Fans of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 debut novel, Nightbitch (Doubleday), got a chance to see the genre-spanning tale adapted into a big-budget film when Amy Adams starred in the movie version, released in December.

Adams’ portrayal of the main character received a Golden Globe nomination for best performance by a female actor in a motion picture, musical or comedy.

The story follows a woman who has sacrificed her career and becomes frustrated with the demands of motherhood and society until a surreal turn finds her encountering elusive freedom through nocturnal canine transformations (see review).

AW interviewed Yoder by email.

AW: Sometimes classified as horror, sometimes as comedy, the tale seems viscerally personal about some serious topics. How much of Rachel Yoder makes up the main character?

Yoder: The plight of Mother — an educated modern career woman yet unable to voice her desires and needs within the domestic setting — is one that roots itself in my own Mennonite upbringing. You think you can perhaps educate yourself up and out of the early stories given to you by a traditional Mennonite upbringing, but it turns out that even with a fistful of master’s degrees, that early conditioning about gender, power and authority is still deep within the fascia of a person.

While Nightbitch’s conundrum is one with which many modern women, Mennonite or not, relate, I do think there is a special edge that cuts deeper for those of us who watched our mothers shoulder a huge burden of labor in the name of duty, sacrifice and godliness.

To be direct, just how Mennonite is the main character?

I don’t think Mother in the book is very Mennonite. I think she thinks she’s left it behind. But the author of the book knows better than that. When I was younger, I liked to think I could somehow leave behind the Mennonite part of me, but it’s so fundamental to who I am. I see everything through the lens of right and wrong, should and should nots, good and bad. And this black-and-white thinking extends to my identity as a woman and mother.

Nightbitch was an effort to write a new story that gave voice to a narrative counter to the one I’ve been carrying around all my life about how a mother should look and what a woman is allowed to want.

These days you are assistant professor of screenwriting and cinema arts at the University of Iowa. What has been your journey from a Mennonite childhood? What have you left behind, and what do you retain?

The intentional Mennonite community of Deer Spring in Fresno, Ohio, where my family moved when I was in the third grade, I now view as a lifesaver. We moved from the conservative Amish-Mennonite community of Hartville to this idyllic land trust populated with progressive Christians who were educated and eclectic. Not many of the other kids, now my lifelong friends, have remained within the church. I don’t know what this says about the success or failure of this experiment. But I do know I’ve been chasing that sense of community ever since. I long for a place of community in this modern world.

I am only now, at age 46, really unpacking the stories I’ve carried with me all my life. I’ve lived in the shadow of these stories feeling ashamed that I didn’t want to get married, didn’t long to have kids, was more interested in attending theater and dance than church. I didn’t find a role for myself within the Mennonite story. I could not answer the question, “How does a smart, ambitious, sexual, career-minded woman stay inside the Mennonite church?” There was no place for me. And I’m not sure there is one for me now, either.

Religion can be culture and tradition. It can be faith and theology. It can quash freedom in the name of obedience to expectations. How did religion fail either the character of Mother or the person of Rachel?

Here’s the thing that I think a lot of newer generations, myself included, are experiencing regarding religion. We are interested in how to come together in community with like-minded people. We are interested in mutual aid and financial equity/justice. We are even interested in pacifism. But, in my humble estimation, I don’t think any of this is going to be delivered via established religion. We are wary of an institution fundamentally entwined with patriarchy and capitalism. And we don’t need God to tell us what’s right and wrong. The concept of the male God itself is problematic for me. The Judeo-Christian creation story is highly problematic. I don’t think the church, Mennonite or not, is the institution of the future. What is? We’ll see.

Was writing Nightbitch cathartic?

Sure. But I was pretty uncomfortable with the idea of other people reading it, especially my Mennonite family. I still have this nagging sensation of Is it OK I wrote this book? Will I get in trouble? I’m still waiting on that trouble. So far, it hasn’t yet arrived. I don’t think I could have written this book if I was still a practicing Mennonite. You have to leave the community to be able to tell the whole truth. To a certain extent, it feels like this book is my public breakup with Anabaptism.

I can’t say what would have happened to Mother had she not gotten those graduate degrees. But I do think she was able to build an identity for herself outside and beyond her childhood vis-a-vis her art-marking, which I’m guessing would have happened with or without art degrees. To be an artist is to be a person who asserts a point of view, an idea, a self. That, in and of itself, is a radical act and not compatible with stories that tell you to be small, quiet, meek.

The book has now been published in 13 languages and was optioned for a film before it was even printed. What’s next?

I’m finishing up a novel-in-stories that is the coming-of-age story of a Mennonite girl who leaves her community. I’m dragging my feet because I really don’t want my Mennonite family to read this one, maybe even more than I didn’t want them to read Nightbitch. But my writing has always come from a place of wanting to understand the self. I don’t know how to write if I’m not writing from that place.

Rachel Yoder participated in Eastern Mennonite University’s 2024-25 Writers Read Author Series and the Mennonite/s Writing 2022 conference hosted by Goshen College.