3rd Meet Roundup & 4th Meet Book Selection

Sorry to be late with this one.

Thank you to our book club members Florencia, Anabela, Emilie, Dani, Claudia, and two new faces, Dan and Katrina. Thank you to Meaghan for hosting me and Evita in her studio, especially after my car was hit by a reckless driver.

Thank you for coming and taking time to pay attention to Rachel Yoder, Bonita Ely, and each other.

It’s taken me a while to write this round up and if I forgot something you want to archive, please post below. Every time I have began, it (I!) gets too intense, too intimate, too self absorbed into the experiences that mirror or at least are analogous to Nightbitch. I even call myself Nightbitch now. Do you? The narrator took it on so willingly.

You were kind of…He paused, thinking, then continued: …a bitch last night.

He chuckled to show it wasn’t meant meanly, just as observation.

Night bitch, she said, without pause. I am Nightbitch.

They both laughed then, because what else were they supposed to do?

It’s such a powerful persona—to be feral and free, rummage in backyards and parks, kill birds and small rodents, and come home with dirt and cuts on your unshaven legs is an apt antidote to the attentive gentle caring of a young life that needs you in the most totalizing way you may ever be needed.

Our meeting was more open and vulnerable, with a lot of discussion of our experience directly linked to the experiences and perceptions of Nightbitch’s protagonist, an unnamed mother and unreliable narrator dealing with post-partum depression, alienation, loneliness, and the general what-the-fuck of first time parenthood. Nightbitch induces its reader into that state. As such, Florencia wasn’t sure she wanted to go into that experience again, as she was still living parts of it despite her son being 6. Evita remarked that no other book has so accurately described the desperation, patheticness and humour of her motherhood experience. I agree. Maybe some of us will forever live it? Claudia and Emilie weren’t sure, especially in how the aloof husband was represented.

We agreed that the situation of their marriage, Nightbitch staying at home and not just “fucking send[ing] him to daycare!” as Claudia exclaimed, is a product of the US-based focus of the book. Being in Canada, we cannot imagine the way childcare and lack of a proper maternity leave would make us act. I think all the parents in the group have or have had children daycare and cannot imagine life without it. Meaghan and Evita agreed that their friends in the USA have different experiences preciesely because of the lack of support systems for parents, especially mothers. And the lack of support is mainly financial. When daycare costs more or as much as a parent working, it doesn’t make sense to send them off when they can be in the comfort of a dog cage that helps them sleep at home. I’m not being fascetious. It is beautiful how Nightbitch and her son made this world for themselves and she scaffolded play without reservation for each of them.

We spoke a lot about the elaborate details of the banal every day, the long stretches of boredom and unrestrained force Nightbitch’s son has turns those experiences into magic. That is, how can we re-frame those early days? What does that do?

We discussed her projecting onto Wanda White and the Jen’s, even on her husband and her child. But then she furnishes a room of her own and re-directs her projections into an intimate score—an abject critically acclaimed performance, in which the audience leaves unsure if they were drugged, or if any of it really happened. A nod to the unreliability of Nightbitch’s narration throughout. Perhaps a commentary on the haze and magic and impossibility that arises from the extreme sleep deprivation of new parenthood.

The group honed in on how the story was in some ways impossible unbelievable but also plausible, in the sense that parenthood, when discussing it outside of the in situ context seems unbelievable; reads as unbelievable, because it is so wild and crazy and demanding. But we’re all making the magic happen, somehow.

By the time we got to the art work, Bonita Ely’s Dogwoman Communicates with the Younger Generation (1982), it was late, so we decided to start with the art work for the next meeting. In the piece, Ely performs a dog woman while visbily pregnant with her child. The visibility is highlighted with the screen strapped to her belly and then projected for the audience to see. She is on display, her body is on display, her pregnancy is on display, and the connection to other species is on display—a kind of making oddkin. Donna Haraway’s (2016) feminist framework that I argue¹ is a reframing of anthropocentric and nuclear family structures. Making oddkin signals that we, human and non-human entities ‘require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.’”² Considering this was in Australia in the early 1980s, it is incredibly risky; Ely describes its risk. Other than a few artists, Mary Kelly, Alice Neel, etc., motherhood was yet to be so celebrated in its myriad ways, and even then, it was not of import in performance art.

We were all curious how the film adaptation will be like, and Claudia mused it will probably be horror. Dani messaged me later that, yes, it will be a horror comedy. I am not sure about this, are you? I don’t know enough about the horror genre, other than it gets a lot of academic film studies focus, to really comment.

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There have been a few suggestions for books:

The Honeyman Festival (1970) by Marian Engel (184 pgs.)

Claudia really wants us to read this one, and it’s a different time period as well.

“First published in 1970, The Honeyman Festival chronicles one night in the life of Minn Burge, a woman in her mid-thirties who is torn between affection for her family and the need for a life in which impulse and intelligence can once again find play. Pregnant with her fourth child, and unable to take refuge in facile resolutions, Minn interrogates her life with a razor-edge passion in which many readers will find they too are involved.”

Sorrowland (2021) by Rivers Solomon (368 pgs.)

Roxanne Gay gave this science fiction novel 5 stars on Goodreads and it’s won a bunch of awards. Its premise is unlike any book of this genre I have read.

“Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.
To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.”

This Accident of Being Lost: Songs and Stories (2017) by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (152 pgs.)

Dan suggested this one, and while it’s not specifically about parent/child relations it has some great parenting stories within it.

“A knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization.

A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting “ARE THEY GETTING IT?”; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.”

Self-Portrait with Boy (2018) by Rachel Lyon (376 pgs.)

It is in a style similar to Rachel Kushner's, The Flamethrowers. The undergirding questions about art and motherhood/mothering may seem too similar to what we have read, but this takes it from another angle. It has also won a bunch of awards.

“Rachel Lyon’s fascinating first novel, is about a photograph, the artist’s intent, and her choice, but in an unexpected and compelling way. A photographer just out of art school sets up an automatic shutter to take a self-portrait and accidentally captures the image of a young boy falling to his death out the window behind her. She has unintentionally created a terrifying and arresting work of art. Her self-portrait on its own would not be as interesting, but with the addition of the falling body it becomes something great. Is it art? She wants it to be. The question is: What will she choose to do with the devastating image?”

“Lu recognizes that the photograph is a career-maker. It's also voyeuristic, obscene. In the course of the next few weeks, she becomes genuinely close with the boy's grieving mother; she also meets a prominent gallery owner through the boy's artist father.”

The Leavers (2018) by Lisa Ko (368 pgs.)

“One morning, Deming Guo's mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon--and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. Told from the perspective of both Daniel--as he grows into a directionless young man--and Polly, Ko's novel gives us one of fiction's most singular mothers. Loving and selfish, determined and frightened, Polly is forced to make one heartwrenching choice after another.

Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It's a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.”

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Let us know by 1 June so we can have a month to read it. Please share any titles and artworks for upcoming sessions, as well.

Our next meeting is tentatively scheduled for June 26, 27 or 28 at 8PM. Does that work for people? If it’s not enough time, it could be first week of July, but I also know people go away for vacation?

Comment on what day works best with the choice of book!

Thanks for your patience,

Magda

1. Magdalena Olszanowski, “Antidotes for a Liveable Future, esse arts+letters 109, 2023.

2. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.