♪♪ [Nebbe] How would you describe the environment you grew up in?

[Rachel Yoder] This was an intentional Mennonite community of sort of leftover hippies.

It was on a land trust, so many, many acres all adjacent.

Everyone built their own houses.

Everyone gardened.

You know, there was like a swimming hole.

It was actually really idyllic in a lot of ways.

♪♪ [Rachel Yoder] I was so ready and so confident and wanted to get out in the world.

I was sort of like, I can do anything.

I'll take on anything.

I had this moxy that I don't know where it came from.

[Nebbe] When did you first think that you wanted to be a writer?

[Rachel Yoder] I grew up in the library.

My mom was a librarian.

So, it was always something that had been with me.

And it wasn't until I met my writing mentor in Arizona.

And she said, you know, there's grad programs and people teach and people can be writers.

Not until that moment when I really thought oh, I could maybe do something with writing.

[Nebbe] I want to talk about Nightbitch.

[Rachel Yoder] Sure.

[Nebbe] It is a novel that kind of defies genre.

I feel like I've seen it referred to as horror, comedy, speculative fiction.

How do you describe it?

[Rachel Yoder] It's about a one-time artist turned ambivalent stay-at-home mom who thinks she might be turning into a dog.

Nightbitch.

(laughter) [Nebbe] Where did this idea come from?

[Rachel Yoder] It came, you know, it came from a joke my husband and I had when I became sort of feral at night and would maybe snarl when awoken.

And so, it was something we joked around about.

And then, as I was getting back into writing after having stopped once my son was born, I thought wow, it would be a really bad idea to write a book that literalizes this nightbitch joke that we've been making.

But it seemed really fun.

It seemed like a fun challenge.

It seemed ridiculous.

And so, I dove into it.

He's super cute!

Do you just love getting to be home with him all the time?

♪♪ Yeah, I do, I love it.

[Rachel Yoder] So, right after I sold the book in January of 2020, literally maybe two weeks after it sold, I started talking to producers who were interested in optioning it, which had not even been on my radar.

I didn't understand how they got the manuscript.

It was very confusing.

But we wound up striking a deal with Annapurna, which is a production company, and the film actually for films got made very quickly.

♪♪ Mama fuzzy.

(boy laughs) I'm not fuzzy.

I just feel off.

Look at my teeth.

See how sharp they are?

It's a little bit weird.

Motherhood, it changes you and connects you to some primal urges.

(making dog noises) Marielle Heller, the director, came on the next year and the film was really wrapped by 2022.

So that's two years.

The stars just really aligned.

Even the producers on the film would say to me, I don't know how this is getting made.

And I'm, I don't either.

It was produced by six women, which is also not the norm.

I only really worked with women on this film, which was an incredible experience.

[Nebbe] Now, you got to be at the premieres, different premieres of the film.

But there was an Iowa City premiere at the Refocus Film Festival at the Englert Theatre and you were there and got to be part of the conversation afterward.

What was that experience like?

[Rachel Yoder] That was such a dream because I have lived here for 15 years.

These are my people.

This is my community.

The book really grew out of very literally this community.

There are identifiable locations in the book that people can kind of map onto Iowa City.

So, being able to share that with everyone, it really felt like the movie is not mine to a certain extent, the book is not mine either and being able to say we all sort of own this, you know, felt incredible.

And what a long way I've come to feeling so isolated, so alone in early motherhood and now to have this incredible community is really, really touching.

[Nebbe] In writing about motherhood in that way, how did your own experiences influence the characterization?

[Rachel Yoder] Yeah, I definitely relate with this feeling of isolation and loneliness and not really knowing where to find my group, my pack of support.

And I think that's really one of the main engines that drove the book was if there were a book I could have read when I was in that loneliness what would it be?

What would it sound like?

[Nebbe] And you hear from a lot of moms who say, I identify with this.

What do you want women in particular who read this book to take away from it?

[Rachel Yoder] I mean, I think that.

I think if moms, women feel less lonely, feel seen, feel witnessed, that is one thing about Nightbitch is that she has no one to sort of witness her story.

She doesn't really show up.

None of her experience is tracked really by anyone.

And there's something about that.

Inside of that you sort of feel like you're disappearing.

You can feel like you're disappearing in motherhood.

And so, when I hear from women and they say, you see me.

I understand how powerful that can be.

♪♪