MOFITA Book Report: Nightbitch

Well, I quit.

Oh my god why didn’t any of you tell me how good this book is? Of course, everyone DID tell me how good this book was, like how everyone tells you how hard it is to have a baby. I heard the message so many times I stopped hearing it. So now it’s finally my turn to be the one who has read Nightbitch and I can’t help but run around all stunned, asking everyone if they have heard about how Nightbitch is incredible. I am here, all freshly wide-eyed like, Why isn’t everyone talking about this?

Lots of people did talk about this book when it came out in 2021. But, I wonder, did they talk about it enough? A quick scan through reviews tells me no, not enough. I get that it’s being made into a big deal movie and that’s fine (though I have mixed feelings now because I love the book so much and I am scared they’re going to ruin it) but I just don’t know if we talked about how alive and true and fresh and necessary this book is enough.

Have you read it? I finished it and genuinely felt that this whole writing-about-motherhood thing I’ve been doing for about 6 years is complete. Not in a sad way. Rachel Yoder already did it so perfectly, I feel free to kick my feet up. This book expresses so completely what motherhood feels like to me — the extremes, the physicality, marriage and babies and love and longing — I don’t have to try to articulate it anymore. I might stop talking and writing for a while and just walk around holding Nightbitch like a lightbulb over my head hoping someone will come up to me and talk about it. Feeling blue? Lay on the ground with Nightbitch on your face and maybe nap for a while and let it seep in through osmosis.

I lay around like this sometimes when I need inspiration. Give it a go! Can’t hurt.

The book breathes. It howls, it spooked me and rattled me and saw right through all of my bullshit.

If you haven’t read it yet, I don’t care what time it is put the kids to bed immediately, put your phone on Do Not Disturb, and pick it up. You can borrow my copy if you live in Portland, don’t mind lots of scribbling in the margins and swear you’ll give it back.

If you have read it, let’s talk. Let’s talk about the husband! Let’s talk about Wanda White, about the cat and definitely about Jen. Let’s talk about pages 196 - 197 of the hardback version: 

I’m interested in knowing about the longing that unites all women, all mothers. What is that longing?…. It’s almost as if having a child allows a woman to see how much infinite potential there is, allows her to see infinity itself. It’s almost as if having a child does not sate a deep yearning but instead compounds it. Look, the mother says, look at what I am capable of. I make life. I am life. But how can I become a god?

This wildness, animal-esque thing that so many of us tap into in motherhood is so tricky to write and talk about. I have been trying and failing for a while. It came up when I wrote about motherhood and psychedelics and why (I think) a lot of mothers are drawn to them, why they can sometimes be particularly healing for mothers. It came up a lot in talking and writing about Matrescence. I loved loved loved how the book pushed crazy hard on this visceral wildness. So much of what it’s trying to say and do would be messy in other hands, and it makes so much sense to me that Rachel Yoder founded a journal devoted to the process of drafting. A story so inherently chaotic told so tightly, so tidily must surely have been drafted and drafted and refined and refined by a person devoted to drafting and refining.

Looking through what other people had to say about the book when it came out, a lot of reviews seem a little tame, to me, considering how this book shook me. This New York Times blurb of it, for example is offensively bland. Thankfully, Hillary Kelly’s New Yorker review crushes it, and does the book a precise and satisfying justice:

Women in fiction have worried for centuries that they’re morphing into beasts beyond their control, but Nightbitch is jubilant. “She loved her body, loved being a body, and loved the boy, another body she had made.” As I read, I kept thinking of the unbelievable promises of orgasmic birth, that pleasure might writhe free of pain....And, oh, what divinity exists in a novel that escapes the confines of the yellow wallpaper! The obligation to play with one’s child—the biggest zit on the nose of parenthood—goes from begrudging and exhausting to romping and roaring. Nightbitch and her son fetch sticks and lap each other’s hair and wrestle on all fours. You can feel Yoder breaking loose, too, like she’s just self-injected a serum mixed with her protagonist’s blood.

What else is there? Read it, it’s great. Borrow mine. If you’ve read it, why didn’t you tell me how good it is???? Anyway text me let’s talk about it. What I’m thinking about lately is, now that we’ve read it, what should we do next? Now that we know, what now?