Donna Freitas is the author of a number of award-winning, critically acclaimed books, including the novel The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano (published in twenty languages) and Her One Regret, the memoirs Consent and Wishful Thinking, and over a dozen novels for children and young adults. She has a PhD in Gender Studies and Religion, and teaches creative writing.
At CrimeReads Freitas tagged "seven of my favorite books/series that offer portraits of very complicated motherhood." One title on the list:
Rachel Yoder, NightbitchRead about another book on the list.
Perhaps as a palate cleanser if you end up reading, We Need to Talk about Kevin, you can turn to Yoder’s Nightbitch, about a new mother who suspects she’s starting to turn into a dog (for example, she becomes convinced early on she’s growing a tale.) This is one long,funny, biting fever dream about the earliest days and months of new motherhood, in all its ambivalence, rage, confusion, and the kinds of things that happen when you never sleep.
One of my favorite things about “the mother” in this novel, is how clever Yoder approaches this stage in a mother’s life—with her very name being replaced by “the mother” as though she no longer is anything but, and how Yoder hilariously displays the ways that husbands/fathers abandon women to this stage of child-rearing, and roundly dismiss the concerns their wives might raise as just their “imagination” playing tricks.
Nightbitch is among Jane Flett's seven top novels about brilliant freaks and Erin Swan's five books about fragile worlds.
--Marshal Zeringue
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