MOTHERHOOD TURNS YOU FERAL. In childbirth insides are turned out, hair matted, sounds you would never utter in polite company erupt without restraint.

And that’s only a few hours into the transformation.In Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch — a debut novel released in the gully of last year to great acclaim — similes are stripped and mother actually turns into animal, long nights spent in pursuit of wild rabbits, throats ripped from whimpering torsos (a violent image, only if you’ve never experienced the turmoil of postpartum depression, or the rearrangement of your organs as a baby grows inside you). A most aggressive metamorphosis, spurred by years of artistic unfulfillment and the whole unholy mess that is young motherhood, which the mother, or Nightbitch, must now keep quiet and attempt to discover the meaning for by herself.“I was deep in my Nightbitch days when I started writing the book,” Yoder tells me. We’ve finally come together on Zoom after I finally managed to get the difference between my Australian and her States’ time zones right (she graciously responded to my frantic email with a “nothing compared to the time I got my time zones mixed up for my phone call with AMY ADAMS”). We’re talking about the godawful, trying process of unbecoming and becoming after motherhood, where this story first originated. “Before I became a mum, I had earned two graduate degrees in creative writing, had taught, I was running a creative writing nonprofit, and I had no intention of ever stepping out of my career — had no intention of ever stopping writing. For my entire adult life I had written.”

She explains, “And then I had my beautiful son who I was deeply obsessed with immediately. And not only found myself quitting my, what I called my ‘dream job’ nine months after I had him, but also, for the first two years of his life, I didn’t write a single word.”

“It felt like a huge loss of myself. Like this was how I had come to find myself, since I was 20 [years old]— it’s the way I sort of brought myself into being. And so then when writing left me in motherhood, it was a huge crisis.”

The artistic expression that eventually came from the experience — around the time Yoder’s son turned three and she was able to find affordable childcare for a few hours a day — is vivid and violent, though humorous, too. “The whole concept of Nightbitch was actually a joke that my husband made,” she laughs.“I was three years sleep deprived, and, you know, went a little feral in the middle of the night…A horrible idea and also really funny.”

[WRITING’S] the way I sort of BROUGHT MYSELF INTO BEING. And so when the WRITING LEFT ME in MOTHERHOOD, it was a HUGE CRISIS

It shows in the writing, her awakened creativity. Of Nightbitch’s playfulness, a New Yorker review observed, “You can feel Yoder breaking loose, too, like she’s just self-injected a serum mixed with her protagonist’s blood. The second half of Nightbitch trots down a path into a magical forest, where Yoder relishes her job as tour guide, introducing readers to the glowing phenomena lurking among the bushes. Look, Happiness! And, over there, Delight!” “That’s the beautiful thing about speculative fiction or horror or anything that’s not reality or realism,” Yoder explains. “It’s imagining different possibilities. And that’s really what I needed in my life. I needed some…some more possibilities for being and feeling.”

THERE MAY BE VIOLENCE and rage (“I want to be an artist and a woman and a mother I mean a monster I want to be a monster,” Nightbitch proclaims) and uninhibited joy, but there is also grace. Moments of connection. There’s a line, deep in the second half, when Nightbitch recalls her own mother reflecting wistfully about her once-dream of becoming a singer in Europe, “She said she would do it later, but little did she know.” Yoder says this moment of quietness, when Nightbitch recognises her own mother’s sacrificed dreams — before, ultimately, her own — is likely her favourite part of the book.

“She turns around and looks at her mother and her parents even, and finds this new space of love and compassion for them,” Yoder explains. “She used to feel, you know, like maybe they didn’t understand her…and for a few moments in the book, she sees them and understands that, of course her mother understands what she’s going through.” We are, all of us, just trying to reconcile our many needs and roles in life.“It’s a surprising turn that I didn’t see coming, that she would sort of reconcile with her parents without them even sort of being present.”

Then later, when Nightbitch reveals her secret wanderings and transformations to her husband, and he cares for her in the shower. Washing her body with soap and cloth, massaging mud from her scalp, combing her hair. “What a husband, to love her through such a thing.”

And in the end, her SHOWING HER TRUE IDENTITY? Everyone sees it as something that’s DIVINE and INCREDIBLY POWERFUL

“Narrative-wise, you know, for Nightbitch, the problem wasn’t her husband,” Yoder explains of the choice not to use the husband as an easy plot device, to not make him as “a whipping boy” as a means for Nightbitch’s transformation. “It was an inside job. It was something internal to her and her husband was going to be part of the journey, it was just a question of how he would fit into her journey.”

“I love that moment in the shower, too, because she’s been so afraid to show anyone who she is,” Yoder says. “She thinks that her true self, her true desires are so monstrous and terrifying and ugly that how could anyone ever love her if they saw who she really was — and her husband’s like, I do love you. I think you’re magnificent and beautiful. And I love you all the more.’Yoder concludes by affirming what every frustrated, tired mother who struggles with her ambition needs, but rarely hears. “And in the end, her showing her true identity? Everyone sees it as something that’s divine and incredibly powerful.”

THE THEMES OF RETURNING to one’s self, and of wholly, completely inhabiting your power, have clearly resonated. A film adaptation has been in the works since before the novel’s release, starring none other than Amy Adams (it seems Adams, like Yoder, forgives being stood up on account of mistaken time zones). This mother-of-three, once writer-in-waiting, jumped on her email to contact Yoder, when still only a halfway through reading it, the thoughts and emotions divulged so resonant. Still, for the many ways this novel has becoming bigger than what it was intended to be, the reward has been in the process.

Of the first couple of years of motherhood when she didn’t have time to write — but more significantly, didn’t want to write — Yoder reflects, “[writing is] such an integral part of who I am, and motherhood is so all encompassing. And when people said, ‘oh, it’ll pass, it’ll pass,’ that wasn’t helpful for me because you don’t want to not be who you know yourself to be.”“You know, you want someone to say, ‘oh, I’ll help you find yourself again’— not ‘it’ll pass.’ Not ‘then you’ll be someone who you don’t know.’ ”

“I do remember writing the very end of the book, which I wrote last because I didn’t know how to write it,” she reflects. She was in a cafe — where most of this book was written — and when it was finally done, she closed her laptop and knew. Knew that was the book, that was the experience. Knew herself again. “I was like, ‘wow, that was it.’ That was the book I needed to write to get to this point; like that was the book I needed to write to teach me ‘the thing.’ And the book taught me how to write it and taught me how to be the person coming out the other side of it.”