Rachel Yoder is an assistant professor of cinematic arts at the University of Iowa.
Just nine years after earning her second Master of Fine Arts degree, writer and University of Iowa instructor Rachel Yoder sold her first novel, and then the film rights, a year before it was even published.
Author of 2021’s buzzy Nightbitch, Yoder – an assistant professor of cinematic arts (teaching screenwriting) at the University of Iowa – attended a screening of its film version on December 13 at Davenport's The Last Picture House. That was followed with an audience Q&A and a long line of patrons who had the author sign copies of her acclaimed book about the grueling challenges and transcendent joys of motherhood.
“Thank you for pouring your heart and soul, and feelings and emotions – the whole spectrum of everything about being a mother,” moderator Julia Glausi told Yoder on Friday night. “I found myself truly howling with laughter and crying real tears reading it. Just feeling so seen, as we like to say.”
Glausi is the head of film and TV for filmmakers Scott Beck and (her husband) Bryan Woods. She’s a producer on their latest movie that they wrote and directed: Heretic, starring Hugh Grant.
Yoder first moved to Iowa City 15 years ago, and it was where she met her eventual husband Seth. “I love being a Hawkeye,” she said.
Yoder grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio (reflected in flashbacks in the book and film), and studied English literature as an undergraduate student at Georgetown. She has said it wasn’t until she moved to Arizona and met a mentor who encouraged her to write that she thought about writing as a viable career option.
After receiving an MFA in creative writing, in 2007, at the University of Arizona, Yoder took a couple of creative nonfiction writing courses. She also attended a NonfictioNOW Conference, which was hosted at the University of Iowa, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, at which she studied with Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate David Shields.
Yoder graduated from the UI Nonfiction Writing Program in 2011, and she is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process, which publishes first and final drafts of stories, essays, and poems along with author interviews about the creative process.
Yoder’s debut novel, Nightbitch was released in 2021 to critical acclaim. It was selected as an Indie Next Pick in August 2021 and a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture, and with Yoder shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize, she was also recognized as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
On September 7, 2024, a film adaptation of her book- written and directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams – premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Nightbitch follows “Mother,” who puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her son. As her previous sense of identity fades into motherhood, she discovers a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck, and her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her symptoms intensify until she finds herself transforming at night into a dog.
Christy Lemire's review of the film says: “Turning into a dog is actually the least interesting part of Nightbitch. The recognizability of Mother’s day-in, day-out doldrums, and how she fights to forge a new identity within them, is the real happily ever after within this twisted fairy tale.”
“Rachel Yoder‘s book took my breath away,” Heller said in a 2022 statement. “I haven’t felt this way about a book since I read The Diary of a Teenage Girl many years ago. Rachel’s darkly hilarious tale of motherhood and rage made me feel seen. And adapting it with Amy Adams in mind has been the thing that has kept me going through the pandemic.”
Started as a Joke
On Friday, Yoder said the term “nightbitch” started as a joke between her husband and herself.
“I would get somewhat feral during the night, and I thought it’s a really bad idea to write a book in which a mom actually turns into a dog and was called ‘Nightbitch.’”
They have a 10-year-old son, Cohen (nicknamed Coco), and Yoder's experience staying home with him as a baby and toddler is her story's foundation. She heralds mothers as “gods,” responsible for creating life.
“It just didn’t make sense for me to be working, financially, the cost of child care,” Yoder said. “It didn’t make sense emotionally.”
She decided to stay home with her son, which she called “a biological imperative.”
“I was an animal,” Yoder recalled. “I wanted to have my offspring with me all the time. I didn’t want to leave him at daycare. So I stayed home with him and – as one could see a million miles away, yet I could not – I stopped writing. He was my ward, every moment of every day. That was great. It was great for a while.
“I was almost 40,” she continued. “I had been out of the workforce a couple years and all of a sudden I’m like, 'I haven’t written. I’m a stay-at-home mom.' Like, ‘How did I get here?’”
Yoder recalled thinking, “What have I done and how do I get back to me?", noting that she wrote her first novel over three years, finishing it in 2020.
After living through Donald’s Trump’s election and first term as president, she said: “If I’m not gonna self-destruct, I’m gonna take this and turn it into art. That got me back to the page in a really concerted way.”
Selling Quickly
After sending the book to her agent and making revisions in January of 2020, it sold quickly to Doubleday, and was published in July of 2021. Yoder was approached to sell the film rights within a week after she sold the book (in July of 2020) to Annapurna Pictures, and distributed worldwide by Searchlight.
“There are scouts, so they get manuscripts through the underground,” Yoder said. “I talked to, like, half a dozen production companies.”
Yoder originally thought no one would read the book, filled as it was with personal anger and heartbreaking stuff about her marriage. Then she would laugh hysterically.
“Even though it came out of personal experience, it’s turned into something else,” she said. “It feels like it belongs to other people, that other people have taken ownership of.”
Yoder’s son has seen the movie and asked her, “Was being a mom really this hard?” and she replied: “I’m sorry. Yes, it was.”
Her best friend Sarah Shrader (a mom of three) was the first to read it, and told her, “This is gonna be huge.” Yoder replied: “You are deranged.
“She said. 'This is really weird, but the other part, we’ve all been through that,'” Yoder recalled of her friend. “I felt so alone in my early motherhood. I had no idea.”
Yoder is working on her first screenplay, a dark comedy that employs body horror, psychosexual anxiety, and a supernatural landscape to explore ideas of grief and fertility, the darker urges of motherhood, and storytelling as transformative force. She doesn’t yet know what her next book idea is.
She wanted the Nightbitch screenplay to be Heller’s project, and gave her complete autonomy. (She and Coco also have cameos in a grocery-store scene.)
“I also just really admire her as an artist and director,” Yoder said. “She gave me room for feedback and we had conversations about various things, like how to kill the cat in the movie.
“I think Marielle did an amazing job.” Yoder said. “I love that she took the book and made it hers. There’s a lot in the movie that’s inspired by her life.”
Adams, who has six Oscar nominations, was recently nominated for a 2025 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for Nightbitch. The award recipients will be announced on Sunday, January 5.
Yoder’s mother-in-law Paula Michel was in the Last Picture House audience, traveling from Waverly, Iowa. “Seth read it the whole way with her. He knew exactly what was being written,” she said of her son's relation to Nightbitch, noting that she raised him in Edwardsville, Illinois.
But although she has seen the movie many times – first in October in Iowa City – she has actually never read the book. As Michel said, “I’m more of a podcast person.”
For more information on the author, visit RachelJYoder.com.
