So much of my writing comes out of this rebellious impulse to do the thing that you’re not supposed to, whether formally or having a character be unlikable, vulgar, etc.
I think the power of this book comes in its rebellion, in saying the things we are normally not supposed to say or express or even really think. Tell me what it’s like to say what is so often left unsaid as it pertains to the screaming monotony of early motherhood. She understood that she was just a privileged, overeducated lady in the middle of America living the dream of holding her baby twenty-four hours a day.” This book dives deep into maternal malaise and makes the reader see, in an unapologetically visceral way, how soul-crushing it can be for mothers. You write of stay-at-home motherhood: “And, honestly, what a privilege. It was my way of processing the catastrophe of marital division in early motherhood and my deep, animal desire for protection and togetherness. My early experience of motherhood didn’t so much inform the character of Nightbitch as it is Nightbitch. I craved the wisdom of community when presented with this mysterious, mewling little creature, yet the best I could do was sort of wander through mommy-baby activities, unable to connect meaningfully with other moms, completely isolated. I was in the house, with my son, lonely in a way I had never been before. Yet when my own husband’s job demanded that he be gone each week, his ceaseless departures felt nearly criminal after the birth of our son. I consider myself independent, quite happy to be alone for long stretches of time. I didn’t know to fear this image before I had my own child. It seems to be of value to the patriarchy.) For me, this image is actually the mother’s greatest fear: the abandoned mother left to care for her child.
(I do wonder what the cultural value of having the Mother Alone as a holy image is. The image is also holy - the Madonna, who was also abandoned (that’s a sacrilegious analysis, I realize, but pragmatically, it’s the truth), though I would argue that the mother-child bond is the holy part as opposed to the Mother Alone. RACHEL YODER: That image of the mother with child watching as her husband leaves is a classic one that you can find repeated endlessly in all of literature. But then this line appears: “She stood with the babe in arms and watched him back the car from the driveway.” How does this archetypal image and your own experience of early motherhood inform Nightbitch? SARA PETERSEN: Despite being furiously unhappy and bored as a stay-at-home mother, Nightbitch frequently tries to convince herself of the rightness of this arrangement (after all, her husband “had a job he made money”). I had an email exchange with Yoder to discuss her novel, the loneliness of motherhood, the lies of MLM culture, and the irresistible allure of speaking the “monumental unsaid.”
#Secrets of fascinating womanhood review full
About these dualities, Yoder writes: “She would never wish Nightbitch on another mother, certainly not, for while feral-mommy-time had its fun, its vitality and power and brazenness, at its core it was something very private and sad, those deeply held dreams that a mother had tucked into a cold, dark corner of herself.” In a story that gives full voice to the innumerable nuisances, exhaustions, shocks, and injustices of motherhood, Yoder manages to create a fairy tale that feels both bitingly fresh and somehow as old as time. In the novel, Yoder explores mom culture, gender roles, and, above all, the warring dualities contained within the experience of motherhood. In Nightbitch, we follow the protagonist - named simply “The Mother” - as she evolves from dispirited, bored, lonely stay-at-home mom into the eponymous creature, a raging, howling entity that expresses the furies of motherhood by metamorphosing at night into a feral dog. Rachel Yoder’s wildly inventive debut novel is a revelation for mothers craving the validation that early motherhood is a psychic battlefield, in which one’s very sense of self is at stake. And Nightbitch exposes and speaks to that scam in a deliciously satisfying way. Early motherhood felt, for me, like a crazy-making, gaslighting scam.
#Secrets of fascinating womanhood review skin
When I felt desperate or overwhelmed, as if my skin couldn’t contain me, people nodded with kind sympathy and told me that “the baby blues” were tough. While my mind was pulsating with joy and terror and chaos and fear, the rest of the world took pictures and told me to enjoy every sweet little moment. Motherhood made me feel simultaneously bursting with corporeal power and tightly contained in a box that didn’t allow for my pre-maternal humanity. I HAVE BEEN WAITING for a book like Nightbitch since giving birth to my first child nearly nine years ago.