Nightbitch, a reflection

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!.

Nightbitch, a reflection

This blog is about how to make time for our art and how to make time for ourselves even though it seems impossible to do so. I’ve been writing on that topic on one blog platform or another since sometime in the early 2000s. I started writing in this way to recommit myself to the craft after years of working around the edges of motherhood. Wait: that did not come across strongly enough. What is more true is that I started writing these blogs as a kind of prayer to evoke the courage and strength to make time for my art. Because I desperately needed to. I wasn’t so desperate and angry that I was turning into a dog. However, that is precisely what happens to the protagonist in Rachel Yoder’s novel, Nightbitch.

I plucked the book off the shelves on one of our many trips to Powell’s Books in Portland. It was the title, of course, that first got me. But the red cover, replete with a slab of raw meat, enticed me further. After reading the synopsis on the back, I felt inspired enough to toss it in my cart. It sat on my shelf for months. I started reading it around Halloween of 2023 but didn’t finish. Not because I didn’t love it, but because I got pulled away and then just didn’t get back to it. I couldn’t seem to make time for it.

Then, one day last summer, Chris was reading something that mentioned a movie version of the novel was coming out. I said, “Do you want to read the book together, aloud, before it comes out?” He did. We started in late summer/early fall. The first 100 pages we devoured in a few days. Totally engaging. But then, life’s demands and detours stood in the way of our progress for a bit. We didn’t finish until this past Saturday morning. We read the final scene aloud in our living room, enrapt and profoundly moved by the book’s gruesome denouement. Later that evening, we drove 40 minutes to The Grand Cinema in Tacoma to catch the 6:40 showing. This was our first time at The Grand, which is very much like our own beloved Capitol Theater here in Olympia, only slightly more polished ( since it’s more big-city, I guess).

The book is about a woman who has a career as a professional artist. After trying for a while to both do her art and care for her child, she makes the decision to stay at home with her son. The reality of giving all of herself over to the roles of mother and wife produces a rage and despair in her that takes on symbolic character, through her transformation into a dog. She takes to roaming the neighborhood at night looking for innocent, lesser critters to stalk and kill.

It’s an astonishingly brave book that takes on a subject that speaks precisely to why this blog exists. No matter how exaggerated the situation became in the book (and it did), I still felt that it echoed eerily how I’ve felt so many times. Chris and I both agreed that the book succeeded where we thought it would fail, in numerous places throughout the plot. We recounted several scenes that, when we came to them, we both thought, “Surely, she can’t pull this off.” And she did.

A subtheme of the book is female companionship. There’s a scene that the movie amplifies a bit more than the book where “the mother” (the only name given to the main character) attends something called “Book Babies” at the local library. The mother is educated, an artist, and shows up not wanting at all to interact with these other mothers, seeing herself as above them somehow. For fear of spoiling any plot points, let’s just say that her perspective develops by the end of the book. This too resonated. The women in my life, from my writing groups to those who ran relays and marathons with me, or backpacked into the woods to get a needed dose of solitude, perseverance, and communion—those women have propped me up all along.

It’s occurring to me now that this is the second book I’ve read this month where motherhood gets depicted in violent symbolism. The same is true of Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. This novel I discussed in my all-woman book group (that reads novels by or about women). It’s a story told by a young black girl who lives in poverty on the coast of Mississippi, in a family of all men (save for one female pit bull) in the days before and then during Hurricane Katrina. It’s a tense, sometimes lyrical, brutal, and beautiful novel.

I love that there are stories that tell another side of motherhood, that explore how it begins in violence and is not all notes in lunchboxes and snickerdoodles from there.

The cultural story—that motherhood is sweetness and sacrifice, and that there is nobility in the mother sacrificing her own dreams to foster those of her offspring— remains strong. This same story extends to those who are the caretakers of our children when they go to school (teachers). I am a mother and a teacher. And I love being both. And perhaps why I love both is that I insist on holding boundaries in both of those roles. I haven’t always. It’s been a life practice. But I have, at least, always been able to hold two contradictory truths in my mind: I would do anything to help you grow into the best human you can be, and I cannot sacrifice my own best version of myself in order to do that.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.