Welcome to Autofictions, where I review contemporary fiction and share more about myself than anyone needs to know. In this edition: Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi and Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder.

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“You light a fire early in your girlhood,” Rachel Yoder writes early in the pages of Nightbitch. “You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You donʼt let it rage into a mountain of light, because thatʼs not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn.”

Both Nightbitch and Diary of a Void are about what happens when the conflagration bursts its bounds and burns hot and bright, intruding on the neatness and order of real life. And both are, obliquely, about how this fire manifests through motherhood.

What a rare and beautiful treat when two books picked mostly at random—one a bookstore find, the other a recommendation—appear to be in conversation, while also being an exercise in contrast. (I will caveat that both were on the featured table at my local bookshop, so maybe less “random” than presciently curated by some sage at Chener Books in East Dulwich.)

In Diary of a Void, an unmarried salarywoman invents a pregnancy to protest her treatment as the office maid—expected to tidy cups, take out the trash, and make coffee for guests while also working punishing hours. In Nightbitch, a stay-at-home mother and lapsed artist with a very real hellion of a two-year-old begins to transform into something feral and canid. No decline into madness, this: she is actually growing fur, and her canines are sharpening, and is that a tail?

For Diary of a Voidʼs Shibata, motherhood (or the illusion thereof) is an ascent to a vaunted plane: work days that end at five, male coworkers contributing their fair share to office maintenance, a mommy aerobics class that becomes an oasis of care and camaraderie. Never mind that she has to pad her “baby bump” with a pair of tights; as time passes, Shibataʼs expanding belly gets in on the gag, and eventually itʼs unclear whether her bun in the oven is a well-tended fiction or an immaculate conception.

But for Nightbitch, motherhood—visceral, at once numinous and base—feels like descent: into loneliness, sleeplessness, creative stasis, and incandescent rage. Rage at the husband who travels all week, returning only to doze and game through the weekend. Rage at the child who wonʼt sleep in his own bed, grow out of diapers or binkies, or do anything without Mama present. Rage at the cat who is always underfoot. Rage at the other mothers whose children are such well-behaved, well-attired, silky-haired, apple-cheeked little fuckers.

Where Diary of a Void is spare, almost clinical in its exteriority, leaving you guessing about the precise grade of Shibataʼs delusion (is it delusion?), Nightbitch is viscid with emotion, the prose snarling and feral even before Nightbitch embraces the same. (Content warning: some gory shit goes down.) Her catharsis comes not when she triumphs over such beastly desires but when she welcomes them in, finding a new way to be a wife, a mother, an artist, a magical woman.

Iʼm not a mother and donʼt plan to become one, so certain elements of Nightbitchʼs pairing of transcendental awe and blazing fury I can experience only at a distance, to say nothing of knowing what itʼs like to be an unwed pregnant woman in present-day Japan. But that image of the suppressed flicker behind the eyes, the collective memory of the someone or something that tells every young girl to quash the flame, to not be too much, too sensitive, to not be dramatic or ask for too much, to clean up after the men, to let them have their say—I shook at times as I turned the page, recognizing not just myself but all the brilliant, complicated, passionate women Iʼve known.

In my anthropological research with an n of precisely one, I would venture to say that even in the most egalitarian (cishet) partnerships—wife, when not working, does the dishes and the laundry and deals with the handymen and replaces the bin bags; husband resets the router and fixes broken things and shoos spiders out the windows and as the higher earner pays more of the mortgage—that undercurrent of you donʼt see the work I do to preserve this cozy little kingdom of ours persists.

Because marriage, like motherhood (though not to the same degree), is a relinquishing of past selves and possibilities. Stability might always have been the dream, and true partnership can be so beautiful and eternally surprising, but oh, wasnʼt it fun to stay out all night and have fiery ill-fated flings and make so many friends, if few true-blue. Every luminous fantasy was ahead of you, if you could just stretch that pliant twenty-something body of yours to grab it...

Family, in whatever form it takes for you, is precious. But it may be a gem you burnish at the expense of others. Our anger is the incandescent, inextricable byproduct, and the balm is not in sacrificing or suppressing it but in letting it out in one long, magnificent howl.

Other books Iʼve read recently:

Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie OʼFarrell
Either/Or by Elif Batuman
Shame by Salman Rushdie
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

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