A Closer Look at the Novel Nightbitch

Nightbitch (Rachel Yoder, 2021) is a married woman and mother to a toddler. Her husband works out of town and is gone most of the week, and she gave up her work in the arts to be home with her son. The novel is told in the third person, almost like folklore: a mother who transforms into a dog.

It sounds crazy but it works brilliantly. I’ve read a lot about how everything changes for a person after they have a baby, and this is of course a play on that. Nightbitch misses her old non-mother life, but also adores her son and her life with him. It’s complicated. Tufts of fur and sharpened teeth raise questions for her, but are easily dismissed along with all the other strange things that happen to bodies that have created new life.

After these few signs emerge, Nightbitch actually transforms into a dog, hunts throughout the night, and bonds with her son in a way she hadn’t before. She tries harder to join the mom-brigade in town and embrace her new identity as a mother.

Nightbitch desperately yearned for such a thing, for her son’s delirious cackling and pudgy little wrists and garbled, lispy words of love to obliterate every last smidge of ambition. Why couldn’t mothering and cooking and grocery shopping and cleaning and laundry and Book Babies really fill her with glee and well-being and a sense of a life well lived?
p. 123

I deliberately didn’t read much about this book because I didn’t want others’ takes to color my own. For me, this book is about how we expect mothers to become one-dimensional, instinctual creatures because they’ve had a child. Nightbitch follows instinct, just as we expect women to harbor this mysterious “maternal instinct” above all other ambition. In the novel, Nightbitch seems to struggle with her desire to be a wonderful mother to her son, but maintain her other interests. She wants to find a balance between herself as an individual and herself as a mother.

You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. you keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration.
p. 7

While the book is full of brilliant feminist takes on how and why women are more often the ones to give up work outside the home to raise their children and the unfair circumstances all women face, I did think the narrative lagged a bit in second third of the book. Nightbitch swings back and forth between embracing her new identity and not, and for a short, pacey novel it seemed an unnecessary detraction.

This review originally appeared on my book blog at monicacardenas.com.