July 29, 2021
Lara Ehrlich
Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest today is Rachel Yoder. Before I introduce Rachel, thank you all for tuning in, and please chat with us during the interview. Your comments will appear in our studio, and we’ll weave them into our discussion. If you enjoy the episode, please also consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon to help keep the podcast going. Now, I’m excited to introduce Rachel. Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch, her debut novel, set for release on July 20, which has also been optioned for film with Amy Adams set to star. She is a graduate of the Iowa nonfiction writing program and also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. She is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. Rachel grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of Eastern Ohio. She now lives in Iowa City with her husband and 7-year-old son. She describes writer motherhood in three words as “never enough time.” Now, please join me in welcoming Rachel.
Rachel Yoder
Hi, Lara.
Lara Ehrlich
Hi, Rachel, and congratulations on the soon-to-be released novel. Look at this. It’s gorgeous. And it’s a wonderful book.
Rachel Yoder
Thank you. And it just so happens, the image is pulled from a vintage meat ad, which has astonishing, extraordinary messaging about meat about how meat is so good for you.
Lara Ehrlich
Very appropriate for the book, right?
Rachel Yoder
Yeah, right.
Lara Ehrlich
We’re going to get into that pretty deeply in a few minutes. But first, let’s talk about the three words that you chose to describe writer motherhood. “Never enough time,” I think resonates with most of the people listening. Why those words?
Rachel Yoder
Yeah, I mean, I tried to come up with something a little bit more positive, but motherhood and being an artist has been about the negotiation of time. What time can I take? What time do I need to give? I find my life being scheduled into smaller and smaller bits. That’s the central tension for me, especially with a partner who does, as the partner in the book, work out of town every week. It’s this constant “When are you leaving?” “When are you coming?” “When can I leave?” “When can I come?” Never enough time, as compared to my two MFAs, during which, I spent all my time, all of my single time, in my creative space. It was a big changer from that sort of lifestyle.
Lara Ehrlich
Oh, I’m sure, yeah. Your son is 7 now, so I’m sure that negotiation with time has changed and morphed throughout the years.
Rachel Yoder
It has, and you know what’s really funny? I just realized this. My son is very creative in a very different way than I am. He is a builder and loves to build Legos and Minecraft, and my main negotiation with him now is about time. How much screen time can you have? How much listening to podcast time can you have? That tension has now transferred over to his grade of life. Maybe I need to think about that a little bit more. I sent him to half-day nature camp, and this morning, he’s like, “I don’t want to go to camp. I don’t have enough time. I want more time for my projects and my creative space.” And I was like, interesting. I’ve heard that before. Maybe it’s tension that we now share, oddly enough?
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. I wonder if there’s ever enough time for creative people.
Rachel Yoder
Yeah, that’s a great question. Is there ever enough time. It feels like that’s probably a central tension for many creative people.
Lara Ehrlich
You feel like you had enough time during your MFA programs, even though it was a very different type of place in space?
Rachel Yoder
I did. It felt really wide open, especially during my first MFA, when I was really uncomfortable with teaching. Teaching took up a lot of time. I actually gave up my teachership in my second year, because I didn’t go to get my MFA to spend all my time teaching or worrying about teaching. I think there was a really big commitment on the part of the program to give students a lot of time, and the teaching loads weren’t that heavy, especially when I came to Iowa. I was very lucky, grateful for a fellowship that I got. That was really my condition for myself. I’m getting a second MFA, which is sort of a ridiculous, embarrassing thing to do, but I was like, if I’m going to do this, I’m only going if I get a fellowship, so all my time can be spent on writing.
Lara Ehrlich
Tell me about the two MFAs, and I don’t think it’s ridiculous and embarrassing, considering one of them is from Iowa, which is, of course, incredible. But tell me about the first one, about nonfiction and where you started and why you started there, and then about the movement to fiction at Iowa.
Rachel Yoder
It’s actually flipped. The fiction was first, and it was at Arizona, and then I moved into nonfiction at Iowa. I was 25 when I got my MFA, which felt really young. I hadn’t studied creative writing as an undergrad. It all felt very new to me. I wasn’t familiar with the literary community. When I went into that program at all, everyone else felt a lot smarter than me. They had gotten their undergrad degrees in creative writing and kind of knew how to talk like writers. And I was like, who are you people. That just felt like I was getting my feet wet. I didn’t quite know where I was or what I was doing. It was only after those two years that I realized, oh, okay, this is what I just did, and this is the literary world. I didn’t know about literary journals, really, before I went there. I had published a Modern Love essay when I was at University of Arizona, and that was my first dabble into nonfiction. I took a few nonfiction classes when I was there, too. And all of my fiction was very autobiographical. It was very autofiction. I was really interested in what is nonfiction all about? Should I be an essay writer? Should I be writing a memoir? I seem too young to be writing a memoir, but all of my stories are drawn from my life. I’m really glad I wound up at Iowa, because the focus is so much on the essay and what an essay is. I feel like my literary repertoire was really expanded at Iowa, looking at a lot of experimental forums, talking about all the different ways in which you can think about narrative, thinking about the narrative of an idea—which was something really new to me and that really sparked my imagination. I think in Nightbitch, I really brought all of that to bear. Before I went to Iowa, before I got a nonfiction degree, I was really scared of exposition or any sort of telling stories. My stories were very mannered, very stylized, very “only showing,” sort of mysterious, like, what is going on. But when I sat down to write Nightbitch, I knew that there was going to be a lot of just ranting, for lack of a better word, and I was a lot more comfortable with that, because I knew that there were a lot of ideas that were also going to be part of the story, and I felt more comfortable using that mode, as well as all the tools and tricks I knew from writing short stories.
Lara Ehrlich
Talk us through Nightbitch a little bit, for anyone who doesn’t know what it’s about. Give us the elevator pitch.
Rachel Yoder
Nightbitch is about an ambitious artist turned reluctant, stay-at-home mom who becomes convinced she’s turning into a dog. It’s looking at issues of rage and power and ambition and motherhood, and it’s really challenging a lot of messages that we’ve been given about what motherhood is and what it should be and what womanhood is, through this story of … a mom-dog? A were-mom? Or is she? Which is also in question in the book.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, all of those themes resonated with me so much and I’m sure will with readers, as well. It’s an amazing book and premise and ranting. I think you’re right. It has a negative connotation to rant. But in the best possible way, I see what you mean in this book, and the rage really comes through. Talk to me about rage.
Rachel Yoder
Yeah, I was really angry in early motherhood, and I never was given any tools for dealing with anger. It felt really uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to express it. I felt guilty for being angry. I come from a Mennonite background, and anger is right next to violence. Mennonites are pacifists, so my instinct is to never express anger and to just deal with it on the inside. But that wasn’t working. For me in early motherhood, it was, like, rage. Rage can really destroy you, if you let it. The book was me trying to negotiate that rage and figure out how to deal with it. I think that’s, again, probably something a lot of women struggle with, how to be angry. You don’t want to be the angry woman. People just stop listening to you, which has been my experience. When you get angry, you lose all your credibility. In this book, I wanted her to be so angry that you couldn’t look away. Like, you had to listen. And to show that she was being completely logical and completely credible, despite her anger. That felt really important for me.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, completely credible and logical in the most illogical of premises, kind of.
Rachel Yoder
Yeah.
Lara Ehrlich
Which is an amazing balance to strike.
Rachel Yoder
I also feel like there’s something that felt very logical, even about the absurd premise, to me. I didn’t interrogate it too much. I just ran with it, no pun intended. There was something that felt deeply right about her turning into an animal, so that became something very interesting to explore. It was kind of like, what is this all about? Let’s see how it plays out over the course of this book.
Lara Ehrlich
I totally I understand that. And I love that. It’s interesting. A draft of a book that I just finished, I started writing with the word “rage” in mind, and it was an emotion that I wanted to tap into, and then the story was kind of secondary. It was like the rage was driving the characters and the plot, and it sounds like you’re saying something similar here. Did the rage come first and then the story was crafted around the rage, or how did that come to be?
Rachel Yoder
Oh, yeah, the rage came first. You have to remember, I was writing this deep during the Trump presidency. I started it soon after he was elected, and that the helplessness and rage I felt on election night, sitting there after it was called, and being like, “I have known this man. I have met this man so many times, and I have felt small and foolish in his presence.” And that was the night it really began. It kind of cracked everything open for me, because it seemed like something must be done in the face of what had just happened. But I think, too, having my son and then deciding to quit working and stay home with him was a big transition out of my girlhood into my womanhood, and a very rocky one at that. It was me having to learn how to own my rage, own my power, own my womanhood, and I didn’t know how to do that. Yeah, the rage came first, and the book was, in very many ways, like a catharsis. I had to figure out how to work through it, and the rage was very inarticulate for a long time.
Lara Ehrlich
Wow, there’s so many directions I want to take, but what made you angry? Obviously, the election, which, I am right there with you. My daughter was not even 1, I think. I’m hearing this result that would shape her childhood for at least four years of her life, which is devastating. That is a very tangible rage. What else made you angry in early motherhood?
Rachel Yoder
Well, I was never the kind of girl who fantasized about getting married or becoming a mom. My fantasy was about moving to New York City, working in a high rise, wearing high-heeled shoes, ordering takeout. From a very early age, I wanted to have a big, juicy, great life, and I really saw that centering on my career. My vision for what my motherhood would look like with my husband was that we would both work in town, we’d have both come home at 5 o’clock, it would be a very equal undertaking, I would be able to be fulfilled in my career, I would be able to keep all these parts of me that were really important, I’d be able to write here and there. And just because of the specific logistics of our lives, that is not at all what wound up happening. I also should add that after my son was born, I lost my desire to work. While I did still want to, it became a lot easier to see how stepping out would happen. I was so deeply in love with my baby the first year. The oxytocin was doing its magic. I was high all the time on my baby, my baby hormones. Actually, for the first nine or 10 months of his life, I did work. He was at daycare for 40 hours a week, and I was in agony. I was like, is this what modern motherhood is? You see your baby from 5 to 8 or whenever he falls asleep? Or maybe he has been awake at daycare all day, and as soon as you get him, he falls asleep, and you never see him awake. That felt like a tragedy to me. Like, I don’t want this to be my motherhood. So, then, okay, I’ll quit my job. Well, we won’t have any money. We’ll make do with one career. And that’s what happened. I find myself at home with him, and it’s great for a while. It’s all I want. I want to go to the park with my baby. I want to hold him every time he falls asleep. I want to nurse him to sleep. It was great, and I was so grateful that I could do that. But after a time, by the time he got to be 2 or 3, I sort of came to, from this view this baby view, and was like, what have I done? I’m 38, I have stepped out of the workforce, I have not written for two years, my husband is never here, I don’t have any friends, and I have a toddler. Suddenly, it felt like the trap that I had been working my whole life to avoid. Marriage always felt like a trap to me, motherhood felt like a trap, and I was like, how did I get here? Despite my two MFAs, despite my this, that, and the other thing and all this ambition I had, how am I still here? Despite my great partner, despite this great community I live in. That’s when the ball really started rolling, because I just started thinking, like, of course, this is how it’s all set up. I think that’s where the rants began. I knew that if this had happened to me, then certainly it happened to so many other women. How do we escape that story? How do we write another story? It seems almost impossible. That’s where the rage came from. And the rage also came out of desperation and isolation, too—this huge feeling of being so alone. Like, who can I turn to? We didn’t have family in town, all my grad school friends had moved away. I was like, where’s my pack? Where’s my community? How do you find a community nowadays, if you’re not part of a church or some other established thing? These all felt like really insurmountable questions to me, and I couldn’t figure them out.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. Did writing the book help?
Rachel Yoder
Yeah, it did on many levels, because I went back to writing. If I could do one thing differently, even though I didn’t want to write, and I thought I didn’t have anything to write in the first two years that my son was alive, I would have made myself write. I find time to write every day—not, like, while he napped, but being like, no, I need to pay someone for two hours a day to come. I think that would have been incredibly helpful for me to move through it, but I didn’t know that. The book was me writing the story I needed to read. It was putting these characters that were very similar to me and my husband and my son in a very similar situation—except I didn’t think I was turning into a dog, so throwing that into the mix. How can we use these characters, or embodiments of ideas, and move them through time and space to some sort of resolution? The structure of story is what I turned to, to find some resolution. It’s such a good engine. That’s what I’ve done for it for the last 20 years. The reason I started writing was because I was in deep crisis. I had left my family, I’d left my Mennonite community, I’d had a huge, cataclysmic break in my life. I was just this girl alone in Arizona without her pack. That was when I first started writing, because writing has this promise of resolution if do it enough, and resolution not in the sense that you’ve figured something but that you’ve moved through something. You’ve moved to a different place. And that is very much what I wanted me to do. When I started writing this, I was in a place of rage. I was in a place where I thought I was helpless and powerless. I knew I needed to move somewhere different. How do I do that? Through the use of story.
Lara Ehrlich
Let’s go back for a second, if I can remember my thought because I was so enthralled by what you were saying. Your point that had you known, you would have hired someone to come and give you those two hours a day or whatever it would be. For anyone listening, who hasn’t thought to do that, why is that an important thing to do?
Rachel Yoder
I was actually talking to my best friend about this last night, and she told me this anecdote, which I thought was so great. She was a long-distance runner before she had her three kids. Before she had her baby, she was wise enough, she turned her husband and said, “I am never going to stop running. I want you to know that.” And she said that because she knew it was the part of her that made her her. It’s what made her feel alive. It’s what fulfilled her in a very deep, soulful way. As soon as her son was born a few weeks after, she gave the baby to her husband and said, “I’m going for a run now”—probably not fully wanting to go for a run, but she went for a run. On the run, he called her and said, “The baby’s crying.” She’s like, “Welcome to fatherhood. I’m going to finish my run.” Like, figure it out, you know? That blew my mind. Like, yes, of course, it’s not only that you’re doing something for yourself that’s not just superficial self-care but something that is important to who you are, but you’re also setting up a dynamic with your partner about how this is going to go. You are setting up a way in which your core self should be treated. You’re saying, I’m going to cherish my core self, I’m going to cherish the part of me that makes me me, and it’s really important for me not to lose that. It’s like a ritual that you’re setting up and a way of relating with that core self. That is really important. I think, again, even if I had hired someone, with money we didn’t have, to come for two hours, and then I went to the coffee shop and ate a cookie and just sat there, I still should have done that, because that would have been me taking care of myself in the way I needed to and respecting who I was and valuing myself properly.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. I know self-care is something you wanted to talk about specifically during this conversation. Tell me what the word means in our culture and then what it means to you.
Rachel Yoder
I get this look on my face when you say, “Tell me what it means in our culture,” because it feels so superficial and corrupt at this point—you know, the commodification of self-care. It feels like a business, and whenever anything turns into a business, it feels like it’s far away from its original intent to me. Again, I was talking to my best friend about this, how real self-care requires you getting to know yourself and getting quiet and still with yourself and figuring out what you need and want and what needs aren’t being met. I think there’s a trap that you can fall into of superficial self-care. “I went and got a facial, and I should be feeling great now.” Maybe those are your forms of deep self-care. It’s different for everyone. But I think the real self -care comes in taking care of your internal self and coming into a better relationship with yourself. That’s what we’re really going for here.
Lara Ehrlich
What’s your form of self-care? What do you do?
Rachel Yoder
Writing is a huge form of self-care for me. Whenever I’m not writing—and my husband actually sees this sooner than I do—he’s like, “You’re a mess. Do you need to write?” And it’s like, yeah, I actually do. It’s my way of being still and quiet and going somewhere that feels really sacred and working from there, which is what I need. I’ve also found that gardening is a form of self-care, touching the earth and being in relationship with these amazing things that are alive and are so weird and have so much vitality and personality. I’m looking at my flowers right now. There are so many personalities out there. They all have something to say. I’ve also recently gotten into somatic therapy. I’ve started working with a somatic therapist who, when I asked her what I can do when I’m feeling really anxious, she’ll say stuff like “you could drink a glass of water” or “you could look out a window at something very far away.” And I’m like, “You’re insane. What are you talking about?” But really, what she’s getting at is how can I become more a part of my surroundings? How can I become more aware of my body as a thing in this incredible system that’s all around me? A huge part of self-care for me, for this past year, has been understanding how to communicate and listen to my body. So many women are estranged from their bodies and from the sensations of their bodies. That has been a mind-blowing thing for me, too. Nightbitch has a lot to do with being in communication with the sensations of your body. That has been some real self-care for me, negotiating my relationship with my body.
Lara Ehrlich
I feel the same way, actually. I’ve heard that from a lot of women on the show, that sense of disconnect from our bodies and how somehow motherhood brings you back into your body, through pregnancy and then through nourishing your child with your body. Even women who don’t give birth and who don’t breastfeed still come back to their bodies in a very vital way. Did motherhood bring you back to your body?
Rachel Yoder
That’s a great question. I loved being pregnant. I loved all the sensations of pregnancy. This sounds totally crazy, but I love giving birth. That’s, obviously, a mama who gave birth seven years ago saying that. Did it bring me back to my body? Yes. It made me understand my body had a lot more potential than I thought it did, and therefore I had a lot more potential than I thought I did, in terms of strength and resiliency and doing something really hard. That has been a big piece of my relationship with my body. I also have some autoimmune stuff and incredible pain in my body, which has been something that I’m also negotiating, and I think part of the horror of the body in Nightbitch is a body that seems to be out of sync with you or at odds with you. I’m really interested in that tension and what stories that has to tell.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, let’s stick with that for a second and talk about transformation and women’s bodies and that out of sync feeling. Just go deeper there. That’s so fascinating.
Rachel Yoder
I think what was interesting to me about Nightbitch is that it is a narrative of her being literally at odds with her own body. Like, there’s another animal in there that she’s warring with, but also the fact that her body, on a literal, physical level, is expressing things that she cannot express. In her silence, in her inability to take action, in her internalized, repressed rage, her body begins to change, because it’s like, “I am not going to wait for you. Catch up. This is where we’re going, and you’re coming along, whether you like it or not.” At first, she resists her body, but then, as she figures out how to negotiate it, how to wrangle it, she sees that it’s saying something very important, and it’s crucial to her coming into her own power, to her transforming into this artist and woman and mother that she always wanted to be. It just seems like we can’t go there without our bodies. We have to bring our bodies along. I’ve recently gotten Botox in my face, and I’m like, can I do that? Can I do this and be the person I want to be? Is there any way to get Botox in my face that doesn’t reinforce the message that I am flawed? Is there any way to do it? I don’t know if there is. I’m feeling it out. It doesn’t mean I’m not ever gonna get Botox again. It means that’s an open question right now that I’m negotiating, and more will be revealed. But for lots of people, there’s a thought that the mind and the body are separate, and we can do one thing in one place, and it won’t affect the other place. It’s become incredibly clear to me that we’re this one unified animal. I’m really interested in the ways that all those parts of us are working together, because I think they constantly are, and they’re constantly telling us things, whether we hear it or not.
Lara Ehrlich
Well said. I think this is a good transition to maybe sharing a little bit of Nightbitch, if you’d like to read to us.
Rachel Yoder
Sure. I can read just a little bit of the beginning and give you a little taste. This is the first time I’m reading from a finished copy here, so thank you for the opportunity to do this. It’s really exciting. Okay, so this is from the very beginning of the book:
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.
That’s their relationship in a nutshell.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you for reading, and I’m honored to be the first place in the real book. Let’s talk on a craft level for a second about that opening and about how effectively and beautifully you set up the entire rest of the book with those first few paragraphs in such a matter-of-fact way—here’s what’s happening to this woman, she accepts it as a matter of course, even if she’s going to rebel against it—and just how efficiently you do that in the first page. Talk about that.
Rachel Yoder
Well, thanks. There is a lot going on there, I think. When I just read it now, I was like, oh, what’s so evident from page one is her own internal gaslighting, her own internal doubting of what’s happening. Then that’s reinforced by her husband, who’s like, “Oh, you’re being silly again” and “yeah, you’re totally turning into a dog.” That’s a dynamic that I think a lot of us can relate to, where you don’t take yourself seriously, for many reasons. That’s also a really big tension in the book, her not knowing whether what she’s thinking is worth being taken seriously, and her getting to a point where she’s like, “No, what I’m saying must be heard.” It starts off as a joke. She wants to be a cool girl who can take a joke, she’s not uptight—which is a vibe I definitely relate to and have related to throughout my life—not wanting to be confrontational, not wanting to be uptight about feminist stuff. I think now in midlife, I’m like, “No, it’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit.” And it’s all designed to make us feel bad about standing up for ourselves, make us feel bad about being angry, make us feel bad about hurting the man’s feelings or confronting a man. It’s just so insidious. I feel like all of that is sort of swirling on this first page, and I think it sort of swirls between the wife and husband in the book. That was a really interesting dynamic to write, because I don’t think he’s a bad guy, and I didn’t want to make him a bad-guy character, but I did want to show that they were both part of this pretty insidious dynamic that was really unconscious to both of them until it gets to a point where she realizes the power is within her grasp to transform their dynamic.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, and actually, you just touched on this, too, but the power of naming, too, that she claims this name for herself, and it has the word “bitch” in it. You know, claiming away from those who use it in a disparaging term against women who are angry or women who speak out. There’s just so much power in the book generally, but in that first page plus, you really start off with a bang.
Rachel Yoder
Well, isn’t it interesting, too, that “bitch” is a word given to women by men? Because I feel like if someone’s a bitch, I want to be their friend. Like, that’s a plus in my book. I want to know what’s going on with you. It’s just this very obviously gendered slur. I did think about that, like, should I take it back? Do I even want to take it back?
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. This is such a technical question, but was the book always called Nightbitch?
Rachel Yoder
It was. The title was the very first thing. I did talk to some editors who were like, “If we publish this, we can’t keep at Nightbitch.” And I’m like, “That might be a deal breaker for me.” I just felt like that’s what it had to be.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I mean … if you see this on a shelf, you’re gonna pick this up, right? It has meat and the word “Nightbitch.”
Rachel Yoder
It’s also, like, totally absurd.
It is very angry, but that had to be leavened with the humor. It was also just really fun to write, because I could be utterly absurd and just play around.
Lara Ehrlich
Let’s talk a little bit about the book on a publishing level. Tell us a little bit of story about publishing Nightbitch and about what’s next for it, because you have some exciting next steps for the book.
Rachel Yoder
The deal happened right before we all shut down for COVID last year. Really quickly. I found my dream editor. She saw it, and she knew. She was like, “Yes, yes, we’re doing it.” And I was like, “Okay, yes, let’s do it.” It’s been a joy to work with her. Her name is Margot Segmanta, and she works at Doubleday. We did some editing during the pandemic. It wasn’t really in-depth editing; it was adding a little bit more to the MLM mommy narrative and building that out, fiddling with the middle backstory part, which was always a little problematic and hopefully works now, and then just fine-tuning language in some areas. That went really smoothly. And it should be noted that every single person who I have worked with on this book and with the film, which we’ll talk about, has been a woman. Every single person, which I find astonishing. I feel so lucky. It just hit me the other day. Especially for film stuff, you don’t get to work with women, but the executive who I’m working with, the producers are women. Soon after the book was sold, some sort of magic happened, and everyone in Hollywood had the manuscript. I still have to get clear with my agent on how exactly this happened. But I got hooked up with a film agent, and she’s like, “Okay, we’re gonna sell it.” And she did her thing. During the pandemic, I was taking calls with producers and with Amy Adams. It was a pretty long process, but it was also really interesting, because you would have calls with these producers, and they just wanted to talk about your work and talk about the story, which was really fun and gratifying. It was great. I think about it took about six months to get a contract, and everything kind of paused at that point. Hollywood was shut down. But now we’re in July again—how is it July again?—and it seems there’s been some movement and hopefully there will be an announcement soon. Things are moving forward in a really positive way with people who are just really vibing with Nightbitch. So many moms and women are vibing with my pitch, and so I’m just really excited to see what someone else does with the story. It feels like something that is no longer mine. I think on July 20, it’s really not gonna feel like mine. It’s gonna feel like this thing that is doing something out in the world.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, July 20, and then the book will be on shelves. I want to be respectful, because there are some things that you are not able to talk about yet, when It comes to the film, but can you tell me about any of the calls that you had? Can you tell me about talking to Amy Adams and what that conversation was like?
Rachel Yoder
I think so. It was funny because my son was home, and I got the time zones wrong, so I had just gotten out of the shower, and my phone rang. I was literally in the towel, and she’s like, “Hi, it’s Amy.” And I’m like, “Um, I’m sorry, I got the time wrong.” She was very sweet. She’s really smart, and it was a very personable conversation. It’s pretty amazing to be able to ask, you know, what scenes resonated with you the most? And what was it about the book that captured your imagination or your interest? She said she was really interested in the feral rage of the book. She’s been taking edgier roles of late, but still, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen completely unhinged Amy Adams. I think that’s probably an exciting prospect for her to go into this new territory. I think it is in the right hands. It can be something that’s really singular and funny but also deeply earnest and serious. It was completely surreal. She said she really liked the script from arrival, because at the beginning of it, she had no idea how it was going to end, and she likes things that are really surprising. She had a very sophisticated aesthetic sensibility, so I was like, “Yes! Yes. Thank you! This is what I want, too!” It was wonderful. It’s just been wonderful working with everyone who I’ve worked with so far and feeling like what I wrote is being respected and understood and handled in a way that’s gonna do it justice. By women, it should be noted.
Lara Ehrlich
Like I said, I think that the scenes and the ferocious energy of the book really resonate especially now. It feels like there is a swelling of rage among women that you’ve really tapped into, so it’s the right time and place for this book, I think.
Rachel Yoder
I hope so. I hope that women will be able to read it and say, “Oh, this is what I can do with my rage,” or it’ll give them a way to think about how rage can be generative and propulsive and creative and can actually serve you very, very well, if you know how to come into relationship with it, instead of trying to repress it or push it away. Like, inviting it in, inviting the beast in and asking what is up? What do you want? That is what I hope women do, come into closer relationship with their rage from this book.
Lara Ehrlich
Let’s talk about that a little bit more. This goes back to something you said early on, that with your upbringing, rage is something that you hold at bay. I think that’s something, whether you grew up as a Mennonite or not, women are taught, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, to hold their rage at bay. You’re not supposed to be angry. You’re not supposed to be a bitch. You’re not supposed to argue. Can we talk a little bit more about your grappling with that complexity and where you’ve come out the other end? You say you want women to invite the beast in. What can it do for you?
Rachel Yoder
I think rage is a piece of self-care for me. I feel so guilty sometimes, going and getting a hotel room for the weekend after my husband’s been gone, being like, “Peace, bye, you’re with the kid on your own.” The way I get through that is you summon the beast. Here is your ambition. Here is Nightbitch. Like, Nightbitch needs to fucking go and get room service and have no one talk to her for two days. Like, let’s get serious. There are lots of different ways of talking about it. It could be rage, it could be bringing your fierce mother energy to yourself, to your own caretaking. Rage has been so propulsive for me. I mean, it created a book where I was like, “I haven’t written in two years, I am a writer, I am going to write a fucking book now.” It gave me focus, like, this is what I’m doing. There’s no negotiating my way out of it. Here we go. If you feel guilty, cool—we’re gonna do it anyway. If you feel like you’re abandoning your family, cool—we’re gonna do it anyway. The rage is really at all of the other voices who would have me act otherwise, and that is power, to have a fierceness that you can bring to all of this other stuff around you. That has been really helpful for me, to focus my rage in those ways and to use it to protect myself, to protect my time, to protect the thing that makes me me. I have to do it every day. It’s a constant negotiation. You can see it in how I’m sitting. You take the rage, and you put it in your chest, and that’s how you activate it. You can take the rage, and you can put it in your guts, and it’ll eat you alive. You can hold it in different parts of your body. Yeah, this is what’s always going on in my head these days. I don’t know. Pandemic. Too much time to myself. But that’s how I think about it. Like, where is it in my body? How does it feel? Where does it feel like it’s harming myself, when I feel sick with rage? Where is it then? How can I become more comfortable? Can I drink a glass of water? Can I look at a tree far away? Yeah, all of this work on myself—all of my work with my physical ailments, all of my art—it all just really feels like it’s converging now. That’s what this book was, a convergence of all of these different relationships and negotiations and problems and trying to find how that all comes together in this story. And it can be a story that’s hopeful in the end. Not everything was resolved, but she’s headed there. She’s found a first stage on which to perform this self, and we can be hopeful that she’s now on the right path.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you, Rachel. That’s the best ending, right there. Thank you so much for joining me. This has just been such a pleasure. I’d like to talk to you every day. It’s been such a pleasure, everyone. Thank you all for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode. Go out and get your own copy of Nightbitch, and I will see you all next time. Thank you, and good night.