'Canina': motherhood with hair and fangs

The American writer Rachel Yoder, photographed in Madrid.Luis Sevillano

The childhood of the writer Rachel Yoder was not exactly typical for a child in the United States: she was raised in a Mennonite community in the Appalachians of Ohio, a region of forest and mountains in the vast interior of the country.

“Do you know what the Amish are?” She asks smiling, knowing that this branch of the Anabaptist movement that at that time was the “center of her life” is not particularly well known in Spain.

"Well, it's something similar, only less strict," she clarifies.

However, reading her raw and brazen first novel,

(Blackie Books), no one would say that he grew up in a conservative environment poring over the Bible.

The book, quite a hit in the US, of which a film version starring Amy Adams has already been shot (it will be released, if everything goes according to plan, in 2023), follows the transformation process of a character who responds to the dull name La Madre, a woman in her thirties who dedicates herself to taking care of her two-year-old son while her husband spends most of the week away for work.

She left her job at an art gallery when she found herself unable to reconcile the many hours that the position required with the many hours that her upbringing required.

She recognizes her privilege, since not everyone could afford it,

but at the same time she can't help but feel overwhelmed by the brutal ups and downs that go through her body and her head.

She until she, finally, she understands that she is metamorphosing into a bitch.

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What kind of mother kills her son?

"For many people, motherhood means a great transition," explains Yoder sitting in the lobby of her hotel in the center of Madrid, where she arrived a few hours before the interview after a strenuous journey from Iowa, where she lives with her family. and works as a speaker representative.

In her case, as in the case of The Mother who is transfigured into a Night Bitch (in English,

, the original title of the novel), was not only a “big” but also a “rough” experience.

A journey plagued with ups and downs, in which writing provided him with the method to explain, and explain to himself, what was happening to him: an abrupt and difficult-to-unravel change that in the book manifests itself as a tuft of hard hair on the nape of the neck, fangs , some growls that begin to escape from the throat and an unprecedented and irrepressible passion for raw meat.

An alternative —and fun— way of telling how someone feels about becoming a mother.

Asked about the debate that has recently been generated in Spain regarding the

of books on motherhood, the author responds like this: "I think that whoever says things like that we are talking too much about motherhood is the voice of patriarchy and power saying: well, you have already had your moment to show your annoyance, now you have to go back shut up”.

Behind the facade of The Mother's peaceful, perfect life in one of those well-to-do American suburbs populated by semi-absent fathers and devoted stay-at-home mothers who always have a peanut butter sandwich ready, lurks a system of strata. of anxieties that transcends all culture and is surely perfectly recognizable to many people who have had children.

The frustration of not being able to dedicate time to one's own interests —for The Mother, art, her dashed ambition—, the need to find advice and solace in others in the same situation —here, a group of home-seller mothers led by Jen ,

of a poster that deep down is not so exemplary— and the disappointment of seeing how the other part of the couple, the one who continues to work abroad, is not that they do not recognize, but that they do not even glimpse the efforts involved in taking charge of a little boy.

“With the pandemic, when we all stayed locked up at home, the disparity between genders in the United States became extreme: women had to take responsibility for their jobs, their children, and household chores,” the writer lists.

“It is clear that there are still many things to solve.”

Faced with the seriousness of what he recounts, Yoder wanted to lower the tone with touches of humor that are sprinkled through an agile text translated into Spanish by Laura Ibáñez.

“I think that humor is often like a defense mechanism, especially for the most difficult things.

And I think it's a great antidote to anger, because anger, even when you read it, can feel overwhelming and cause you to burn with your own outrage,” she argues.

The story of The Mother —and, with it, her own— also proposes the search for magic in everyday life, not only through the idea of ​​metamorphosis, but also through a book about magical women that the protagonist He finds it almost by chance and he goes along with her in her transformation process, which ends better than one might expect.

“The end of the book speaks of the fact that perhaps it is possible to find a feeling of fulfillment, even if it is more on the spiritual level”, the author advances.

That contemporary mysticism is precisely what keeps her tied to her Mennonite origins, a tradition she shunned in her teens, but to which she now feels somewhat close.

“The pandemic has helped me reconfigure my brain,” she says, “and I am partly going back to those roots.”

Cartoon from the 'Man-Eaters' comic, featuring Chelsea Cain, Kate Niemczyk and Lia Miternique, who imagines a mutation that causes menstruating women to become murderous cats.ASTIBERRI

Metamorphosis is a female name

Yoder, who mentions Kafka as the obvious (and distant) inspiration for his character's metamorphosis, acknowledges not having read

, by Marie Darrieussecq, an undoubtedly more direct antecedent, published in Spain in 1997 and republished this year in Tránsito.

In both cases, the literary referent of transformation —from the Kafkaesque cockroach to werewolves— is adapted with enormous doses of irony to an eminently feminine context: motherhood, in the case of

, and the sexualization to which they are seen. women subjected in the

, where the protagonist, a young woman who works in a perfumery that is actually the front of a brothel, mutates into a sow.

“It is a book about the female body,” explained the French author after publishing that feminist novel with post-apocalyptic tones, which was a finalist for the prestigious Goncourt award and made it a phenomenon in her country.

"Another thing is that a larger body may appear, which is society."

Other titles by Darrieussecq address precisely the same major themes that run through Yoder's novel: in

(Anagrama, 2004), a non-fiction book, she recounts her feelings after giving birth to her first child with great beauty and closeness. son;

and

(Errata Naturae, 2021) reflects on the artistic drive through the figure of a painter ignored by history, the German expressionist Paula M. Becker.

Those who Yoder has read are the North American authors Carmen Maria Machado (

Anagrama, 2018) and Kelly Link, whose stories connect with the spirit suspended in limbo between the realistic and the surreal of

, as well as with the exploration of the concept of the metamorphosis of the female body.

It is the same idea that runs through several of the stories by the English writer Angela Carter collected in her 1979 book

(in Spanish it is published in Errata Naturae, 2017), inspired by traditional fairy tales, as well as the Chelsea Cain, Kate Niemczyk and Lia Miternique

(Astiberri, 2021), who imagines a mutation that causes menstruating women to become dangerous killer cats.

Although Yoder, who after the birth of his son had spent "two years" without writing (before

he had published essays and short stories), rather than clinging to direct references, he navigated in the middle of a "fog" in his head that it was dissipating as he progressed in writing.

"The story began as a sensation, something somatic, bodily," he recalls.

“And from there I thought: 'What is he going to become?

And what am I going to become?

He now he knows it: in a Night Bitch.

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