Rachel Yoder

Fans of Fans of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 debut novel, Nightbitch (Doubleday), got a chance to see the genre-spanning tale adapted into a big-budget film when Amy Adams starred in the movie version, released in December. AW interviewed Yoder by email.

Our esteemed colleague Maureen McCollum, host of WPR’s “Wisconsin Life,” made time to talk with Yoder on WPR’s “BETA” about motherhood, reactions to the book, the film and what it might be like to live a dog’s life.

In a recent Mother Tongue essay, “A Matter of Time.” writer Rachel Yoder was inspired by a series of conversations with her young son about keeping track of every minute of every day. Yoder writes that his fixation on how much time he has left prompted her to reflect on the “particular gift of motherhood: the ability to hold both life and death in a single body. The ability to see reality while also finding space to hope.” Listen to the interview.

Director Marielle Heller and Author Rachel Yoder Discuss Their Creative Collaboration on "Nightbitch"

Romance, fury, domesticity, ferality — Greenwell and Yoder both grapple with the chaos and comforts of being human in a storytelling style that can’t be mistaken for another author. So we had a proposal for the two locals: Interview each other, let us record the conversation and then participate in a photoshoot that would double as a kind of trust exercise. In spite of some impossibly busy schedules, both writers were game.

Hannah Bonner considers Marielle Heller’s new adaptation of “Nightbitch,” Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel.

An instant hit thanks to its outrageous, subversive take on motherhood, Rachel Yoder’s debut novel Nightbitch was quickly picked up for a movie. As the film starring Amy Adams hits the big screen, we caught up with Rachel to chat about her reading habits, favourite authors, must-read books and what’s next..

Janet Manley on Marielle Heller’s Adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s Novel

The novelist’s cult book about a stay-at-home mother who turns into a dog is now a film starring Amy Adams. She talks about modern parenting, breaking taboos, and how Trump’s win spurred her to write.

“When people ask me what the movie is about, I’m like, ‘It’s about motherhood and rage,’” says director Marielle Heller in this exclusive first look. “And you either get that or you don’t.”

Amy Adams-vehicle Nightbitch has landed a Dec. 6, 2024, release in cinemas during the heart of awards season. The Searchlight Pictures and Annapurna film was originally intended to debut on Hulu, but will now get a theatrical release.

With series and movies such as ‘Yellowjackets’ and ‘Bones and All,’ female characters with an unbridled appetite have become a hallmark of our culture.

Birth is a transformational experience but it's also an emotionally fraught one, with sometimes traumatic consequences, says midwife Leah Hazard. Here she recommends five books that discuss the deep psychological impact of childbirth, the debate over interventionism, and the inequalities baked into the practice of obstetrics.

How do the demands of motherhood change us and can we survive with our pre-parenting identities intact? Rachel Yoder and Esther Freud in conversation.

Traditional depictions of motherhood failed in the face of the baffling new reality I faced once I became a mother.

Some of the Fodor’s editors are sharing what they loved to read this year, from new releases to books that have been on their wishlist for years.

The DNA of “Nightbitch,” it turns out, is more Angela Carter than Rachel Cusk. It sees the past decade’s cerebral fictions of motherhood and raises them several murdered forest creatures, a shit on a lawn, and a pack of M.L.M. moms stoned on trippy drugs watching another mom scarf raw steak.

In the novel Nightbitch, motherhood is a feral unbecoming. And in writing the best-selling book, the new mother and author, Rachel Yoder, returned to herself again.

Janet Manley on Hettie Judah and the Perennial Problem of the “Mother-Shaped Hole”

Leticia Urieta, author of "Las Criaturas," recommends stories about channeling anger and unruliness in the face of oppression

“It wasn’t long after I first held Evie that a somewhat familiar, yet unrecognizable darkness began to follow me around, and after some testing and hard truths were admitted, doctors were called, medication was prescribed, and talk therapy was set up.

A few weeks later, I found Nightbitch…”

In this episode of Open Form, Mychal talks to Rachel Yoder (Nightbitch) about the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, directed by John Hughes and starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, and Mia Sara.

In a crowded field of novel-manifestos about the indignity of parenting, Nightbitch is primal and corporeal, a labor scream of a book..

In this unforgettable debut novel, Yoder delivers an outrageous Kafka-esque parable about the mundanity and monstrosity of early motherhood.

If you’ve ever suspected motherhood had a darker, possibly feral underbelly, you’re sure to enjoy this darkly hilarious debut…

The red of it all is rather striking, and the classic advertising imagery, soft and grainy, feels both nostalgic and subversive, especially considering the novel’s premise: A stay-at-home mother/artist becomes convinced she’s turning into a dog. Blink and you’ll miss the butcher paper in the shape of a doberman’s head.

Does new motherhood create a monster?

Giving birth is the closest many of us come to being an outright animal. We crouch on all fours, dripping and howling, and, if it goes well, we are aided by instincts we didn’t know we had to push a snuffling, bloody creature into the world. Yet immediately, we are expected to give up on this new animality and return to society, whether it comes in the guise of work and childcare or maternity leave and baby massage classes. What if we refuse to do so?

Nightbitch is a satirical swipe at the failed ‘have it all’ lifestyle…By its conclusion, readers have to wonder: what is the ‘all’ that we were promised to have…

As a society, we know that women are angry. Still, we as women are expected to keep this anger close to us like a secret. If we ever do let it slip out, we are labeled “hysterical,” and “crazy”—descriptions that are meant to discredit us and our pent-up rage. Rachel Yoder’s recent debut book Nightbitch explores this anger through her main character, a woman so angry that she believes she is turning into a dog.

Last week, I had just finished the last page of Rachel Yoder’s fantastic novel, Nightbitch. I picked up my phone and found an eerily fitting screenshot from the show.

Thanks for watching my review for this book. If you are or have ever been a parent I'd love to know what you thought about it, and how much Yoder got absolutely spot on! This book will be on my mind for a while, and even now I'm thinking of stuff I wish I'd said here.

Libras are all about balance, because without balance, you might just wind up going a little . . . feral. So they will understand perfectly the plight of the artist in this book, who feels very unbalanced in her relegation to the household after the birth of her son, and one day discovers, quite by accident, that as a result she is beginning to turn into a dog. My fellow Libras, I know you already know.

Halfway through Nightbitch, I realized I’d been picturing the events taking place in the house where we lived when my first child was little.

This one already had tongues wagging last year when Amy Adams optioned it for film while it was still in manuscript form. Now readers will have a chance to see what all the fuss is about, and judging by the instantly iconic cover and ecstatic blurbs, it might well be the debut of the year. A feral fairy tale of maternal dissatisfaction, it’s best to go into this one knowing as little possible, the better to let Yoder work her devious magic on you.

"Nightbitch" is a Kafkaesque novel, and the plot is hard to describe: It involves a multilevel marketing scheme, some intense suburban moms, and a book about mythical women — but don't let that deter you. It's filled with wickedly smart observations and hilarious — and heartbreaking — moments. "Nightbitch" made this mother of young children feel more seen or heard than I have in years. —Sarah Gelman

The narrator of Rachel Yoder's electric debut novel — which is already slated for an adaptation starring Amy Adams — asks the age-old question: Am I struggling with new motherhood, or am I turning into a dog? (July 20)

In this blazingly smart and voracious debut, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. 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.

Rachel Yoder’s debut novel Nightbitch is a fabulist satirical novel that looks at art, power, and womanhood in a truly unexpected way. In this book, an artist puts her career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but motherhood is nothing like what she thought it would be. And she becomes convinced she’s slowly turning into a dog. As her symptoms increase, she looks for a cure and instead discovers a mysterious book called A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography. Then she starts hanging out with a group of mothers involved in a suspicious multi-level marketing scheme.

The protagonist in Rachel Yoder’s debut novel of transfiguration and maternal rage has lost her sense of identity. Indeed, we know her first simply as ‘the mother’, and then by an assumed name, Nightbitch, a moniker she takes for herself after worrying that she is turning into a dog – extreme hair-growth, new fangs, tail and all.

In Rachel Yoder’s sharply observant debut novel, a frustrated stay-at-home mom finds herself shifting into a canine form. No one, not even her husband, believes her when she tells them about the changes to her body and mind, but Yoder’s protagonist soon finds refuge in a strange book — A Field Guide to Magical Women — and an MLM clique that may have something much weirder than a pyramid scheme in the works.

The plot of this book is out of the world. To put it in a sentence – an ambitious artist decides to give up her job to become a homemaker mother, and somehow ends up believing that she is a dog. A literary fiction imbued with magical realism, this follows the mother’s life as she struggles to keep her canine identity secret from the world. In the process, she discovers other mothers who also have magic backgrounds and are involved in a marketing scheme. This is powerful but humorous take on womanhood, motherhood, art and belief system that we think will blow your mind.

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.

“That night, as she waited in bed beside the boy, her husband lounged in a hotel room somewhere, reading a book or watching TV or playing video games, eating from a room-service tray laid out on the bed.”

The experience of new motherhood is wearying and transformative in a million different ways. A woman, once exclusively her own entity, has now pushed a new human into the world, causing changes not only in her own body but also in her sense of self and society’s view of her. In layman’s terms, the entire process can feel separate from being human — like being a beast.

Choose your battles, Cancer. Your birthday has you looking at the big picture of your life, and you see plenty of things you’d like to change. But July is not the time for major transformations. This may cause some frustrations for you as you try to move forward. Go easy on the people around you, and on yourself as well.

A nameless mother has put her creative career on hold to stay at home and raise her son. Her husband travels for work five days a week, leaving the mother to navigate the loneliness and isolation of raising a demanding toddler while constantly grappling with the loss of her former self.

“This season’s hot debuts include a psychological thriller about a young woman who will stop at nothing to achieve her writerly ambition, a systems novel set in Las Vegas, an exploration of the racial divide after Obama’s election, a chronicle of a new mother’s metamorphosis into a dog, and much more. In these ten profiles, the authors share the stories behind their work and what they hope to accomplish with fiction.” Read More

“Annapurna Pictures has won an auction and landed the rights to Rachel Yoder’s upcoming debut novel Nightbitch. The novel will be developed as a star vehicle for six-time Oscar nominated actress Amy Adams.

The author will adapt the novel and will be executive producer alongside Megan Ellison, Sue Naegle, and Sammy Scher for Annapurna. Adams and Stacy O’Neil will produce through Bond Group Entertainment.” Read More

“Harvill Secker has triumphed in a five-way auction for agent Rachel Yoder’s debut Nightbitch, billed as a ‘transgressive’ novel on modern motherhood.” Read More

“Rachel Yoder's first book hasn't even released yet, but she's already finished the screenplay for a film adaptation slated to star Oscar-nominated actress Amy Adams.” Read More

Ghost Creek is a short film experience produced by the Mission Creek Festival team. Read more.