Reviewed by our very own Jenny :)
‘This book was a bit of a wild ride and I loved it, beside the somewhat unnecessary graphic description of the death of the family cat… that part I could have honestly just done without.
Although the story centres around a woman literally turning into a dog (not a spoiler, it’s literally in the description) this is essentially the story of a relatively new, inadequately supported mother, stretched beyond her means physically, mentally and emotionally.
Utterly exhausted and overwhelmed, she struggles with not only with the general day-to-day of 24/7 motherhood, but also the loss of her career in the arts after having their baby, and is a woman generally mourning the loss of her own sense of self. She is left alone every week by a pretty unsupportive husband who does little to nothing of benefit, even in the 48 hrs he returns to the family home on weekends… which is just enough time to dole out unsolicited and oversimplified advice on how to deal with things.
There’s so much more to this story than the woman’s Kafka-esque transformation into the dog, aka Nightbitch. The book took me a little by surprise by how much was tinged with sadness at the sheer desperation of exhaustion and the loss of one’s own identity as a woman beyond that of a mother after having children. The book has a lot for discussion on the problematic aspects of ‘traditional’ female/male gender roles.
Her transformative experience to ‘Nightbitch’ felt to me like something that was entirely and truly hers - something solitary and unconstrained by her identity as a mother or wife - a reawakening of her own empowerment through the literal embodiment of the character of Nightbitch, thus reigniting her lost passion and regaining her sense of self through “the transformative capacities of art”.
The focusing on the woman changing into the dog is actually just reductive - there’s so much more to discuss here.’
Happy Reading!
