Beyond Postpartum Body Horror: How Nightbitch Finds a Secret Third Destiny For New Mothers

Yes, there are dog nipples on Amy Adams in Nightbitch the film adaptation—I had wondered about this, so perhaps it’s helpful to know. There are six in the book, but eight in the movie. The tail is there, too, a cystic realization of the postpartum “condition,” and one viewed in the squished mirror of the bathroom in an Iowa City bungalow. (Bathrooms do seem smaller from the vantage of a postpartum body.)

I was curious how the film’s director, Marielle Heller, would handle the depiction of Rachel Yoder’s metaphor in Nightbitch: a mother (Amy Adams) who finds she is turning into a dog (“Nightbitch”) during the boggy, repetitive, grinding, joyful days of her son’s early childhood—a time when her husband is perpetually away at work. I wondered how beastly it would be.

In the book, “mother” engages in doggy behaviors like romping around the neighborhood at night with a pack of dogs, gobbling food face-first, sleeping in a pile with her son, and, I am afraid, killing the family cat. Though she worries she is growing a tail and is told by her child that her back is getting furry, there is always the room for the reader to allow doubt around how real her transformation is. The ambiguity of prose is useful: on the big screen, body horror risks superseding the vital internal conflicts, since the conversation around motherhood already feels derailed by its focus on the body rather than the soul. Freaky nipples are a symptom, but not the actual challenge, of motherhood.

Nightbitch’s art is successful because she creates a world you can believe in from the detritus of childhood; the audience are able to see themselves in it.

“One day, the mother was a mother, but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else,” writes Yoder in the novel, which I have studied obediently. The film treads carefully in these same tracks.

Nightbitch, mother’s alter ego, is a sane manifestation of “intense maternal ennui.” Mother is an artist who has given up her low-paying job in the arts to stay home with her son because it makes economic sense; a decision her husband (Scoot McNairy) accepts without protest, daring to return from his McKinsey-esque travel schedule and sleep through the child’s cries. You’d grow pointy canines too, if it happened to you. And maybe the family cat does suffer (somewhat more accidentally in the film than in the book) while you’re overburdened by parenting and the wiping of butts.

As the film begins, mother is withering, out of place at the mommy-and-me group at the library (which includes Veep’s extremely funny Mary Holland) but just as ill-fitting among her old crew of cool studio artists. What mother needs is a secret third thing, described here by Yoder:

“Who knew what would transpire if she fully embraced her desires to wag, to lovingly lick the fine hairs of her son’s head, to trample down a nice flat area in the bedsheets before herself curling there—chin resting on her forearms—and falling asleep?”

She finds temporary freedom lowering herself to her toddler’s level, splashing paint on the floor, growling while eating from the hot bar at Whole Foods, and getting properly dirty. Maybe, as Nightbitch’s husband suggests, happiness is a choice, and she just needs to have more fun with it. Or maybe she is working through an artistic problem. Older women recognize in her playful abandonment of behavioral norms something of their past selves tending to young children, and she in turn begins to see the knowledge that women carry quietly with them.

After she has begun her descent into doggiedom, Nightbitch finds a pile of carcasses that some coyotes (or maybe neighborhood moms-turned-dogs?) have left on her doorstep. The situation has gotten more serious. In the book, her child sees the bodies first:

He stuck out his fat little finger, eyes wide, and watched her to see how she would react to the pile–a literal pile–of mice and squirrels and rabbits and even one flaccid raccoon which had been left just outside the door, on the porch.

She gasped.

An offering. A sign. A welcome.

It’s an image Heller will come back to at the climax of the film. Nightbitch’s child is delighted by the carcasses. They look like toys. Like Jellycats. They reminded me of Mike Kelley’s Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, an enormous mobile of clouds of soft toys sewn face-in and hung from the ceiling, and of Fruit of Thy Loins, in which toys burst out of the abdomen of a bunny, an undermining of the simplicity and delusion of childhood.

The carcasses become the central artwork at Nightbitch’s art show in the film, which differs from the performance art in the book (Nightbitch eating a raw steak on stage and killing a bunny). In the middle of the gallery space is a merry-go-round—the same one your council ripped out of the park you visited as a child—adorned with a pyramid of animal pelts that connote the violence that begins motherhood, but also the death of childhood and the beginning of something else.

A much-quoted poem by Mary Ruefle, “Lectures I Will Never Give,” describes the way toys function as your first metaphor (she is talking about Rainer Maria Rilke’s work on this subject):

“When you were a kid, and you had a soldier or a doll, you invested a real animate life into the inanimate object, and you were experiencing your first act of poetry not when you spoke to them but when they spoke back to you, and invested life in you, and then this dialogue caused you to believe in the world and the world you could believe in was a world you had created yourself.”

Nightbitch’s art is successful because she creates a world you can believe in from the detritus of childhood; the audience are able to see themselves in it. On the walls are portraits of the women who helped her find her way back to art: the doggy neighborhood moms and also the librarian (Jessica Harper) who lends her a book about witchcraft, which details the mystical powers women have displayed over the centuries. (Somewhere, there must be a section in the book that explains what is happening to her, thinks Nightbitch, whose story in turn became that book for many mothers.) The reveal of the portrait of the older librarian—giver of the text! Maternal keeper of knowledge!—was the moment that brought a lump to my throat.

Art is the way you manage to angle a view that captures both perspectives, bridge the false gap between one identity and another, allow multiple things to be true.

The “great forgetting” a mother experiences as she abruptly moves from child to parent is not as foregrounded in the novel, but becomes a central idea in the film, in which the moms talk about the “before times.” Flashbacks show Nightbitch’s Mennonite mother singing with her church, but also running into the dark of the woods, returning covered in mud. Nightbitch remembers this from childhood. The films corrects this forgetting through the artworks.

The paintings for Nightbitch’s exhibition were created by the Chinese-born artist Junyi Liu (刘俊仪), who has said she creates “dreamlike, unreal worlds, yet [ones that] originate from reality.” That’s what Nightbitch does too: finds a way to represent—to see—the other mothers. It’s the act that brings her husband around to understanding, nearly too late, what she feels, what she is capable of as an artist, and what she needs from him. The visual artist Madeline Donohue focuses on motherhood despite being told in art school that no one wanted to see it, using herself as the subject in acrobatic, vibrant paintings of children somersaulting with their mother. She said to me recently, “If you can find a way to represent yourself in your art, you will succeed.” I wrote it down.

Sometimes I feel that motherhood is like driving a car and saying, “Horse! Out the window!” and the child in the back is crying because they were too slow and didn’t see it—but you, in fact, are both the mother and the child, unable to reconcile your multiple selves. In the after-times, you see it all, in visceral detail, and it’s hard to trim back to the tight frame of childhood.

Nightbitch’s world with her son involves sitting on the curb to watch the garbage truck come, standing around at the playground, and gradually panning out. Art is the way you manage to angle a view that captures both perspectives, bridge the false gap between one identity and another, allow multiple things to be true. The mother is a mother until the artist finds in her something else. Heller’s artwork nails it here.