Rachel Yoder

In this blazingly smart and voracious debut, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog.

One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...

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. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, 'A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography', and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem.

An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, 'Nightbitch' will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.

A Novel

Nightbitch

Finn Salter

I want to run and run and run into the cornfields all the way to a stream and then follow it to the ocean-I'm sorry, but I'm not coming back-and I want to have very, very passionate sex with a stranger and I want to sit on a fully decorated cake without underwear and I want to perform a large anonymous act of extreme vandalism and I want to be an artist and a woman and a mother I mean a monster I want to be a monster

Izzy Burgess

You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and rend 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.

Clara Gauthier

I made you, and I destroy you as well. I am your entire world, and then, also, I am the person you leave behind. I will always be with you. You will never understand me. 

High Fidelity

Yes, indeed, she was a good mother, one of the very best.

A testament to her goodness: that preternatural ability to wake and wake and wake again, night after night, ever since the day the boy was born. Her husband—bless his heart—had never done well with sleep deprivation, yet she, surprisingly, had taken to it as if she hadn’t been a lifelong oversleeper, as if waking at all hours of the night and getting up at 5:30 a.m. was something she was somehow genetically programmed for.

Georgie Wishart

Sunday morning, she rushed from bed to the bathroom, for she felt the impending blood-fall waiting inside her, a deluge that gushed into the toilet when she sat down and provided her great relief, while at the same time, inspiring a wave of ultimate exhaustion, an unwieldy project she must now attend for the next week.

hessensitive

The magic-hour light cast everything in melancholic tones-the gelatinous bits of noodles left on the boy's plastic plate, the vagrant peas beneath his high chair, the clutter of wavward puppets and matchbox cars strewn across counters & bedside the cat-food dish. In such moments, she could almost touch her loneliness, as if it were her second child. 

Only a little way into this novel, Yoder presents a stark contrast between the past and the present; between self without baby and self with baby. I feel the overwhelming sense that our protagonist is aware of this contrast and may even actively choose to separate her existence in this way. Perhaps this is a depiction of how she copes with guilt or frustration, or both, as a mother. Perhaps it is a reflection of the boxes that she feels she has stepped into with who she is at the time, or, perhaps, it is a reflection of the boxes that society as a whole pushes her into. Perhaps it is both.

Lily Cooper

‘Yet now there was nothing. Not a single creative impulse inside her, no matter how she searched’.

james cao

He was her only project. She had done the ultimate job of creation, and now she had nothing left. To keep him alive-that was the only artistic gesture she could muster.

Actually, honestly, she allowed herself only one good wag a day. Other than that, it was off limits. Who knew what else would develop if she gave in to these urges? Who knew what would transpire if she fully embraced her desires to wag, to lovingly lick the fine hairs of her son's head, to trample down a nice flat area in the bedsheets before herself curling there— chin resting on her forearms— and falling asleep?

To what identities do women turn when those available to them fail? How do women expand their identities to encompass all parts of their beings? How might women turn to the natural world to express their deepest longings and most primal fantasies?

Nightbitch quotes

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