Oct 11 2024 50 mins 3
In today’s episode Kate and Betsy interview Rachel Yoder, author of the book NIghtbitch, which has been adapted to film and will be released this December starring Amy Adams. Today we explore the challenges of motherhood, feminine rage, women delaying their greatness, and the fear of disruption.
In today’s episode we discuss:
- Rachel’s early years growing up in an Amish/Mennonite family in Ohio, living in an intentional community, and not fully participating in dominant culture. We talk about how she is still trying to make sense of of those years, and the divide between how she was raised and the process of moving more into her authentic self.
- How the character of “Nightbitch” was based on her own experience as a writer who quit writing after she had her son. It was a full two years before she finally sat down to write, and when she did this book was “just there”.
- Feminine rage and how Rachel started this book after the 2016 election.
- The giant disconnect between how powerful women feel in labor bringing life into the world, but how disempowered and devalued women often feel while staying at home with children.
- The double bind of going back to work vs staying at home with your child, and how it all feels like a “trick”.
- Feminine longing and women’s unique access to it.
Bio:
Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (2021), her debut novel. A film adaptation of her novel, written & directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams, will be released in 2024. Formerly the 23/24 Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she now serves as Assistant Professor of Screenwriting and Cinema Arts at the University of Iowa. Selected as an Indie Next Pick in August 2021, Nightbitch has gone on to be named a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture and recognized as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and shortlist for the McKitterick Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and The Sun. With Mark Polanzak, she is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. She live in Iowa City with her son and her husband.
About Nightbitch:
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 into 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 multi-level-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] wily and unrestrained debut. . . You can feel Yoder breaking loose, too, like she’s just self-injected a serum mixed with her protagonist’s blood . . . With its endorsement of a magical text as more cathartic than any mommy memoir, Nightbitch makes the case for itself, and for fiction that expands motherhood into new, surreal dimensions. I’ve seen myself in all the clever, recondite novels of beleaguered mothers. The moaning and groaning, the searching and yearning are real. Yoder sees a new way into the baser kinks of our animal selves, the ineffable bodily transformation of a woman into a mother. What is fiction for, if not blowing life up into the freakish myth it appears to be?”
—The New Yorker
“[Nightbitch] might well be the debut of the year. A feral fairy tale of maternal dissatisfaction, it’s best to go into this one knowing as little possible, the better to let Yoder work her devious magic on you.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“All the cool-mom book groups—all the parent book groups, really—should read Nightbitch. . . It feels like reading a deliciously long text from your smartest friend, with a hint of Kafka, if Kafka lived in the age of mommy bloggers and designer doggy raincoats. No need to be a parent, a dog owner, or a fan of magical realism to enjoy; Yoder writes about contemporary anxieties with so much intelligence and charm that she can cause you to reflect without spiraling into deep depression. That’s a feat, these days, greater than metamorphosis.”
—Glamour
Past Episodes You Might Like With Female Authors
Episode 123: Delores Reynals: A True Women of the World
Episode 122: Nina Lohman – The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain
Episode 107: Jocelyn Davis: Insubordinate
Episode 103: Lyz Lenz: This American Ex-Wife
Episode 90: Michaela Boehm: The Wild Woman’s Way to Embodiment
Episode 87: Dr. Stacey Shelby: Tracking the Wild Woman Archetype
Episode 52: Katherine Wintsch: Slay Like A Mother
Today’s Episode sponsored by:
Want to Meet Betsy & Kate in Person on Retreat?
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