Author’s debut allows mother to unleash inner animal
It started with a joke between her and her husband.
“After having a child and two years of not sleeping through the night, I could be quite feral when awoken during the night. So, we would joke about the nightbitch,” says Rachel Yoder, assistant professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts. “One day I thought, ‘It would be a really horrible idea if I literalized this and wrote a book about a mom becoming a dog.’ But it seemed like such a fun idea. And when I tried it out, it just sort of took off.”
Yoder’s debut novel, Nightbitch, was released in 2021 to critical acclaim. It was selected as an Indie Next Pick in August 2021 and a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture, as well as being recognized as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and shortlist for the McKitterick Prize.
And on Sept. 7, 2024, a film adaptation of the book directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.
Nightbitch follows “mother,” who puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her son. As her previous sense of identity fades into motherhood, she discovers a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck, and her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her symptoms intensify until she finds herself transforming at night into a dog.
Yoder grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio and studied English literature as an undergraduate student at Georgetown. She says it wasn’t until she moved to Arizona and met a mentor who encouraged her to write that she thought about writing as a viable career option.
A few weeks after Nightbitch premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and before its wide release Dec. 6, 2024, it will open Iowa City’s Refocus Film Festival. Starting Oct. 17, the annual festival celebrates adaptation and transforming one art form into another.
Yoder says she is thrilled that the film will be shown in the city where she found her home and where so many people supported her during the writing of the book.
“I feel like the community is in some way part of its creation,” Yoder says. “This is where I became a mother. This is where I really kind of came into my adult self. It’s going to be very, very special to share it with the community.”
While working toward an MFA in creative writing — which she received in 2007 — at the University of Arizona, Yoder took a couple of creative nonfiction writing courses. She also attended a NonfictioNOW Conference, which was hosted at the University of Iowa, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, at which she studied with Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate David Shields.
“The fiction I was writing was already so autobiographical, and I was also interested in publishing nonfiction, but those experiences solidified my interest,” Yoder says. “I told myself I would only indulge a second MFA if it was at Iowa and it was paid for, and they were kind enough to give me funding.”
Yoder graduated from the UI Nonfiction Writing Program in 2011. She says she loved that the faculty and her classmates were all coming at nonfiction from different angles.
“Some were journalists, others were poets, and that was a huge benefit of the program,” Yoder says. “Another thing I really liked about it was this sense that you could experiment. There weren’t hard and fast rules. We were still sort of defining the genre. The sense of experimentation and possibility and hybridity, bringing in fiction, bringing in storytelling, bringing in poetry, it just really gave me this sense that I could do whatever I want.”
After recently reading Iowa City author Garth Greenwell’s new book, Small Rain, Rachel Yoder can’t say enough about it.
“It was so masterful, so beautiful, and so romantic in a lot of ways. It’s so unlike how I write. I really appreciate reading a writer whose approach is so different yet so accomplished. I highly recommend this book.”
When Yoder started writing Nightbitch, she wasn’t sure whether she would ever show it to anyone.
“It was a place where I could be completely honest and tell the truth, and I could decide later if I wanted anyone to read it,” Yoder says. “A lot of the book is about getting to know the darker sides of the self, and instead of running away from them, embracing them and seeing what they have to teach us.
“There are so many things that are taboo about motherhood and what you say about motherhood. You’re not supposed to tarnish it in any way. I thought, ‘What if we just tell the truth about it being hard and vicious and messy and wild? If we tell that story, what will be gained?’”
Yoder says parents have told her that before reading Nightbitch it felt like no one understood what they were going through or the feral thoughts they were having. It felt like no one had told their story before.
“It’s been really wonderful to hear that people feel seen and feel less alone,” Yoder says. “What else could you hope for from your work than that?”
Actor Amy Adams’ production company partnered with Annapurna Pictures to option the rights to Nightbitch before it was even published.
“Books are optioned all the time, but it takes a lot to get a movie made. The stars really have to align,” Yoder says. “And somehow the stars aligned.”
While writing Nightbitch, author Rachel Yoder says she would spend two or three hours at a time at a coffee shop, with her goal being to write 1,000 words.
“And they could be 1,000 words of gibberish. I just had to write,” Yoder says.
She says that on days when the book wasn’t coming to her, she would write short flash fiction — “It was a treat I gave myself.”
Some of those side stories ended up playing a role in Nightbitch. In the book, the mother discovers a mysterious academic book that becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography.
“They were just fun little writing exercises, but at a certain point I did sort of want to write that book rather than finishing the novel,” Yoder admits.
So, will we ever see that book in the future?
“I think I’m over it, but never say never,” Yoder says. “There were some stories about magical women that didn’t make it into Nightbitch.”
Yoder wrote an initial screenplay, but when director Marielle Heller, who previously wrote and directed the film The Diary of a Teenage Girl, came on board, she wanted to do her own adaptation.
“That’s not unusual, and I was totally on board,” Yoder says. “She very generously had me read the script early on and invited me on set for a few days. I felt like, if I wanted to, I could have some input. But I had a lot of trust in her because I really admire and respect the work that she’s done. It’s been great to have another artist be inspired by my book and make it their own.”
Yoder says she enjoyed watching the cast and crew film Nightbitch.
It was also a bit surreal.
“It was kind of emotional because there are parts of the book that are drawn from my life,” Yoder says. “Seeing these moments acted out in front of me was baffling and magical.”
Yoder is currently working on a script she describes as a dark horror comedy, which is based on a short story by another author. She says she also may put together her own short story collection at some point down the road, but for now, she’s focusing on the script and teaching — and preparing to go to the Toronto Film Festival for the premiere of Nightbitch.
This will be Yoder’s first year teaching screenwriting courses, and she says after 20 years of teaching fiction writing, it’s exciting to feel a sort of beginner enthusiasm again.
“These students are so brilliant. They see things in texts that I don’t see,” Yoder says. “They’re also from a different generation, so just learning about what is on their minds and what their concerns are is important to me. I’ve kind of gotten set in my ways and in the kinds of things I like, so I like it when my students introduce me to new things that I would never have picked up on my own.
“I’m excited to be in community with them, and it feels like an honor to lead them through this exploration of screenwriting. I’m really excited to see what stories they want to tell and what characters they want to bring into being.”
