title: Nightbitch by: Yoder, Rachel published: 2021-07-20 read: 2021-09 preview

When you pick up reviews of this beautiful, magic-realism book, you will find out it’s about a woman who turns into a dog.

But of course, it’s not. This is a book about motherhood. The main character remains unnamed, being referred to as Nightbitch or the mother. And that’s all you need to know. Mother of a single boy, and a husband who’s always on business trips. How does she cope with transitioning from being a promising artist to a mother?

She doesn’t. And finds her way out.

This is a book which, in its style, its humour, its darkness, reminded me of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I really love this book

It was a Friday, and her husband would be home from work later that day. She had upward of ten pounds of red meat in her cart. They still needed juice, wipes, yogurt, bananas, crunchy snacks, and a bag of utterly civilized carrots.

Imagine trying to shop for crunchy snacks with a toddler and heightened near-animal sense of smell while the enormity of patriarchal society loomed behind every box of farm-themed crackers, in the crackle of every pretzel bag you picked up.

As she walked through the automatic sliding doors of the grocery store to the parking lot, someone behind her said her name, and she turned.

Sally—single, cute, young, happy, blonde Sal—waved and nearly skipped toward her with glee.

Hey, how’s it going!? she asked, hugging the mother and ruffling the boy’s hair. I haven’t seen you in _forever. Do you love being home with this guy? I bet it’s so fun.

Sal worked at the community gallery where she had been director before she stepped down. It had been the right choice. It had. Being at work while her infant lolled on the day care’s linoleum floor had been agony, but being at home was also agony, just of a different sort.

She wanted to tell the girl: It’s complicated. I am now a person I never imagined I would be, and I don’t know how to square that. I would like to be content, but instead I am stuck inside a prison of my own creation, where I torment myself endlessly, until I am left binge-eating Fig Newtons at midnight to keep from crying.

In the story, yes, the mother changes into a dog, well at night at least, and thus builds up an animalesque bonding with her boy. He loves his dog! This is her sense of self, this is her private sphere, where her offspring, something she created by herself, has a place, too. The husband not, of course – but he’s only there for the money, is otherwise faceless, and doesn’t bother anybody too much.

When did our son start eating raw meat? the husband wondered. I mean, how did he figure that out?

Hmmm, Nightbitch said, smiling at the boy and then reaching out to tickle him and send him into a squirming fit of giggles on the floor.

I guess I was cooking dinner and he must have stolen a little piece of raw meat, she offered as she retrieved a glass from the cupboard.

No, the boy said from the floor. Mama give meat. Yummy. Doggy.

Honey, she said to the boy kindly, then, to her husband, He’s so silly, isn’t he?

All’s well that ends well. Nobody dies, if one does not count the cat and the many bunnies.

Oh dear. Her kitty. The fluff.

The stupid-sweet little fluffenwaffer. The smoosh. The rug. Fluffy paws and jingle meow. She had once wanted to decorate her with tiny ornaments, because, while sitting, she took on a perfectly conical shape and resembled a Christmas tree. Her ballerina. Her baby. Oh dear, indeed.

How long had she stood there within the bloody mess she had created? Two cartoons’ worth of time? Five? The boy entered the kitchen to find his mother’s face covered in blood, her hands, too, a bloodstained robe sliding from her shoulder as she picked tufts of black fur from her mouth, a pile of black fur at her feet, motionless. Blood on the cabinets. Blood on the floor. Blood on the ceiling.

The boy froze, eyes wide, looking from the pile to his mother, then back again.

Oh no. The boy! What had she done? She stood stock still, watching the boy as he tentatively edged toward her, sniffed her robe, then sniffed the dead cat. He nudged the body with his nose, lifted the cat’s paw, and watched as it fell.

He looked again at his mother, then let out a small, joyful howl, then nudged the cat’s bloody body with his tiny foot.

Pulling herself up out out of her life depressions through openly confronting her dogged behaviour, by celebrating it, by shocking and fascinating the world.

Don’t pass on this one, if you’re in to reading about the horrors of stay-home-motherhood.