Nightbitch - 18 May 2023 » 8pm EST

I want to turn into a dog.

Will you do it with me, turn your hairs

into fur?

It is powerful,

I am turning into Nightbitch.

Or have I been her all along?

No! she yelled, nicely.

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Next week, 18 May 2023 at 8pm EST we will meet for our 3rd Art Monsters reading group. Will you join us in person? online? If anyone has a loaded data plan we can tether to Zoom from a park. Because if you have read through the end of the book, is there a more apt place than a park to discuss Nightbitch?

Zoom link is always the same, and will be sent out in a private email.

We will discuss it alongside Australian feminist artist Bonita Ely’s Dogwoman Communicates with the Younger Generation (1982)

Nightbitch is agony and ecstasy on every page. It is cathartic, without Rachel Yoder asking us to do therapy for her. She pulls it off, because

“in my dream space, somehow I’ve bridged the divide, reconciled the irreconcilable image. I don’t have to choose one or the other, I choose both. I want ideas. I want children. I want stories, and I would also like a very delicious casserole. I may not get this in real life, but I can write it into being, and so I have.”

She describes this writing process at the end of a talk on her Nightbitch tour, and it explains the optimism that we are left with at the end of Nightbitch. She wrote the book as a dedication and a love letter to the women in her life.

I was definitely reading some motherhood or motherhood-adjacent books before and as I wrote Nightbitch—Jenny Offill (Dept. of Speculation), Rachel Zucker (Mothers), Sabrina Orah Mark (Wild Milk), Cherise Wolas (The Resurrection of Joan Ashby), Cusk (A Life’s Work), etcetera—but I never planned or wanted to write a motherhood book. If anything, I wanted not to write a motherhood book. But I do think that the literary climate of 2015-2019 in which many of these books were coming out made Nightbitch, when it emerged, feel like it was more possible because these other women had already opened the conversation. —Rachel Yoder from Reading Motherhood

In the book, like the other two books we read, Dept. of Speculation and Little Labours, the main character is left unnamed. In Nightbitch, the husband and the son are also unnamed. What does not naming a mother do? I remember when S— first started daycare, the educators and director, would refer to me and J as S— mama and S— papa, respectively. Not even in the possessive. We didn’t need names because we had our roles.

“I want to be an artist and a woman and a mother I mean a monster I want to be a monster” —(p. 135)

Nightbitch is struggling with her role as a mother and artist. For now, her son is “her only project” (p. 24). Is this something other parents do too? In 2015, I wrote about my first pregnancy as an art project. After having children, ambition becomes unrecognizable, but it doesn’t go away. In another interview, Yoder says what I have heard so many mother artists say, “that having a baby, something changed in me. I had a vision. I became enlightened on what my task and role is in the world.” Her character has this epiphany too when she realizes she needs to go through motherhood wholly; she needs to embody every banal and abject detail of it, she needs to channel all the mothers of the world and throughout history, for, what eventually becomes, her brilliant performance art show.

Art she works on feverishly in a makeshift studio, that “she must keep as her own, whatever small bits of it were left” (p. 75). Have you ever felt this desire if you have children? To have something secret of your own? Staying up later than you should only because it is a time when your body, thoughts and actions belong only to you? Figuring out how to need yourself again.

The role of the main character’s partner began like most. He was submissive, often not around, and aloof to the intensity of mothering a young child. Yet, unlike other books that situate the partner, (always a man), as out of it—unclear on his role or the dire straits of the mother—in a unexpected turn, Yoder doesn’t. Nightbitch just needed to ask for help. To suggest all non birthing partners are totally clueless, as many momfluencers want us to believe, is unfair. If we have no idea what we are doing, how can the partners, who, especially if we are breastfeeding, spend less time accruing experiential knowledge of the baby. So, Nightbitch asks, and her partner does it. He helps. And he helps with joy. He welcomes the things he probably didn’t know he was allowed access to. As Chelsea Conaboy argues in Mother Brain: Separating Myth from Biology – the Science of the Parental Brain, parental instincts aren’t innate, and don’t magically come to us, especially if we have no role models or Wanda White* to lead the way.

Nightbitch is feral, wild, and has the every-mom postpartum 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” (p. 29). How freeing to let go of everything and run around at night, without caring to keep it together lest any onlookers judge you as an unfit parent. To get as dirty as your child, to scream, to yell, not just in a car or enclosed space, but in the wild, outside, out in the world. There’s also the time Nightbitch goes out with her art school friends and loses it at the end yelling “I could crush a walnut with my vagina”, in a scene reminiscent of the end of Tati’s Playtime (1967). Evita and I were wishing we could have done this on multiple occasions, and are grateful that Nightbitch does it for us.

Nightbitch is not angry, she has post-partum rage. A rage so real and so impossible to channel in our contemporary world, but at least acknowledged in a way that previous generations of mothers had no language for, no ability to understand beyond being diminished and derided as “hysterical women.” The line between functioning in the world and being completely undone is a miracle of a balancing act for new mothers. We do it because we have to, because we want to. We love our children, we want to make worlds for them, even if that means letting them sleep in dog cages and playing fetch in the park. We don’t want to run out of time.

In our first meet, a few of us remarked how this rage changed the relationships with our pets after the birth of our first children.

Sex also changes.

The end was so beautifully optimistic of what is possible as a parent, in spite of all—“a place which a person finally arrives.”

I cannot wait to discuss this with you.

xx

Magda