Nightbitch’s sardonic, snappy, and often uproarious perspective.

Simultaneously playful and sob-worthy, Nightbitch exposes the alienation and messiness of motherhood. Yoder uses Nightbitch’s canine transformation to convey the inherent wildness, rage, and fierceness women carry inside them. While women have historically been culturally conditioned to quash their instincts, Nightbitch mauls convention to embody a rawer version of herself. As a dog, Nightbitch can tap into her creative impulses, love her son with animalistic purity, and delight in her body’s strength.

Yoder’s control of language, sharp wit, and inventive world make for a breathless read. Fast-paced yet introspective, Nightbitch is a crucial examination of motherhood and womanhood from a fresh new literary voice.

Shortly after the protagonist Nightbitch gives birth to her son, she quits her dream job at a gallery to have more time with her child. However, in liberating herself from the impossible businesswoman-cum-mother trap, Nightbitch only locks herself in another: life as a stay-at-home mom. No longer “well rested, well fed, well,” Nightbitch’s days are void of “creative impulse” or social connection (20, 23). She feels ungrounded from any reality outside the confines of her house, and keeping her son alive is the only way for Nightbitch to prove her livingness.

Everything changes for Nightbitch when one day, she discovers she’s growing fur. She’s soon convinced her teeth are getting pointier and a tail is emerging from her backside, too. When Nightbitch tells her husband she’s “turning into a dog” (3), he insists she needs psychological help. Conversely, her transformation intrigues her. It is, after all, the first interesting thing to happen to her in some time.

While balancing the drudgery of domestic life, Nightbitch gradually gives herself over to her canine life. At night, she romps around the neighborhood with a band of dogs. She chases squirrels at the park, attacks raccoons in the yard, and buys and devours heaps of raw meat. She howls, barks, and wrestles her son like the dog she’s convinced she’s become.

However, when Nightbitch’s dog pastimes begin to challenge others’ expectations of her as a domesticated suburban mother, she must decide who she wants to be and how to express her true self. With the help of her new friend, Jen, Nightbitch channels her wild instincts into a new artistic project. She and Jen translate Nightbitch’s life as Nightbitch into a performance piece—a project that ultimately lets her embrace her innate ferocity. 

Yoder’s surreal representation of motherhood doesn’t shy away from the grotesque. When Nightbitch discovers a “patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck” in Chapter 1, her life as a dog begins (3). With it, sensory and hormonal instincts drive her journey into a new lifestyle. Nightbitch’s persona is Yoder’s sharp, distilled metaphor for a woman’s ferocity—the beautiful, untamed part of herself she learns to keep secret in childhood because “that’s not becoming of a girl” (7).

As a dog, Nightbitch can say what she wants, eat what she wants, and strip off all her clothes to roll in the dirt at her leisure. She tears through life the way a housebound dog tears outside—delighting in the sheer thrill of being alive, experiencing the night air, and hunting after smells and sounds. The more comfortable Nightbitch feels embracing these sticky, luminous aspects of herself, the less trapped she feels by her stifling domestic reality.

Yoder combines elements of longing, wit, terror, magic, and mundanity to nuance Nightbitch’s simple story. On its surface, Nightbitch is about a mother stuck at home with her young son. Nothing really happens to disrupt her stale routine. She attends the library’s baby book club, takes trips to the grocery store, and gets invites to herbal groups by a group of sheared, shaved, and chic local mothers. Otherwise, Nightbitch spends her days feeding, entertaining, and begging her kid to sleep. The banal confines of Yoder’s narrative world force the reader to ask: What kind of life is this? It’s a question Nightbitch readily answers: No kind of life. Or rather, as put in Chapter 8, it’s a simulacrum of life “masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there” (49).

Yoder introduces phantasmagoric elements into Nightbitch’s monotonous life to charge the narrative atmosphere and reify the true “mountain of light” Nightbitch harbors inside of her (7). Whether Nightbitch really is half-woman, half-dog, Yoder leaves up to the reader. But what isn’t ambiguous about Nightbitch’s story is her relationship to her Nightbitch persona. Although initially ashamed of her new canine tendencies—as society forces any woman to feel for a voracious appetite or a hair on her chin—being Nightbitch allows her to unleash herself from the societal, marital, and maternal strictures that threaten to destroy her. Her story asks: What happens when a wolf is taken from her natural environs and shoved in a house to cook, clean, and reproduce?

For Nightbitch, liberation comes in the form of her art. Via her artistic rendering of her life as Nightbitch, Yoder underscores the entanglement of art and life. The project narratively argues that all women are mothers, all mothers are artists, and all artists must create beyond culturally imposed definitions of expression.

Just as a woman’s act of creation doesn’t end once she gives birth, her selfhood cannot die once she becomes a mother. To maintain her freedom and preserve her untamed womanness—represented throughout via Yoder’s deft allusions to fairy tales, mythic creatures, and historical trends of female institutionalization—a woman must go on creating from her innately feral spirit.

Because art, Yoder avers, is a woman’s salvation.

Art is a way to lay bare “the brutality of motherhood” in a violently beautiful form and exhibit womanhood as the “wash of great pain and blood and shit and piss” that it is (237). It’s a way to celebrate the fierce, wondrous, expansive possibilities of a woman’s body.

Nightbitch is thus every woman’s inner wolf—unadulterated, howling her longing and delights toward the moon.