2nd Meet Round Up & Book 3

We chose Nightbitch for Book Club Session #3

Five of us met on Zoom last Thursday—me, Anabela, Claudia, Evita, and Emilie, who had given birth a few days prior to our first meet and joined us, and has a 5 week old now! Several others hoped to be there but had prior engagements, or were too sick to join. Although there were less of us, we managed to stay up over two hours until we finally said /end. Yes, I also Zoomed from my bathroom, again. We began discussing Jenny Offill’s —funny and scheming—children’s books and how Anabela’s son, L, loves them.

We went back and forth on Offill’s refined voice yet, at times, difficult to follow narrative. Reading it with people helped clarify the sequential leaps and paragraph based storytelling. We appreciated Offill’s refrain from cliches despite, as Claudia reminded us, it a story built on tropes (white artist becomes a mother, has trouble with career, husband cheats on her with younger woman, they stay together and move out into the country). Offill eschews a grand narrative and proposes how despite fuck-up’s relationships can make it work, and even make each partner a more realized person. At least, in this story, the self-loathing narrator leaves us with a new found optimism.

How do we make sense of our relationship after a baby joins the dynamic with needs that require an agility we have to train in real time to amass?

Alison Chen’s video piece brought us into a conversation about postpartum breasts and bodies and how our partner’s perceive them as sexual bodies and how for us they have expanded to also be maternal bodies, feeding bodies, climbing bodies, tired bodies.

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I cannot wait to see all of you again, 8pm EST on 4 May 2023. If you were unable to make it, I hope you can next time.

We are going to read the monstrous and hilarious Nightbitch (2021) by Rachel Yoder (256 pgs.) and the art work is TBD, and sent in by one of you! So please share something that would fit the vibe.

An excerpt from Nightbitch.

THE NEXT MORNING, SHE did what any reasonable person would do and went to the library. Never mind that she had not showered since the weekend, and it was now midweek, her hair an inexplicable blend of oily roots too thick even to run her fingers through and ragged, wavy ends curled like dry grass and rustling about her face in a frizz of autumnal" foliage. Add to that the dark circles beneath her eyes, which resisted every form of concealer, and which she now explained as genetic, though neither her father nor her mother had this same feature; it had the unfortunate effect of making the mother look as though she had been punched hard in both eyes, or else had leukemia.

She had (unsurprisingly) not slept well the night before, kept awake by her worry—A tail!? Really???—and so simply had to go to the library and get some books to quell her incessant theorizing and diagnoses. The Internet was truly a horrid place, wasn’t it, what with its endless information, infinite search terms, images and videos and articles, databases, discussion boards, quizzes to see whether or not you did in fact have leukemia. The mother had not known prior to the night before that the search phrase looks like I was punched hard in both eyes would produce not only a list of seven common eye injuries but also endless scholarship on traumatic brain injury, concussions, and chronic headaches.

Rachel Yoder: On art as exorcism, a midlife renaissance, and lack of community

Above is a link to an insightful interview with Yoder. She didn’t write for two years after her son was born. When she finally did, the luxury of time wasn’t taken for granted. When she says she needed to leave the house so she couldn’t fold laundry, I felt a shame of relatability. It is too easy to feel “accomplished” by checking off a house task. And while it has to get done, yes, it also procrastination. When there is so much to do for your creative ambitions, how and where do you begin?

Please share any titles for upcoming sessions, as well.

Nightbitch (2022) by Rachel Yoder (256 pgs.)

While wild it is a more straightforward novel, than Offill and Galchen.

This is being turned into a movie directed by Marielle Heller.

“An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.

As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret.”