Unpacking Nightbitch, the novel

By far my favorite book of the year

I literally devoured all 238 pages of Nightbitch over the holidays, reading late into the night by the light of my phone while my kids slept beside me in our motel room in Monterey. Part of it was that I’ve been hungry for a good novel (I’ve been reading too much academic non-fiction lately) but part of it was that I have just never read anything that portrays motherhood in this way before, and it was scary how well it echoed my own experience. A lot of that has to do with the fact that Rachel Yoder and I do seem to have a lot in common. We were both forced into long stretches of stay-at-home motherhood out of a sense of guilt, exhaustion, a need to be close to our children (despite the tedium of it), and creative careers that don’t quite cover the cost of childcare in America. I also weirdly identified with her Mennonite upbringing and relationship with her mother, not because I was brought up religiously, but because the Waldorf community that my family was deeply immersed in had its own kind of culty vibe and obsession with making everything by hand. Like Nightbitch, I also sometimes feel that I am trying to “save” my mother, that I want to go back in time and shake her and say (in the words of Nightbitch), “Look at you! You’re amazing! You’re my mother! Why are you acting like this? Insist on your joy. Time is short, and you must make great haste, not only for yourself but for me as well. Please. I’m begging you.” (Mom, I know you’ll read this and I want you to know how much I appreciate all you did for us, but you are also the first to admit that you lost yourself in early motherhood).

I think when you see yourself so clearly reflected in fiction, you actually begin to understand your own experience in a way you couldn’t before. This is partly to do with the fact that when you are in it, you literally don’t even have time to think, whereas when you read it, you can reflect. But it also has to do with the fact that we, the mothers, are all constantly gaslighting ourselves a little bit, aren’t we? I keep trying to convince myself that motherhood really is rewarding and fulfilling and wonderful in and of itself and then I keep coming up short, missing something. When someone else puts this into words, like Yoder has done, you give yourself permission to acknowledge the suck: the suck of playing trains on the floor all day when your brain and body are craving time to yourself or time to work or time with other women who understand you. We are allowed to want other things. We are allowed to not enjoy the tedium of caring for small children.

I enjoyed Nightbitch so much that it made me feel like writing nonfiction is a pointless exercise, that anything that needs to be said can be said better in fiction form. You connect to people’s emotions through fiction. You can portray the complex inner realities of motherhood with so much more nuance and accuracy. You can say the unsayable - things that would make people freak out if you put them out into the world as fact or opinion without the wrapper of character and make-believe to protect yourself, the author, from the onslaught of inevitable criticism.

Don’t worry, though, I am still going to write my non-fiction book. And even though I hate New Year’s Resolutions (as I wrote about in my last post), the closest I will come to making one this year is: I am not going to be afraid of saying what I need to say anymore. I think I can partially thank Rachel Yoder for that. Her book is so brave. So many of us women are bred to be people pleasers and at some point we just wake up and think Fuck that. I cannot please 60,000 people on the internet. There are things about motherhood that need to be said, that won’t sit well with everyone, that might hurt, that might stir up feelings of guilt or regret or longing, that aren’t politically correct. Too bad.

Below I’ve cobbled together some of the most meaningful snippets I saved from the book. These are big themes in my life and in the lives of many mothers. They each deserve their own book. They will each probably get their own write-up here in the future, but to start I just want to capture these themes and add some of my own stream-of-consciousness thoughts to the mix so that I don’t lose them in the hustle and bustle of life. I am pay-walling these snippets and thoughts because they are both personal and controversial (and also, truth be told, because I need more paid subscribers).