Latest news with #Nightbitch
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Type C Mom Are Ruling MomTok...And I Think I'm One of Them
When it comes to parenting, I'm a little Type A (everyone's in bed by 8 p.m. sharp!) and a little…well, not. (My son put his shirt on backwards? No worries, time to get to school!) Like a lot of moms I know, I crave structure. Friday night is ice cream night at my house, but if it's a sunny Saturday and the kids have managed to get through the day without fighting then guess what? We're getting more ice cream. Total Type B move. In case you need a quick refresher, Type A personalities are the ultra-organized, spreadsheet-loving kind of people, whereas Type B personalities have a more laid-back, live-in-the-moment kind of vibe. But what if you're a little bit of both, or somewhere in the middle? Enter: The Type C mom. Coined by social media creator Ashleigh Surratt, the concept has gone viral and with good reason—here's why so many moms (including this mom-of-three) can totally relate. She's the perfect blend of Type A structure and Type B flexibility. She's the mom who accidentally sends her kid to school in pajamas on crazy hat day (oops, mixed up the dates!), but also keeps a meticulously color-coded family calendar and never misses a pediatrician appointment. In her video, Surratt roleplays both sides: 'Thanks for having us over—sorry neither of my kids have shoes,' she says. Then cut to mom on the phone: 'No, we won't need paper towels again until the 2nd. I already have them ordered.' Oh, and she vacuums around the toy pile instead of picking it up (I mean, doesn't everyone do that?). And as it turns out, a lot of us are living that Type C life, including this mom who has beautifully labeled clothing storage bins for her kids, but my car looks like a tornado hit it. Other parents clearly recognized themselves as well. 'Omgggggg I have found my people. I am oddly organized, but yet chaotic at the same time,' one user commented. And another: 'The shoe racks are immaculate, the drawer bins are organized, the go bags are on point, but the dining room table is an absolute catch all and I don't remember the last time I washed my kids hair.' Yet another video on TikTok (that has over 6 million views!) shows a mom mid-meltdown saying: 'If I hear someone say 'mom' one more time, I'm gonna lose it.' Cut to the next shot of her lovingly gazing at a baby photo: 'Look how little they were…' (This made me think of Amy Adams's brilliant portrayal of the push-and-pull of being a mom in you know, without the whole turning into a dog thing) Honestly, because it's a much more realistic way to parent. Being a Type C parent isn't something I've consciously chosen to do. With three kids to wrangle, a full-time job and a pile of laundry that never seems to go down, I've had to prioritize the things that matter and let the rest be good enough. And this is actually pretty common with mothers, notes therapist Salina Grilli, who says that a Type C mom is often a former Type-A personality. 'She might have once meal-prepped like a wellness influencer, but now? She's realistic. Some days it's organic vegetables, some days it's frozen nuggets (and both are fine).' And while I need this balance for my own wellbeing (there's just no way I could be Type A about everything—I don't have the time, patience or resources!), I also like the message that it sends to my kids. Hopefully my structured but flexible approach teaches them that it's OK to have expectations but it's also OK to not be perfect. 'Being a Type-C Mom means allowing yourself to drop the ball, knowing that your self-worth was never in how many balls you could juggle,' writes Grilli. So yeah, some days the backpacks are packed with enough gear for any and all types of weather; other days my toddler's rocking a surprise outfit that she had to borrow from her friend's cubby (thank you, Mia!). Either way, we're getting through the day…and we're probably going to get ice cream later. 20 Types of Moms You Definitely Know (and Probably Avoid in the School Pickup Line)
CairoScene
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Review: Die My Love, A Fever Dream Called Motherhood
Review: Die My Love, A Fever Dream Called Motherhood Jennifer Lawrence is absolutely electrifying in Lynne Ramsay's 'Die My Love'. This is without doubt her greatest performance yet. She plays a woman driven to the brink of insanity by marriage and motherhood. Her performance is raw, primal, and slightly unhinged. Lawrence doesn't so much portray despair as embody it. Her physicality is animalistic. Here's a character study of a woman at war with herself and the expectations placed upon her. I was floored by the untamed intensity of it all. It certainly helps that you have an auteur like Lynne Ramsay behind the camera. Ramsay is a filmmaker with an unmatched eye for visual poetry. Her work on Ratcatcher remains one of the most visually original debuts I've ever seen. Here, too, she channels that same intuitive brilliance. She crafts images that feel both dreamlike and deeply visceral. This is a fever dream of a film. It sways between moods like hormonal tides raging inside the main character. One moment, she's having wild, urgent sex with her husband (Robert Pattinson). Next she's dancing with reckless abandon, as if trying to shake off the weight of her own mind. These shifts aren't just mood swings. They're seismic emotional explosions. The film immerses us in this internal storm. It's one of the few films I've seen that understands how terrifying and ecstatic it can be to feel too much. The film drifts back and forth in time. We see fragments of before and after birth. Aunts offering unsolicited advice, wives' tales passed down like warnings, strangers talking at her baby with the entitlement of familiarity. The sudden drop in sexual intimacy. The awkward silence that follows. And then, the fierce, almost violent return of it. It's not a story about motherhood as much as it is an experience of it. Not what it is, but what it feels like. And what it feels like, here, is everything at once. 'Die My Love' feels like a spiritual cousin to last year's Nightbitch. Both films articulate the unspeakable toll of motherhood. In both, the domestic household becomes a psychological battleground. The real terror isn't monsters or killers, but the slow erasure of the self. Ramsay's film is more lyrical, more impressionistic, but no less disturbing. I must also give praise to Nick Nolte as her father-in-law. Nolte delivers one of the most quietly powerful performances of his career. I feel Nolte has entered a remarkable phase in his late age. His voice, now weathered by time, crackles with a gravelly grace that says more than words ever could. With 'Die My Love', Ramsay doesn't frame postpartum depression with tidy explanations. Instead, she lets us feel the weight of its disorientation. She finds a way to visually express the numbing dissociation. The flickers of sorrow that creep in unannounced. The film perfectly captures the grief of losing a part of yourself in the process of becoming someone else. It understands that depression after birth isn't just sadness. It's estrangement from your body, your partner, your child, your sense of self. 'Die My Love' honours the truth of that experience. What she and Lawrence achieve here is nothing short of extraordinary.
Time Magazine
29-04-2025
- General
- Time Magazine
You Don't Have to Be Certain You Want Kids to Have Them
If you'd asked me in my twenties if I wanted children, I'd have told you 'hell no.' But by my thirties, I'd softened. When my therapist asked me on a scale of one to hundred, how badly I wanted a baby, I blurted out that I was 55% certain. But this was still just the flip of a coin, essentially. I wanted a child slightly more than I didn't want a child. I'd made pros and cons lists. Read books like Maybe Baby, an anthology of over two dozen writers on their parenting choices. I talked to those who had kids—and those who didn't—about why they made the decisions they did. But nothing moved the needle significantly on that 55%. Being 55% certain about motherhood stymied me. It didn't help that whenever I disclosed to anyone how unsure I felt, I was told that I should really want a baby if I was going to have one. Children required sacrifice. They caused hardship. They meant giving up your dreams even if your dream was only to read a book in peace every once in a while. I was reminded that if I had a baby, I would barely recognize my former self. I wouldn't want to do anything I liked to do before. Writing would be out of the question. Reading a newspaper would too. Friends, forget it. Work, don't even think about it. I'd just spent the last three decades shaping and molding myself into the person I wanted to be—now I'd have to lose her? I had no idea back then that what experts call 'maternal ambivalence'—a feeling of uncertainty before embarking on pregnancy and parenthood—is the norm. In fact, research shows that maternal ambivalence is incredibly common. I was normal, and yet I believed that all those women I saw on TV, in movies, and on my social media feed, who seemed so certain they wanted children, were the normal ones. I knew my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and even my mother never had the choice to become mothers. It's just what women did. But now we have a language, a lexicon, for maternal ambivalence. It seemed bonkers to me that practically every woman I knew seemed to be scrambling to sign up for what amounted to indentured servitude. It's not like the images we're bombarded with make motherhood look like a good time. For instance, the book Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, and the new film adaptation starring Amy Adams, follows a stay-at-home mom whose postpartum life is so surreal she turns into a dog. No wonder so many of us are unsure we're all-in on motherhood. I didn't want to be self-sacrificing, but I also had no desire to morph into an animal. Everywhere I turned mothers seemed overwhelmed, exhausted and filled with rage—or, at the other extreme, glowing, happy-to-compromise, and excited by the identity-annihilating drudgery of their new life as a mom. Neither seemed realistic to me. Is there no middle ground? We do women, and everyone, really, a disservice when we only show motherhood at the margins. Sure, there are the early wakeups, the diaper blowouts and the tantrums on the one hand. And on the other, the morning cuddles, the feeling of my daughter's hand in mind, and the first 'I love you.' But there is a whole world in between, a world that is messy and real and raw, and dare I say, human. Maybe we don't talk about the quotidian because those moments are ordinary and as such they are hard to pin down. Maybe in our modern world we are always so busy and rushed that unless something stands out as really bad or really good we don't have the bandwidth to mention it at all. And yet, back when I was deciding about parenthood, I wish someone would have said that being a mother is like all of life: sometimes terrible and sometimes terrific but mostly in between. Back then, parenting seemed like something I should be all-in about if I was to turn my entire life around to bring a baby into the world. It didn't help that my husband at the time never wavered on the fact that he didn't want a child. If I wanted to be a mother, I'd have to leave my marriage at 37 to figure out how to have the baby I was only 55% sure I wanted. Some friends told me I should adopt a dog or get better at keeping my plants alive before I considered children. Others told me I should offer to babysit my friend's kid for a weekend. Everyone thought there had to be something I could do to give myself a little more certainty. But the truth was this: what I needed was honesty. I needed everyone to stop putting their own judgements and expectations on motherhood and just share the truth. I needed the institution of motherhood to stop being a boxing ring where liberals and conservatives duked out their feelings to the detriment of actual mothers. I needed to hear that when my daughter waves hello to the birds in the morning my heart would be flooded with joy. And when she insists that she's the only one who can put on her clothes, even though it takes three times as long, I would feel frustrated. Motherhood isn't something you can try out to see if you'll like it or not. If you choose to have a baby, there are no guarantees that you'll be good at it, that you won't regret your decision, that you'll figure it all out. You just have to have hope. It's normal to be uncertain about such a life changing decision. And it's completely fine to ultimately decide not to become a mother, too. Society stigmatizes women who choose to be child-free. Studies oscillate between whether women who are child-free are ultimately happier or whether the reverse is true. At the end of the day, screw the studies. It's a personal choice. I wish someone had told me back then as I sat on my therapist's couch that we don't have to be all-in on parenthood to choose to have a baby. That kind of grand expectation adds pressure to what feels like an already complex decision. Who says that I couldn't go from wanting a baby only 55% to 150% over time? Who says that I wouldn't evolve and grow as I stepped into the realization that my life is my own and I don't have to follow other people's rules? Who says that our feelings are fixed and we can't change? I wish someone told me that any decision we make that is true to our deepest desires is good. I wish someone had told me that I'd remain unhappy as long as I was in limbo. I wish someone had told me 55% was as good a number as any.
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it's never been clearer that writing matters'
Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: 'A stranger told me I was his mother.' The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. 'I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,' she tells me. 'I'm intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life … and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.' The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura's fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college student, Xavier, who claims he is her son. As the story unfolds, the truth of their entanglement becomes ever harder to discern – is he a liar or a fantasist, or is she mad? Audition deliberately sets itself apart from the recent spate of popular novels – such as Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch or Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor – that explore the viscerality and intensity of early motherhood. Kitamura wanted to write something that was 'temperature wise, on the opposite pole', a novel more concerned with maternal separation, the unavoidable and necessary estrangement that occurs as children grow up and away from their parents. Her fiction has always been interested in the moments when you look at a person you know well and they appear to you as a stranger, and it occurred to her that this happens often between parents and their children. Her own children, aged 12 and eight, are 'very surprising creatures', she says, and she marvels at how rapidly their relationship, and her experience of motherhood, changes as they change. When she speaks to friends whose grown-up children have moved back home, they tell her it's 'like living with a stranger'. 'You do not recognise large swathes of their personality and their way of being in the world,' she says. 'Talking with people, it doesn't seem like it's a reconstitution of the old family unit. It feels like a reorganisation of the family.' In Kitamura's books, the female protagonists are so reserved that they are often accused of being cold or arrogant, but she herself is disarmingly warm and unassuming. 'Is it OK if I get a cookie too?' she asks when we first meet, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. She is dressed elegantly, in a slouchy suit and big sunglasses, and she laughs a lot, generally at herself. At one point, she tells me that when a family friend said she was excited to read her book, Kitamura's daughter challenged her. 'She doesn't have a book coming out,' her daughter insisted, 'I've never seen her write!' 'And that,' Kitamura says, 'feels like a very accurate description of my life.' 'There's something very interesting about being a parent, because suddenly there is another person in the world who is telling you who you are to them. And that is, in a lot of ways, the most important identity that you have, but it is somehow othered. I know very much that the person my children think I am is not the person I always feel myself to be – that crack in being, or experience, is something I wanted to explore.' The actor in Audition struggles to piece together the different parts of herself, her overlapping roles, on stage and in real life, as an artist, a wife and possibly a mother. Kitamura can relate. 'Sometimes I feel like a teacher or a writer or a friend or a daughter or a wife or a mother, and there's something that does feel a bit incommensurate about those parts,' she says. She is married to the British novelist Hari Kunzru. Kunzru writes faster than her, she tells me, and he is better at sitting down to work after the children are in bed, or writing in 45-minute snatches during the day. Ah, I say, is that because of your role in the family: are you the one carrying the household's mental load? But it isn't. 'My friend said something like, 'Who does all the playdates and who books the appointments with the dentists?' – and Hari does all that,' she says, laughing. He also does all the cooking. Do they ever get jealous of one another, I ask, now openly stirring. No, she replies, because they write such different books: his are big and multistranded, hers are more compacted. Then she leans forward and says: 'What does happen is one of us will have an idea and we'll say to the other, 'That's something you should write'.' Her manner is confessional, as though this weren't the opposite of what jealous people would do. They are each other's first editors and always undertake a final read of one another's work before submission. On a day-to-day basis, Kitamura says, she appreciates her husband as the unloader of dishwasher and purchaser of laundry detergent, and then she'll read his new book and think: 'This is smart! You've had all this going on in your head as well!' In light of her family dynamic, it's interesting that her female characters in novels such as Intimacies and A Separation are often married to writers but themselves work as interpreters, translators or actors – mediums for other people's messages. Kitamura says she is uncomfortable with the idea of being a writer and sees her own role as closer to interpreting, to channelling other people's voices. The women she writes about are often passive in their professional and personal lives, which she believes is true to life. 'Who of us has that much agency? I mean, what kind of a fantasy world are we living in? We have the illusion of agency,' she says. 'I'm interested in passivity in part because it's the condition most of us live in. But I'm also interested in passivity because it is itself a kind of action.' She's fascinated by the point at which passivity becomes complicity. Her characters often find themselves in ethically unsustainable positions: working for institutions they disapprove of, for instance, or accepting an inheritance although it isn't rightfully theirs. We meet in late February, and it seems everyone I've passed today in New York has been discussing politics. Kitamura has not been sleeping well. She never sleeps well during a Trump presidency, she half jokes. She teaches on New York University's graduate creative writing programme and says that the day after the 2024 election her students asked her what the point was of fiction: did they not have an obligation to resist Trump more directly? She had struggled with that question herself in 2016, but the second Trump administration has been so extreme that she can now see with greater clarity the urgent importance of writing, art and education. This is, she says, 'in part because they are being targeted so fiercely, but also because [Trump and his allies] are trying to take away everything I love and care about. It's never been clearer to me that writing actually does matter. It's not a frivolous or useless task.' In an immediate way, she continues, writers are well placed to respond to Trump's attacks on language, the obfuscation and doublespeak, the moral panic over pronouns or the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. 'In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person's mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.' And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction's job is, as always, to remind people that there are 'other ways of being'. Before Kitamura wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a ballerina. She was raised in California, where her parents had moved from Japan for her father's job as a professor of engineering at the University of California. Throughout school, she left class at noon to dance, and she planned to go professional. But she got injured and says that was 'the nail in the coffin' because it was becoming clear that she wasn't quite good enough to make it. Having never thought she'd go to college, she won a place at Princeton University, where she studied English. Kitamura sees similarities between dance and writing. Both require discipline: 'It's doing the same thing over and over again, reworking and reworking.' It strikes me too that if ballerinas excel at masking the pain and physical effort required for their art, Kitamura's writing shows similar restraint and contrast, between the streamlined, exacting prose and its roiling undercurrents. In 1999, after Princeton, Kitamura moved to the UK to study for a PhD in literature at the London Consortium. She worked part time at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (where she met Kunzru) in the early 00s, and found London's art and cultural scene vibrant and exciting. 'People were taking incredible risks with their work, and that was interesting to see,' she recalls. In 2009, she published her first novel, The Longshot, about a mixed martial arts fighter preparing for his comeback match. She has retained a keen interest in performance, 'both the pressures and incredible freedom of it'. In Audition, the actor believes that 'a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience' and Kitamura believes the same to be true of books. She wanted Audition to be open to multiple, mutually exclusive interpretations, so that a reader could form their own conclusions. She's curious about what it may say about a reader that they settle for one reading over another, concluding ultimately that the 'son', Xavier, is a con artist, perhaps, or that the actor is a 'bad' mother. Audition forms a loose trilogy with her two preceding books, A Separation and Intimacies, novels that similarly have a keen eye for the sinister, for the subtle and yet threatening shifts in power between people, for the moments when closeness becomes dangerous or suffocating. 'We have such a tendency to think of intimacy as something desirable, something we seek out with other people,' she says, 'but it can also be an imposition.' In Audition, the narrator is almost pathologically attuned to the power renegotiations in the family. The person who is most desired holds the upper hand, the actor observes. Money also shapes how the characters relate to one another, sometimes in unexpected ways: at points, characters try to buy power, but their generosity only weakens them, exposing the extent of their need. Kitamura says she is both fascinated and horrified by the occasions when she has exerted power over her children. 'Those moments make me very uncomfortable. It's really simple things, like when you send them to their room or you lose your temper, or when they are little, you pick them up against their will. It's really a brutal exertion of power over another person, but it's also just parenting,' she says, revealing her ability to identify the disquieting elements in everyday interactions. At the same time, she observes, parenthood can make you feel powerless. She often feels powerless to protect her children from the world. She has already started on her next novel, which she says will be very different from her previous books. She checks herself: 'Well, it's not a maximalist … it's a difference that will be significant to me and nobody else.' She is itching to write, but there's the book tour, her teaching and, of course, family life. Like any working parent, the fact that she has so little time to herself, so little solitude, could make her unhappy, but she's come to accept that 'work comes from the mess of life', creativity doesn't come from a vacuum. 'I have to write from the middle of my life, that's all I can do,' she says. 'I'm not going to wait for a decade to pass until I have more time.' Audition by Katie Kitamura will be published by Fern on 17 April. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A chilling novel in which motherhood is as terrifying as murder
Anyone thinking of becoming a mother would be forgiven for steering clear of contemporary fiction. Barely a month seems to pass by now without another horror-style account from female authors of the sleep-incinerated fug of early parenthood: think Claire Kilroy's Soldier Soldier; Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch; Szilvia Molnar's The Nursery. Each blurred the borders between madness and motherhood with immersive lyricism and – admittedly – a painful accuracy, but one which didn't quite compensate for the now familiar confines of their territory. Naomi Booth's third novel, Raw Content, sits intriguingly askew within this genre, drawing on rather different cultural and historical horrors. Grace has recently given birth to Rosa after a casual relationship with Ryan, a musician she met in London, and the pair are gamely making a go of things in Grace's cramped one-bed flat in York. Inevitably, Grace is more claustrophobically consumed by her baby who, as is common to these sorts of novels, is described in a sort of shell-shocked poetry as alien, even aberrant, 'catastrophically small… a dark sea-fish… a cawing pterodactyl of an infant'. Nor can Grace escape the mythic forcefield of her native Yorkshire in which she grew up – a landscape of 'derelict furnace chimneys and sawtooth roofs' where 'children lay buried under gorse and heather in unmarked graves'. The Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murders in the 1960s, which did so much to invoke fear in modern parents, seep with a kind of viral stealth into Grace's emotionally scrambled state, heightening her awareness of her daughter's tender skin. This is a novel that finds an awful beauty in the fragility of the body, and the shocking vulnerability of the child. Perversely, though, the Moors murders are one of the quieter strands wrapping around Grace's brain, thanks to her career as a legal publisher. She has spent years notating, among other crimes, instances of appalling child abuse, the rigour and calm the profession demands at stark dissonance with the job in hand. Then there's her now retired police officer father, who worked to prosecute child abusers before an instance of 'institutional failings' torpedoed his career. And compounding her conviction of childhood as innately defenceless and imperilled is her estranged mother, who abandoned Grace and her sister Isobel – a now untethered, pill-popping adult whose chaotic visits provide welcome relief for the reader – when Grace was nine, for reasons that are never fully explained; perhaps because, you sense, they're inexplicable. David Peace and Gordon Burn have both explored in fiction the legacy of serial murderers on landscape, community and popular culture in Yorkshire and beyond. I'd argue Booth's novel loses something in comparison for being exclusively concentrated on the individual and yet, at the same time, so diffuse in its references to a more generalised history of child abuse. Throughout Raw Content Grace is convinced she will harm her baby, as though her personal and cultural inheritance is destined to play out through her. It's a potent idea, yet it's played out primarily in the abstract; it's also a delusion on a par with the sort of self-sabotaging thoughts experienced by many young mothers and Booth's novel feels boxed-in by framing it as something commonplace and explicable. Booth can write – her prose is often exacting and surprising at the same time – but I wish this novel had built with greater ambition on its initial dark promise.
