For the month of October, and for our first ever Eagle Eye Book Corner, booksellers Rachel and Finn bring you their thoughts on a tale of motherhood and monsters fit for Halloween season!
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Rachel: Okay. Oh man. I don't know what I expected when I saw this book, because I wanted to read it from the first, but for some reason it surprised me. I was expecting it to be more heavy handed horror.
Finn: It was more subtle than I thought it would be, given the description.
Rachel:Yeah and it has such a bold title. I love it. And Carmen Maria Machado left that blurb, and her usage of specifically body horror gave me certain expectations as well. I mean, there's definitely some body horror, but maybe not as central as I was expecting.
Finn: Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised .
R: It starts off so ordinarily, but it becomes pretty immediately clear that there's this never-ending threat of feminine rage that's below the surface of motherhood as a whole. Her internal monologue is so frustrating to read, but it’s because you feel her frustration in it.
F: Yeah, I thought it was interesting that the characters never get names, or at least the main characters. I was kind of expecting no characters at all to get names, but we did get names for Jen and her two friends at least. I got a sense that the main characters were being reduced to their titles. Like she is a mother and that's all she's being perceived as, by the reader and by the world. This idea makes the use of “husband” over “father” interesting, as it removes him linguistically from the parental set of relations.
R: Absolutely, and continuing the theme of the author’s linguistic choices, I really liked how she didn't use any quotation marks. It added to the sense that it was all very internal to the mother. It was so seamless, it didn't feel forced at all.
F: It almost felt like the mother was feeling so harried and overwhelmed in her life, she didn’t have time to add quotation marks in her mental recounting of events.
R: I really liked it!
F: Something else I noticed was that when I first started reading, I wanted the catharsis of knowing that in the end she would be happy with the child. When I started, it was obvious the child was making her so unhappy in a lot of ways, and I wanted the catharsis of knowing that in the end, it wasn't an indictment of having a child, because as someone who wants a child in the future, I wanted to hear that children would make their parents happy. But I very quickly sort of came to realize that that's not really the point, and that it's not because it's not about the mother's relationship with her child, it's really more about the mother's relationship with different sides of herself, the mother's relationship with the part of herself that is a mother or the part of herself that is an artist, et. cetera. At least from my perspective, I didn't feel like the relationship between this particular mother and this particular child was that central to the story.
R: I think a big part of the whole book was how when someone has a child, it's “Oh, you're a mother, and that's all you are.” Like you're not a woman, you're “just” a mother and that is the part of you that matters. And I think that that's a good segue into talking about how a lot of it is just the mother wrestling with herself and the cultural expectations that are thrust upon her. I think becoming feral and turning into a dog is her way of sort of shoving all of that aside because they are put upon her but she can't escape from it mentally. Because she's thinking she’s supposed to be some particular kind of person, and feeling really bitter, right? But as the book goes on, she just stops giving a crap about it. And I don't think the book is trying to say that you can overcome all of this stuff, no, but that you should be mad about it. And being mad about it is what's gonna save you.
F: Yes! In becoming the dog, she's pushing these boundaries of what she's socially supposed to be, and in the end, it's not that she becomes happy and stops becoming a dog. Becoming a dog, that rage, that's incorporated in with her motherhood and like her art and it all sort of comes together in the end.
R: The other part of the book that was really interesting to me was the fact that she had been an artist, and a lot of it was questions about how she would make her art, and whether she even could anymore. There's a distance between her and a lot of things at the beginning of the book, and one of those things was her artistic practice. She kind of felt like it was something she couldn't reach but then as she gets more into her body, reconnects with her body, her art comes back too.
F: I think that's a big part of it, the sort of sanctification and disgust with the body at alternating points. Sometimes she feels like she should be worshipped as this miraculous life-producing being, and other times, especially around her transformation, she feels so disconnected with the reality of her body.
R: I think that also has to do with the tension of ideas about motherhood versus the reality, because when she starts off she has all these ideas about what it's going to be like, and it's not like that. There's that idea about motherhood being a sacred feminine thing that's kind of divorced from the dirty details.
F: Yeah, absolutely. I think actually the book puts that really well in the chapter on the various mythological women where Wanda White talks about how motherhood “complicates, deepens or denies womanhood.” And I thought that was kind of a core idea of the book. Like motherhood being something that interacts with womanhood in interesting ways and one doesn’t necessarily flow perfectly into the other.
R: I just keep coming back to how she goes from being so dissociated from everything to being in the thick of it and being so present. At the beginning, she doesn't want to be like those mommy types who want to be friends with her because she rejects all these little stereotypes that just don’t fit her and it just gets worse and worse until she transforms.
F: It’s like the mother becoming the dog is a process of rejecting the boxes that society or society’s idea of motherhood is trying to put her into. She doesn't feel like she fits or wants to fit into any of the mother archetypes that she seeing, so her motherhood manifests in a different way.
R: Well, let's talk about Wanda White’s book within the book. I loved that detail so much, because one of my favorite parts of working in the bookstore is seeing all these weird academic books from decades ago. It's like, what is this? Who is this person? Who did these studies? That is a real thing that happens. The internet is huge, yet some things are still just too obscure.
F: Again, it felt like the book maintained the feeling of being very internal to the mother, because she never actually found Wanda. It was about her own relationship that she was creating with this borderline fictional person.
R: That line near the end says Wanda White is not a person, Wanda White is a place. I love that idea. Also, did you notice how the mother signed her letters? MM, which is WW upside down. It’s as if she wants to become Wanda White, she sees her as a mirror.
F: Wanda is someone who has the answers and understanding to her current predicament, which she envies.
R: Yeah. Her husband thinks she's crazy because she thinks she’s turning into a dog and Wanda White is like, “people don't think my work is serious, but these half woman half animal things really exist.” It’s a stark difference.
F: Wanda says something about that at one point, that the “unbelievable” is a valid way of perceiving the world. It’s not something that contradicts science, and is a legitimate way to organize your lived experience.
R: Well, because sometimes science doesn't have the answers and that's our whole problem with the husband, because he is so logical and an engineer and has so many suggestions, but it's not helping at all.
F: That's so true. The husband sort of represents this rationality that's being opposed by these unbelievable or irrational things that are happening to the mother. The fact that they come together in the end, that their relationship ends as a happy one, it’s as if it's saying that the rational and irrational can coexist.
R: Well, yeah. And again, I think the book is very much a process of things that are out of her reach becoming something she can engage with, because her husband is always out of town, so he's very separate from her and she's telling herself that she should be upset, etc. But as the book progresses, she comes to feel that you have to allow your rage to exist and to be expressed, and the more she does that the closer she gets to everything. I've done therapy before where you have to do body scans to make sure you are in your body and you are present. And I just kept thinking of that in the book because of the physical changes the mother goes through. She was very aware of her body, and so she was kind of moving from the realm of silent anger to being able to engage with the world, and being able to engage with her husband was part of that.
F: Yeah, because she felt so far away, or was literally so far away. Repressed and oppressed. Coming back to the end, I liked the sentence where it says “the rage, now tempered by vision” referring to the harmonization of aspects of herself.
R: Kind of like what I was saying earlier about how the rage hasn't gone away. She's accepted it, she's directly engaging with it and not explaining it away. In fact, it becomes more prominent than ever. It was something that bothered her and possessed her, but then she comes to possess it.
F: The book kind of highlights this disconnect between how we're told we should act and how we want to act, and feeling powerless to act as our minds and bodies are telling us.
R: Yeah, I liked how the book wasn’t saying “Oh don't worry. It was all in your head so it doesn't matter.” Rather that she felt powerless, but there's a way to take it back in the situation.
F: She's able to accomplish what she wants, while keeping everything that does bring her happiness about her current life.
R: I mean it makes sense because again, so much of the novel is about what is out of your reach and out of your control, versus what is in front of you and what you are able to affect.
And it's only by engaging with what is directly there that anything useful can happen.
I hope you enjoyed hearing our thoughts about Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch! Feel free to leave your own comments about the book, and check back in the future for more Eagle Eye Book Corner discussions!
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