43 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel YoderNightbitch
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-10, Pages 1-62Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
A stay-at-home mother of a two-year-old child refers to herself as “Nightbitch,” and lives in a Midwestern American town. She starts noticing dark hair sprouting from her neck, and her teeth becoming more canine. As a result, Nightbitch worries that she is turning into a dog. When she expresses concern to her husband, he dismissively laughs it off, saying, “[Y]eah, you’re definitely a dog” (3). Nightbitch looks on the Internet for clues about her apparent condition, researching werewolves and “dog teeth,” but finds nothing.
Nightbitch describes her husband while lying in bed next to him, with their son. He is a good man, she says, but, as an engineer, he is highly rational and condescending toward anything that cannot be scientifically proven. Nightbitch becomes angry with her husband and leaves their bed to go and sleep in the guest bedroom.
Chapter 2 Summary
Nightbitch reflects on the reasons for her anger. She explains she is angry about her life and work situation, where her husband is away throughout the week for work, leaving her to take care of their child for most of the time. She has had to give up her own career as the director of a community art gallery. At first, Nightbitch recounts, she tried to balance looking after her child with working. However, this put a huge emotional strain on her, as she felt like leaving her child in daycare was abandoning him. As such, she gave up her job to look after her child fulltime.
Nightbitch goes onto explain why she had fallen in love with her husband. Meeting him in graduate school, he had shown her a computer folder full of bizarre video clips he had collected from the Internet. Nightbitch was instantly enamored by her future husband’s fascination with the aberrant and grotesque aspects of humanity and his lack of judgment about these things.
Chapter 3 Summary
Nightbitch’s initial enthusiasm for staying at home has waned quickly. She tries to counter her malaise by taking her husband’s advice to “make a plan” and be positive by starting a new art project (21). She remembers how in graduate school she won praise for a piece she created involving the refashioning of roadkill into “the skeletons of new, mythical animals” (23). Yet Nightbitch struggles to find inspiration. Even an attempt to do hand-painting with her son goes awry, with paint ending up all over the apartment. Later that day, Nightbitch finds a hair and a lump growing from her tailbone. She cuts into the lump herself with a knife, which seems to reveal the beginnings of a tail.
Chapter 4 Summary
When her husband returns, and Nightbitch tells him about the lump, he laughs at her suggestion that it might be a tail, telling her that it was just a cyst. Despite this, Nightbitch starts to imagine wagging this tail when she is happy. She begins to have more dog-like fantasies and impulses. For example, she imagines licking the hair on her son’s head and curling up on the bedsheets like a dog.
Chapter 5 Summary
The next day Nightbitch goes to the local library to research possible causes of her tail and the new, dark, bags under her eyes. She sees a group of other mothers with young children at the “Book Babies” group, and reveals that she does not like them. Nightbitch resents the “happiness and positivity that would also be mandatory” in such groups (35), and their collective “mother” identity. A perfect-looking mother, Jen, “the Big Blonde” (36), approaches Nightbitch and says hello. Despite herself, Nightbitch is impressed by this woman’s smell. Big Blonde tells Nightbitch that she and the other mothers are starting a new business selling herbs.
Chapter 6 Summary
Back from the library, Nightbitch opens one of the three books she picked up, “A Field Guide to Magical Women” by Wanda White (39). The book discusses White’s search for “mythical women,” including the Bird Women of Peru, who sprout beaks and feathers in their sixties, then fly away to live in the trees. Nightbitch is skeptical at first, but is highly intrigued nonetheless.
Chapter 7 Summary
Nightbitch describes the monotony of her routine with her child. She must wake early with him, make him breakfast, and play “trains” with him. She then tries to potty train him, a task she finds both unpleasant and frustrating as he obstinately refuses to use the potty. At the end of the day, she struggles to get her son to sleep.
One night, Nightbitch reads another chapter of the Field Guide book about a type of woman called a “Slaythe.” Such women, according to the book, are extremely competitive; they literally start to become sharp and pointed to the detriment of their families and other women.
Chapter 8 Summary
Nightbitch has premenstrual pain. She describes the black cat she has fed for the past few years, her growing anger toward it, and its increasing corpulence. She goes to the supermarket reflecting on her growing rage, and notices that her sense of smell has dramatically intensified as has her appetite for meat. Nightbitch buys a huge quantity of red meat and bumps into Sally, a woman who used to work with her at the gallery. Nightbitch wants to tell Sally about her anger. Instead, she tells her that she is happy being a mom.
Chapter 9 Summary
When her husband returns home, Nightbitch tries to talk to him about her anger, but he does not listen. Instead, he comments on the fridge being full of meat, blithely suggesting that she is “training to be a butcher” (53). Later that evening Nightbitch’s husband tries to initiate sex, but she pushes him away. She does this partly because she does not want him to see the four new nipples that have grown on her torso.
Chapter 10 Summary
The next morning, Saturday, Nightbitch is growing increasingly frustrated with her husband’s ineptitude with their child. Tensions show in their relationship as he criticizes Nightbitch for forgetting to buy milk. On Monday, after her husband has left, Nightbitch sees three dogs on her lawn, which she and her son approach and frolic with. The dogs beckon for her to follow them, but, despite herself, she shews them away.
Chapters 1-10, Pages 1-62 Analysis
The novel begins with Nightbitch experiencing the frustrations of motherhood, setting up the story’s conflict. The novel challenges traditional notions of what it means to be a mother. Unlike stereotypes depicting beaming, happy moms, Nightbitch is anything but joyful. Shopping with her son, tired and angry, Nightbitch asks herself—“how could you not be pissed after having a baby” (50)? As she admits, “she hadn’t slept a whole night in two-plus years” (62).
This section explores Gender Politics and Parenthood. Nightbitch, unlike her husband, sacrifices her career. Initially, she sends her child to daycare so that she can continue to work. The guilt she feels about being detached from her child for large swathes of time, and in an uncaring and depersonalized environment, makes this compromise intolerable. This represents an impossible choice that many mothers face—to give up their vocation, or sacrifice bonding with their child.
These chapters set up how Nightbitch experiences challenges and isolation, all of which inspire her transformation into a dog. She feels the monotony and drudgery of fulltime childcare, what she describes as “the slow agony of the schedule” (43)—“every morning, the same. Every day, the same” (43). Her life has become dominated by domestic mundanity. For example, Nightbitch tries futilely and repeatedly to make her child use the potty.
Nightbitch’s marriage makes things worse. Her husband is away during the week, and only returns on weekends. His absence means that Nightbitch has no help with childcare during the week. She can’t take a break, and the demands of childcare become constant. She is also deprived of the emotional support that might make parenting easier. At the same time, Nightbitch has given up her “dream job” (10), and is no longer connected to the world of art which she loved. This makes her feel the banality of her domestic world more keenly.
Nightbitch has no one with whom to share these frustrations. She doesn’t identify with other mothers, such as the “Book Babies” group, with their glib positivity and wholesome activities. She doesn’t feel that she can be open or honest with the few acquaintances that she meets. When speaking with Sally, a woman she had worked with at the gallery, Nightbitch wants to say how she is “stuck inside a prison of my own creation” where she is “left binge-eating Fig Newtons at midnight to keep from crying” (53). Instead, she can only express the platitude, “I love being a mom” (53). Her isolation is reinforced by a sense that all other mothers are happy and that she must put on a façade. She experiences alienation from her husband, too, feeling unable to discuss her anxieties and frustrations. He is excessively rational, and is unable or unwilling to see that she is struggling. Nightbitch seems compelled to put on a performance of cheeriness for fear of his judgment.
Nightbitch has few means of venting or expressing her anger and despair. She is too tired, because of the baby, to make art. As she says, “now there was nothing. Not a single creative impulse inside her, no matter how she searched” (23).
All of this leads to Nightbitch’s transformation into a dog. As Wanda White, the author of the mysterious A Field Guide to Magical Women suggests, some women adopt animalistic identities and traits “when [outlets] available to them fail” in the conventional human world (40). Becoming dog-like is the last available outlet for Nightbitch to deal with her emotions. Her transformation is a literalized metaphor for the expression of repressed aggression and primitive emotion, what the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud would call the id.
Her transformation also signals her longing for communal female identity, a community that transcends the superficiality and convention of ordinary social norms and returns to a more primal and authentic collective (See: Communal Notions of Motherhood and Femininity.) For example, her metamorphosis is accompanied and facilitated by the three dogs on her lawn. These dogs, beckoning her to follow them, represent her pack, a social awakening to her true nature that is necessary and concomitant to her individual one.
