Nightbitch: A Novel

"It’s one of my favourite books. It’s not only as you say so visceral and raw and quite literally animalistic in its understanding of early motherhood but it’s also such a great portrait of the way—going back to Rachel Reed—birth fundamentally transforms you. I think there is a particular kind of transformation or pushback that happens when you are a creative mother. I’m not by any means saying that writers feel things more deeply than other people, what I’m trying to say is that at the heart of Nightbitch is the push of creative personal impulses against the very visceral, immediate, heavy bodily demands of having gone through birth and what her child now demands of her. I found the way Rachel Yoder writes about that so deeply felt and witty and piercingly accurate. In Womb , I quote one passage she writes about birth being the most violent thing that can happen to a woman, whether you push your baby out or have it cut out of you. She writes how the child “rips its way out of us, literally tears us in two, in a wash of great pain and blood and shit and piss. If the child does not enter into the world this way, then it is cut from us with a knife… it is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself.” I think she doesn’t in her writing shy away from that violence. I mean during the day she’s meeting other mums and trying to look presentable and at night she’s growling over chunks of meat and racing around the back garden! I know any mother who has been up at three in the morning, sweating, and soaking her top with milk and just grabbing whatever’s in the fridge and raging against her life will definitely identify. And although she takes it to the n th degree with the dog metaphor, that’s a model of motherhood that so many people can relate to."