Rachel Yoder: Author of "Nightbitch" Discusses Anger, Expectations About Mothers and Dreaming on the Page
Perhaps one of the buzziest books of 2021 (for me anyway. The moment I saw this delicious red cover, I needed to have it) Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch follows an artist turned stay-at-home mom as she is convinced she is turning into a dog. This satirical fairy tale is not only funny, it delivers honest and raw truths about the way women who are mothers are perceived and what is expected of them in our society. Its about power and anger and womanhood, and yes, turning into an animal. Rachel’s wild debut should already be on your bookshelf.
I spoke with Rachel via email where we discussed anger, the expectations of motherhood, writing the weird and dreaming on the page.
Okay first of all, let’s talk about writing the weird. Was there ever a moment where you thought the premise was too strange or absurd or that the idea wouldn’t work in a novel form? What draws you, as a writer, to the weird?
I never worried the book was too strange, because I wasn’t writing it for anyone other than myself during the drafting, and it was perfectly what I wanted to write, so I was resolved. I did however worry whether the conceit could sustain a novel-length project. You can only play out the dog thing for so long before it loses its novelty and appeal. When I got to the end of the first section of the book, about 50 manuscript pages or so, I had an “oh shit” moment because the story felt complete. It had an arc. It arrived somewhere. But then I saw that I had merely arrived at the threshold of adventure. Now it was time for Nightbitch to go on a journey, and I guess you could say this frame propelled me into the rest of the story.
This book is not nearly as weird to me as it seems to be to other people, I think because I feel the images and characters and metaphors are driving toward something Correct and True. So in this way, the book can be viewed at least in my mind as entirely ordinary. You can get to correct any number of ways, and I suppose I am trying to get there the most interesting and entertaining way I can. Maybe that’s why I veer toward what other people consider weird. I want to give readers’ brains something they’ve never encountered before so that they pay attention and perhaps even ask why is she doing it this way.
I love how vulgar and messy this story is. Why do you think as a society we have such wild expectations for women who are mothers? It seems as though once a woman has a baby, her personhood is reduced to just mother and everyone expects something of her, something different than before a baby. Why was this something you wanted to explore through fiction?
We have these unrealistic and backwards expectations about mothers because they are embedded in so many of our most treasured and oft-repeated stories, from the Virgin Birth to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and then their messages are embodied and performed via any number of women in our lives, beginning with our own mothers. Once you start looking, you’ll see them absolutely everywhere. It’s terrifying.
Exploring these message through story seems then an obvious move, since this is the mode by which we first received them. Why are there not an abundance of stories about the vulgarity and mess of motherhood? You’re constantly touching and talking about poop and pee! You are figuring out ways to clear your infant’s sinuses of a mess of snot! And then there is your own destroyed body to contend with and all the messiness of separated abdominal muscles, any number of prolapsed orifices, decimated perinea, the list goes on and on. These are the absolute embodied truths of motherhood. There is nothing tidy about it. So you have to ask why aren’t these vulgar, messy, true stories being told? Who does it serve to not speak these truths? And who or what is being protected by accepting and repeating counterfeit stories?
What was something you held onto about the story that propelled you through all your drafts?
It was Nightbitch’s anger. If I could get in touch with that when I sat down to write, then I knew I would have a good writing day. Nightbitch is righteous, and her righteousness is the engine that wrote this book.
What was your writing process like? Can you walk us through a typical writing day for you?
My writing process changed significantly after I had a child in that my time became very limited. I had to bring a discipline to my writing practice with word count goals to be reached in an hour or two. And there wasn’t a lot of imaginative space for dreaming when I wasn’t writing, so the dreaming took place on the page, which was also new for me.
How long did it take you to write Nightbitch?
It took me about 4 years, but I certainly wasn’t writing every day during that time. There were months where I would write 1000 words every day, and then nothing for 3 months, and then I would do my 1000-words a day again.
What is like having a book out (not even officially released yet!) being adapted into a feature film ( with Amy Adams of all people!)? Can you talk about how that started and what will happen moving forward?
The entire experience of this being picked up for film, talking to producers, to Amy Adams, thinking about the script and then writing…all of this has challenged me to confront my self-limiting ideas and place my talent, my ability, my vision, in the correct parts of my body. There is a solidness, a feeling of being upright and solid—like tree pose in yoga when you really *get* it—when I am holding these feelings of success in my body in productive ways. You can hold them in all sorts of ways that destroy you—anxiety, fear, dread, and so on—which comes more naturally to me, but I am learning how to feel okay with all of it and when I do, it’s exhilarating.
The development process stalled a bit during the pandemic, since Hollywood was shut down, but now that we have moved through what I hope was the worst of it, there seems to be a renewed energy. I think there should be some very exciting announcements coming soon, which I can’t wait to share.
Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (Doubleday), her debut novel set for release in July 2021, which has also been optioned for film by Annapurna with Amy Adams set to star.
She is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. Her writing has been awarded with The Editors' Prize in Fiction by The Missouri Review and with notable distinctions in Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is also a founding editor of draft: the journal of process.
Rachel grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio. She now lives in Iowa City with her husband and son.
