At 4:51 a.m. my toddler’s sudden shriek stuns me awake, charging cortisol through my bloodstream, and I think about the book Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. I think about that book when I bite my lip because my son’s perfect plum cheeks give me a weird urge to squish them. I think about the book when I think about the drive to create art—and how the fragmented, all-consuming nature of new parenthood is one of the most intense experiences common to human life and yet it’s so rarely captured well in said art. 

Nightbitch is about a young mom who finds herself turning into a dog. It might be one of the truest stories I’ve read about motherhood. Big picture, it’s the type of story I shied away from before having a kid because I was afraid it would scare me (I mean, that cover). Well, motherhood is scary, folks. Especially for women who harbor artistic ambitions. 

Rachel Yoder’s writing, on a sentence level, is enough for me to enjoy and recommend the book. Let alone the story’s complete originality. Deftly, Yoder portrays two things we usually see at odds with each other in literature: She unflinchingly exposes the brutality and raw ends of motherhood, exploring the idea of motherhood killing women’s ability to be creative—and she also invites us to the intimate moments of visceral tenderness that somehow manically coexist with that very brutality. I’m a big fan.

Still, I find myself qualifying when I talk about it with non-moms: “It’s a book about a young mom—but …” as if you have to be a mom yourself to get or enjoy a book whose plot orbits the experience of a woman as a mother. What other demographic would we do this about? (I’ll wait.)

Nightbitch is a story about the nature of creativity. It’s about loneliness and the search for meaning. 

• It’s about transformation.
• Capitalism.
• Pyramid schemes.
• And mommy groups.
• And what it means to be a human woman.

Did I mention it’s funny, too?

I highly recommend it. Whether you’re a mom or not.