Loneliness, Identity Loss & Overwhelming Joy: How Nightbitch Captures The Reality Of Motherhood 

‘I am afraid I will never be smart or happy or thin again. I am afraid I might be turning into a dog.’ As a mother of a two-year-old, I found much to relate to in Rachel Yoder’s best-selling novel Nightbitch, first published in 2019 and now adapted into a new film starring Amy Adams. Nightbitch is the story of a woman who, yes, starts to transform into a dog while at home looking after her toddler son. Despite some initial concern, she soon relishes the opportunity to be free from the chokehold of domesticity and early motherhood. Think Teen Wolf meets Rachel Cusk’s seminal A Life’s Work.

Laced with humour, Nitghbitch is a work of gothic fantasy fiction, yet – canine metamorphosis aside – the story feels chillingly real. That’s because it was born from Yoder’s own experiences. ‘Nightbitch’ was a nickname she jokingly coined for herself during those difficult first years, and much as a dog takes over the protagonist’s body in the film (a character only ever referred to as ‘the mother’ or ‘Nightbitch’), the writing took over Yoder. “I thought I was going to write a collection of personal essays,” she tells me. “But, man, the voice that came out, she was angry. She had a lot of questions. She was incredibly confrontational. I thought, ‘Wow, who’s this?’” 

Yoder was also keen to push the boundaries creatively. “The book is about imaginative play, imaginative freedom and what we can create out of our playfulness and animalness.”

The space where fantasy and reality rub shoulders is what makes Nightbitch such an addictive read. As anyone who has had a baby knows, on certain days the relentless mundanity can tip over into a hallucinogenic fever dream where it’s easy to question your own sanity. The sense of destabilisation – that, at any moment, life might spill into something more chaotic, more broken or more feral – pervades the book. But for Yoder, as it is for the mother, this can be quite empowering: “[As a new mother] I felt very much a victim of circumstance... this voice was really in touch with her power, really in touch with her rage.”

The rage is real. Just this week, I heard my own partner say to my son, “Why is mummy always so angry at the moment’?” And what new parent wouldn’t like to run off into the night and howl at the moon, free of expectation? “I am now a person I never imagined I would be,’ says the mother in the book after bumping into an old colleague. ‘I am stuck inside a prison of my own creation.’

Alongside the internal conflict of new parenthood, Yoder explores the problems presented by going out into the world again. I was struck by the isolation that the mother feels around other mums – again, something that felt familiar to my own experience. When the mother encounters them at a baby class in her local library, she is repelled: ‘She didn’t make eye contact, instead looked at her phone and felt slightly superior for not caring about leggings and essential oils.’

I ask Yoder why, at one of the loneliest times in our lives, we’re so hostile towards other women who are in the same boat as us. “We have these ideas that looking after children full-time isn’t that important or interesting,” she says. “Then, when you become one of those women, there’s cognitive dissonance; it’s like, ‘Wait a second, how do I now navigate this?’”

In the book, the mother, once an artist, has given up work to be at home with her son – as Yoder did. The torment of needing to be both with her son and her work is unrelenting and without resolution: another prison of her own making. The wish to dull the very part of you that makes you, you was not unfamiliar to me: ‘Nightbitch desperately yearned for her son’s delirious cackling and pudgy little wrists and garbled, lipsy words of love to obliterate every last smidge of ambition.’  

The women in the library come to signify all the mother has lost: a path she’d vow she’d never take; a ‘type’ of woman she believed she’d never be. These were all thoughts swimming in Yoder’s head, too. “I had a lot of ideas about what becoming a mother made me, and if I decided not to work, what that meant about my intelligence and my worth within society. I was confronting all those ideas I had about myself when I came into community with other mothers.”

The book is a maze of the complex emotions motherhood evokes: the tedium, the identity loss, the relentless repetition, the strange passing of time, the real and perceived judgement of others, the sense of self-worth attached to careers put on hold and all the ways this tests the dynamic of a relationship. But it is, I think, chiefly about enduring the most intense experience of your life and feeling utterly alone while doing it, even from the person you’re sharing a bed with every night.

For Yoder, this is where it all started. Initially, she thought this was a book “to and for her husband” because she felt so “alone and misunderstood... Actually, it’s become a book written to and for other mothers to say, ‘I see you.’ I needed my experience to show up somewhere because it felt so unseen and unwitnessed. And so, I did that for myself. I’m going to bear witness and I’m going to write it into existence and give it a voice. That felt like really vital work for me.”

Yoder says it’s now surreal to see her life on the big screen and describes moments on set with her family that brought her right back to the intensity of her own Nightbitch era. Now, her son is 10 and the challenges are different. At the start of our call, I mention that that book felt it was meant for me, as I’d had trouble organising this interview with her alongside juggling childcare after a sleepless night and my partner away working. She closes her eyes as if for a minute she’s right there again, “I completely understand,” she says. “I feel it through the computer.”

Nightbitch, starring Amy Adams, is in cinemas from 6 December. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder is available here