Why should mothers, any more than anybody else, be good?
-- Jacqueline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2018)
SUN DAPPLES THE HOUSE; in the corner, a well-watered ficus flourishes. Large abstract paintings adorn the walls of the living room, so impressively tidy it's more evocative of an Airbnb than an actual living space. A handsome brown leather couch flanks a bay window, on the other side of which the light is always in soft focus. It falls gently (too gently) on a young boy: blond; somehow, even covered in paint, always clean; and, even when he supposedly isn't well-behaved, shockingly well-mannered. He and his mother visit the neighborhood playground, the nearby pond, the all-too-suburban curb; the garbage truck never passes without a wave.
On its own, the scene isn't startling -- to the contrary, it's evocative of much proliferating trad wife content. What's startling is that this isn't the transient, transparently staged backdrop for an influencer's 20-second TikTok or Instagram reel about domestic bliss. It's the set of Nightbitch, the feature-length, much-anticipated adaptation of Rachel Yoder's eponymous novel (2021). In Nightbitch, an artist (played in the movie by Amy Adams) becomes a stay-at-home mom. At times, the consequent tension between caretaking and creativity offers our unnamed artist-protagonist material fodder; at others, motherhood seems to be turning her into a real bitch -- i.e., a dog. This is the darkly humorous story that Marielle Heller -- the director and writer of Sundance darling The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), and the director of the Mr. Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) -- has taken up the Herculean task of adapting for the big screen. The result, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, successfully tracks Yoder's novel in narrative -- if not in tone or form.
Both Yoder's book and Heller's film join the quickly saturating canon of contemporary motherhood media, most recently inflected with celebrity and literary cache by novels and memoirs such as Miranda July's All Fours (released this summer and currently sweeping year-end best-of lists), Sarah Manguso's Liars, and Leslie Jamison's Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (both also published in 2024, to substantial acclaim). In each of these -- and so many others since the release of Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work in 2001 -- a cis white woman contends with the demands of parenthood while simultaneously struggling to complete her own creative work. The implicit question they raise likewise underlies Yoder's and Heller's projects: how does a woman, specifically a mother, foment her creative potential when patriarchy makes such primal fantasies seem impossible?
One might assume, then, that the target audience for any Nightbitch adaptation would be mothers. Still, a montage of Amy Adams as the title character drinking wine while cooking her son dinner, or while eating boxed mac and cheese straight from the pot at the stove, looks like me on any given night of the week -- which is to say, a woman too busy, tired, or impatient to sit and savor her food. Many details feel applicable to a woman of a certain age rather than a parent (Adams garnered news for growing out her chin hairs; despite not having a child, my own are ubiquitous). Others seem remarkably detached from actual parenting experience: so visually sanitized is Nightbitch's domestic sphere that when she confesses to her husband "I'm the housewife I never wanted to be," I found the statement almost as fantastical as her canine metamorphosis.
This comparative detachment stems from certain directorial choices. In fairness, it's difficult to avoid visualizations of domestic space in a movie primarily set in -- well, domestic spaces. Even so, it's worth noting that descriptions of Nightbitch's home are virtually absent from Yoder's book. There, the focus falls on Nightbitch's evolving physical appearance and interior monologue; it's as though Nightbitch is so uneasy in her various roles (as mother, wife, would-be maker) that she's unable to register the spaces in which these roles are prescribed. Where the film lingers over Nightbitch's upper middle-class home decor, the prose in Yoder's book is rich with descriptions of the protagonist. In the first few pages, Yoder writes, "Her hair was long and unkempt and, suspended within it, small bits of leaves, a dust of cracker or bread, unidentified white fluff. She breathed heavily from her mouth." From the start, then, Yoder's animalistic language -- "unkempt," "heavily" -- primes readers for a satirical fairy tale wherein a woman turning into a dog feels perfectly plausible, even expected. Indeed, what else might mothers of young children become, Yoder suggests, if not mangy, feral dogs? Sleep-deprived and stuck in a perpetual preverbal state with their toddlers, mothers like the one Yoder conjures are mythical beasts, surviving against all odds.
Yoder's book ably threads the needle between searing wit and salient social commentary, a move Heller's film never quite achieves. Traversing the aisles of a grocery store in the novel, Nightbitch contemplates her life choices as a stay-at-home mom, as well as her inability to be happy. "She wondered whether she was being hysterical," Yoder writes, adding,
That was the last thing she wanted to be. She had always prided herself on not being a hysterical woman but, rather, a smart woman with good points who sometimes got a little upset but was mostly cool to hang out with.
Of course, she knew that the concept of "the hysterical woman" was itself a sexist creation, and she rejected the label altogether, but she also made sure no one would ever associate her with such a label to begin with.
The complexities of her position are clear: even if, like Nightbitch, women intellectually recognize sexism, we still fear the consequences of its rhetoric foisted upon us. Rather than "hysterical women," we aspire to be "Cool Girls" -- though, as Gillian Flynn wryly reminds us in Gone Girl (2012), it's ludicrous that "men actually think this [Cool Girl] exists." For her part, Yoder explains that Nightbitch is "mostly cool," utilizing the adverb to allow a whole history of decidedly uncool moments to go unsaid. Such an omission (of whatever "mostly" refers to) is part of the novel's strength: verbal allowances and withholdings that both venerate and gently cut the protagonist down to whatever size society affords her.
In the book, commentary unfolds through the protagonist's observations, occurring primarily in Nightbitch's head, rather than in dialogue with other characters. For Heller to translate secret desires and urges into images is no easy feat. In the film, Nightbitch's long internal monologues bemoan her child, who "will pee in your face without blinking" or who refuses to fall asleep at night. These voice-overs, whose wryly bitter tone soon grows monotonous, represent our sole point of access into Nightbitch's experience. The mise-en-scène appears perfect -- it's only when we listen that we know it's definitely not.
Hypothetically, such a directorial choice could be made to work. Yet these monologues often seem to lack a necessary self-awareness. Soliloquizing as Nightbitch, Adams wonders: "How many women have delayed their greatness while the men around them didn't know what to do with theirs?" Vitally, the question is posed as not only polemical but novel as well -- what Heller's film fails to render is that it isn't alerting us to anything we don't already know. It's a lesson most women learn early: the world isn't designed with their desires in mind.
Of course, Yoder's book, which shares this same message, isn't novel either. Still, it's self-aware -- not to mention consistent and enjoyable in style. Yoder's agile prose dresses up old claims in new (maternity) clothes. Yoder's propensity for exclamation points and lyricism prove particularly adept at demonstrating Nightbitch's ferocious fecundity, brimming with humor and, at times, pure rage. When a pack of dogs surrounds Nightbitch in the middle of the night, tearing the clothes from her body, "She close[s] her eyes and bec[o]me[s] pure movement, pure darkness, a twitch and surge, the animal's first dream." Later, when Nightbitch devours pounds and pounds of meatloaf at the local deli, Yoder writes, "The mother continued in her fugue, the feel of the meat in her throat filling her." Here, alliteration heightens sensuality, as do the sexual overtones: It is not just the taste but also "the feel of the meat in her throat" that alchemizes Nightbitch into a ravenous animal.
Heller's recreation of this scene is shot in a medium close-up: Adams buries her face in a plate of meatloaf under fluorescent lighting. The moment, like so many others in the film, feels visually sanitized. Most of Heller's shots are frontal, which feels like a formal equivalent of taking something at face value -- i.e., Nightbitch is simply hungry, or getting carried away with her son. Notably, the on-screen scene lacks the novel's sensuality; it feels family-friendly, as palatable as the processed meat before the mother-son pair.
Really, Heller's film feels like something one could watch with their children -- a film that I imagine the women from Book Babies (a library group for mothers and their young) might put on to pass the time. Ultimately, both the film and novel are about a mother realizing that motherhood itself is a work of art, a lifelong performance piece, but that such art is not attainable without simultaneously cultivating an interior life, rich and loamy with secret thoughts, desires, and reveries. Reading Nightbitch, I feel that wild animus. Watching Nightbitch, I feel the opposite: domesticated, bored, and tamed. In this way, the literal translation of Yoder's text to screen suggests that the key to a successful adaptation is less a question of a fidelity to a book's literal substance then a fidelity to spirit with which that substance is rendered. Yes, motherhood can be wholesome -- but it can also be ugly, violent, and maddening. It's this that the film adaptation of Nightbitch is missing: bite.