Nightbitch: A Novel - Softcover

Yoder, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593312147 ISBN 13: 9780593312148

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING AMY ADAMS • In this blazingly smart and voracious debut novel, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. • "A must-read for anyone who can’t get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural that Yellowjackets exemplifies." —Vulture

One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...

An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.

As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem.

An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RACHEL YODER is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. She holds M.F.A's from the University of Arizona (fiction) and the University of Iowa (nonfiction), where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her stories and essays have been published in literary journals such as The Kenyon Review and The Missouri Review, as well as national outlets such as The New York Times, The Sun, and Lit Hub. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and son.

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In this blazingly smart and voracious debut novel, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. • "A must-read for anyone who can’t get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural that Yellowjackets exemplifies." ―Vulture

One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...

An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.

As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem.

An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One
When she had referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke--because that’s the sort of lady she was, a good sport, able to poke fun at herself, definitely not uptight, not wound really tight, not so freakishly tight that she couldn’t see the humor in a lighthearted not-meant-as-an-insult situation--but in the days following this new naming, she found the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck, and was, like, What the fuck.
I think I’m turning into a dog, she said to her husband when he arrived home after a week away for work. He laughed and she didn’t.
She had hoped he wouldn’t laugh. She had hoped, that week as she lay in bed, wondering if she was turning into a dog, that when she said those words to her husband, he would tip his head to one side and ask for clarification. She had hoped he would take her concerns seriously. But as soon as she said the words, she saw this was impossible.
Seriously, she insisted. I have this weird hair on my neck.
She lifted her normal hair to show him the black patch. He rubbed it with his fingers and said, Yeah, you’re definitely a dog.
To her credit, she did appear more hirsute than usual. Her unruly hair moved about her head and shoulders like a cloud of wasps. Her brows caterpillared across her forehead with unplucked growth. She had even witnessed two black hairs curling from her chin and, in the right light--in any light at all, to be honest--you could see the five o’clock shadow of her mustache as it grew back in after her laser treatments. Had she always had so much hair on her arms? Descending the edge of her jaw from her hairline? And was it normal to have patches of hair on the tops of your feet?
 And look at my teeth, she said, baring her teeth and pointing to her canines. She was convinced they had grown, and the tips had narrowed to ferocious points that could cut a finger with a mere prick. Why, she had nearly cut hers during her nightly examination in the bathroom. Every night, when her husband was gone and their son was happily playing with trains in his pajamas, she stood at the mirror and pulled her lips back from her teeth, turned her head from side to side, then tilted her head back and looked at her teeth from that bottom-up angle, searched the Internet on her phone for pictures of canines to which she might compare her own, tapped her teeth with her fingernails, told herself she was being silly, then searched humans with dog teeth on her phone, searched do humans and dogs share a common ancestor, searched human animal hybrid and recessive animal genes in humans and research human animal genes legacy, searched werewolves, searched real werewolves in history, searched (somewhat inexplicably) witches, searched (somewhat relatedly) hysteria 19th century, and then, since she wanted to, searched rest cures and The Yellow Wallpaper, and she reread The Yellow Wallpaper, which she had once read in college, then stared blankly for a while at nothing in particular while sitting on the toilet, then stopped searching altogether.
Touch it, she insisted, pointing to her tooth. Her husband reached out and prodded the tip of her canine with his pointer finger.
Ow! he said, pulling his hand back and cradling it close to his body. Just kidding, he said as he held up an unscathed finger and waggled it at her face.
 Your tooth looks the same to me. You always think something’s wrong with you, he said pleasantly.
Her husband was an engineer. He specialized in “quality control.” What precisely this meant, the mother was not entirely sure. So he went around and looked at machines to make sure they were maximizing efficiency? Adjusted systems to keep them humming along at higher frequencies? Read output reports and made suggestions toward improvement? Sure. Whatever.
What she did know was that he had little time for feelings, a condescending patience for intuition, and scoffed openly at talk unsupported by peer-reviewed scientific studies or statistics. Still, he was a good man, a caring man, an affable man, whom she appreciated very much, despite everything. She was, after all, prone to indecision, doubling back on things she had once felt but had since come to feel differently about. She was prone to anxiety, to worry, to a sensation in her chest that her heart might explode. She ran hot. She buzzed. Either she needed to keep busy or else she needed to lie down and sleep. Her husband, on the other hand, needed nothing whatsoever.
No wonder, then, that they deferred to his judgment, his good levelheaded judgment, his engineer’s evenness. Of course there was nothing wrong with her. This she told herself as they lay in bed, their child between them, asleep and wedging his toes beneath her leg.
I think I should sleep in the guest room, she whispered to her husband.
Why? he whispered back.
I get so angry now. At night, she said. He didn’t respond. I think I just need a good night’s sleep, she added.
Okay, he said.
She rolled from bed without a sound and felt her way down the stairs and tucked into the clean sheets of the guest bed. She rubbed the patch of coarse hair on the back of her neck to soothe herself, then ran her tongue over the sharp edges of her teeth. In this way, she fell into a thick and unbothered sleep.
One day, the mother was a mother, but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else.
Yes, it had been June, and, yes, her husband had been gone the entire week. In fact, it was his twenty-second weeklong absence that year, a year in which only twenty-four weeks in total had passed, not that anyone was counting.
Yes, the boy had an ear infection that week and had slept only in fitful bouts. Yes, he had not really been napping well or even at all.
Yes, she was experiencing intense PMS for the first time in her life, at age thirty-seven.
And it was then, on a regular Friday, in the deepest hours of night, when the boy awoke there in bed, between his mother and father, for he did not--he would not--sleep in his own. It was the third or fourth time that night he had stirred. She had lost track.
At first she did nothing, waiting for her husband to wake, which he did not, because that wasn’t a thing he ever did. She waited longer than she usually did, waited and waited, the boy wailing while she lay as still as a corpse, patiently waiting for the day when her corpse self would miraculously be reanimated and taken into the Kingdom of the Chosen, where it would create an astonishing art installation composed of many aesthetically interesting beds. The corpse would have unlimited child-care and be able to hang out and go to show openings and drink corpse wine with the other corpses whenever it wanted, because that was heaven. That was it.
She lay there as long as she could without making a sound, a movement. Her child’s screams fanned a flame of rage that flickered in her chest.
That single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself--that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do. 
You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration.
You tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593312147
• ISBN 13: 9780593312148
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Penguin Random House Ireland; https://eu-contact.penguin.ie; ; Arnulfstr. 124; München; 80636; Deutschland