Corporeality and Motherhood: A Conversation with Rachel Yoder
“A profound form of estrangement from the self is estrangement from the body: addiction of any sort, making poor decisions regarding wellness, ignoring pain or discomfort or other malfunctions.”
Firstly, I’d love to find out a little more about your path to becoming a writer. You have two Master’s degrees in creative writing and have also worked as an agent, festival programmer and editor, so you had already experienced this creative industry from different perspectives before being published, so what was the catalyst for you to move towards writing?
I took my first creative writing class when I was 22 and working an administrative job at a small college. I was on my own for the first time and trying to figure out how to be a person in the world. Writing gave me a method by which I could bring a self into existence through storytelling. It was life-saving in many ways because it gave me an outlet for my growing pains and served as a sort of psychological laboratory in which I could place a girl very much like myself in different situations and make her move around, watch what she did, attempt to figure her out. I didn’t definitively “figure anything out,” of course, but I did commit to writing as a way of life then.
I read a wonderful article you wrote about chronic pain in Literary Hub, where you wrote: “As a person who has paid close attention for two decades to words, sentences, and the stories I tell, it was astonishing to realize I had never given such close attention to the details, sensations, and story of my body.” I love this idea and wondered if you could perhaps talk to our readers a little more about your experience of taking notice of your body and how paying attention to our physical selves relates to the storytelling process?
A profound form of estrangement from the self is estrangement from the body: addiction of any sort, making poor decisions regarding wellness, ignoring pain or discomfort or other malfunctions. We like to think we can separate the body and the mind, but as I’ve dealt with a number of autoimmune illnesses in adulthood, it’s become clear to me there is no separation between body and mind. Of course, in Nightbitch, the protagonist’s body is what sets her on a journey; the mandate of her body is unstoppable and has something to teach her. I didn’t set out to tell a story with this sort of message, but there it is, in the book. And I have to wonder if I was writing that to myself, as a way to say, yet again: Rachel, listen to your body. What is it saying? Don’t be scared. Be open.
Nightbitch is an incredible exploration of social realities through a wonderfully original – and somewhat disturbing – depiction of a main character whose body articulates what she is unable to say with words. Could you tell us a little more about why you chose to employ such an animalistic and monstrous metaphor?
Also, many reviewers have found your book to be innately weird – is this strange to you, given the fact that you are actually, I think, exploring a very true emotional reality for many women?
I didn’t think too much about the why of Nightbitch; she came to me, and I just went with it. Motherhood itself put me in touch with the phenomenally mammalian experience of birthing offspring and then keeping that offspring alive with my own milk. I had this apprehension of oh, wow! I’m an animal. Then, when I was home with my child and had given up my work life and creative life and social life, I was reduced to physical weariness, food preparation, close oversight of the excretions of my offspring, sleep management (of my child), sleep deprivation (of myself), and so forth. Again, I was put in touch with a basic, animal sort of existence and felt myself turning feral with an inexplicable rage. Why was I so angry? That’s where the book began.
I’ve seen so many readers respond to the book with, oh yes, it’s weird, but that’s sort of beside the point, because it’s true. Motherhood is beyond weird, so perhaps this book is a way of animating that truth, of making us able to see and feel the weirdness of it again.
Does it matter to you whether readers believe Nightbitch’s transformation is real? And did you enjoy playing with this tension during the writing process?
It doesn’t matter to me, no. As I wrote, I liked to think the transformation wasn’t literal, but I think most readers read it as absolutely real. I hoped it could be read either way.
One of my favourite quotes from your novel, which I think sums up a lot of the ideas you discuss is: “How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.” Could you tell us a little bit more about what you view as the consequences of this idea?
When we support mothers in giving up all of their identity beyond motherhood, we encourage them to participate in their own dehumanization and reduce their value to that which is purely reproductive. Obviously, a woman’s worth doesn’t only come in her ability to reproduce. And obviously women’s dreams are myriad and varied and not limited to “having kids.” This book is fighting against the dehumanization of mothers and women which, in turn, makes things like domestic violence, rape, and bans on abortion all the more feasible, because we don’t see women as anything more than gendered, sexualized, and/or reproductive objects instead of as individuals with unique desires.
Full interview is featured in our Exploration Issue.
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