Iowa City authors Rachel Yoder and Garth Greenwell discuss midlife crises, ‘re-wilding’ marriage and trusting in Amy Adams

When we learned the movie adaptation of Nightbitch — Iowa City author Rachel Yoder’s satirical 2021 novel about a new mother embracing her inner (and outer) beast — would be headlining FilmScene’s Refocus Film Festival in October, Little Village editors naturally began imagining a cover for the September Fall Arts Preview involving Yoder holding some type of raw meat.

Then we caught wind that another Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumnus, Garth Greenwell, would be moving back to Iowa City and that his third book, Small Rain, was due to release in September. Greenwell’s first two novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), were hailed as instant classics, experimental in form and unflinching in their depiction of queer relationships and desire. Small Rain, his first book set in the U.S., follows an Iowa poet navigating a dysfunctional healthcare system and new love.

Romance, fury, domesticity, ferality — Greenwell and Yoder both grapple with the chaos and comforts of being human in a storytelling style that can’t be mistaken for another author. So we had a proposal for the two locals: Interview each other, let us record the conversation and then participate in a photoshoot that would double as a kind of trust exercise. In spite of some impossibly busy schedules, both writers were game.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Greenwell: I saw the announcement that the movie is opening up the Refocus Film Fest. Congratulations on that. The novel was extraordinarily successful, but putting something on a screen means maybe it’s going to reach a whole bunch of different people, and maybe more people. How are you feeling about this new life the book’s going to take on?

Yoder: I’ve been trying not to think about it too much and just ride the wave that has been and will be this movie. It’s been such an honor to have another artist be inspired by something I wrote and then make their own art about it. I feel really protective of [director] Marielle Heller and [lead actor] Amy Adams. I want them to get their flowers. I’m a bit nervous to see what the reception will be. It’s a weird movie, because the book is weird, and I’m just trying to experience it as fully as I can. I’m just trying to have fun with it. So that’s how I’m feeling.

Greenwell: Teach me to live, Rachel Yoder! [Rachel laughs] That’s all so wise.

Yoder: Oh, it’s been a long road, Garth. Well, I have a really broad, somewhat ridiculous question about your book [Small Rain]. I was just really taken by your ability to write in such detail and to stay in this narrator’s fluid train of thought so closely to the minute details of this experience.

I know that the narrator’s experience is very close to an experience you had. When did you write this in relation to your experience that mirrors it and how did you approach capturing that detail on the page?

Greenwell: I wrote the book over about three years. I started writing it a month after I got out of the hospital. The medical crisis that the narrator undergoes, I went through a similar medical crisis. One of the things I believe about art is that we have art because there are situations that are so difficult and complex that they defeat all our other tools for thinking. We need the pressure of form. I needed that in order to unpack and try to understand what had happened to me. One of the primary virtues of art-making is being patient — trying to resist my urge to move ahead to finish a sentence, to finish a scene, and instead to stay moment to moment and to try to do this thing that literature can do, which is to stop time and unpack a really dense, complicated moment. Not just what the consciousness is thinking, but also what the body is experiencing.

Yoder: I was really surprised and delighted to find that the prose in this book felt more sung than written. The book felt really scored to me, and I’m interested in hearing how you were thinking about punctuation and sentences and paragraphs and sections, because it does feel like it’s a movement.

Greenwell: Oh, I love that you say that. That’s a beautiful observation. So I, like my narrator, have a background in music. I was a singer. I do think that the way that I approach sentences and scenes is really conditioned by that. English punctuation is really chaotic, more chaotic than punctuation in many other languages. English punctuation has always been as much about music as sense. Once, when I published a story in the New Yorker that had like a six- or seven-page-long paragraph, my editor said, “Will you let me try to put in paragraph breaks and just see how you feel?” And it was the strangest thing because it felt like you were listening to an organ concerto and the pedal tones were shifting at the wrong place.

So I have a question for you. We’re in a moment where there’s a lot of discussion about women writing the impossibility of heterosexual marriage. Something that really strikes me about Nightbitch is that there is a lot of similar energy in the book, a woman who finds the structure of her life unbearable, and yet what the book does, instead of scrapping that structure, is to “re-wild” that structure. Like a re-wilding of domesticity. I wondered if you had thoughts about how the book resonates for you in this particular moment of the discourse.

Yoder: It was very tempting with the book to turn it into a right and wrong, into something that was just angry and not much more. It occurred to me very early on that that wouldn’t work. It wasn’t truthful and it wasn’t that simple. It’s been really interesting because the women who continue to write to me are not writing about how their partners are horrible. They’re saying, “I feel so seen. Thank you. I needed someone to acknowledge my experience.” And that’s very different for me.

What I find challenging about the current slew of books about the impossibility of heterosexual marriage is that they are angry and don’t move much beyond that. Yes, embrace the anger, but I’m interested in what comes after the anger in heterosexual marriage, because that to me seems like the more complicated and nuanced part of the story. The first third of Nightbitch I would characterize as rageful, and I knew the entire book couldn’t be rageful. That wouldn’t be interesting nor narratively wise. So how was the book going to shift into a different key, and what would that key be? That was part of the discovery of writing the book. How to stay instead of how to leave, what the lessons of staying were. What was important and needed in the staying.

Greenwell: I find so beautiful the moment when the husband acknowledges what Nightbitch has accomplished and says, “This is your best work.” Why was it important to have the husband see and acknowledge her art, and then the role of art in the novel as a whole?

Yoder: Someone said, “Nightbitch doesn’t have a witness to any of her life, really.” She’s with her child. She’s alone. There’s this deep desire of the book to be witnessed, to be acknowledged. These women readers who write to me, that’s what the book is stating for them. They want to be acknowledged and witnessed. That moment with the husband was so important because he finally sees her. He sees how beautiful and important her work was, and he sees that she’s doing it within this context of motherhood. It felt like that act of seeing and witnessing was essential for her journey and for her marriage. I don’t quite know how to talk about art in the book. Oddly enough, that’s the thing I’ve talked about least. I was interested in this idea of how performance and art seemed like they could be used in a great way in life, and also used to destroy your life. I feel like at the beginning of the book Nightbitch feels like she is performing an inauthentic role. There was something about the ability of art and performance to allow you to access authenticity.

Greenwell: Well, it’s interesting thinking about performance art, because it was another way that your book resonated for me. One of my favorite books is The Gift by Barbara Browning. In it, she’s a performance artist and when there’s something in her life that is daunting, if she can just conceive of it as a performance art piece, then she can do it. I’ve always loved that idea. It’s very foreign to how I move through the world, but I love that, and that does feel resonant with Nightbitch, too.

Yoder: Oh my gosh, that rings so true for me. I think especially coming out of this Mennonite culture and Amish culture, which was very removed from mainstream culture, and feeling like, as I crossed class boundaries, that there were different performances that had to happen. Like going to Georgetown from the dead-end of a dirt road, there were different performances that had to happen there. So I suppose that’s sort of what Nightbitch is doing, too.

So I took your class on apophatic writing, which I loved. It occurred to me that there’s so much in your book that looks at an idea and then looks at its opposite, that embraces not knowing. Were you thinking about this apophatic gesture? And is the apophatic gesture perhaps the emblematic gesture of midlife — this place in the middle, where you see both the is and is not — and you really come into this physical knowing of living and dying?

Greenwell: Oh, that’s such a good question. You really brought A-plus questions. One of my central beliefs about art is that one of the reasons we need art is because it helps us to say yes to life. And yet, the question is, what makes that yes convincing? A lot of the art that I see, especially in a queer context, called “affirming” feels like propaganda for life. That’s not genuine affirmation for me. This question of how can art offer an affirmation that moves through negation, like a yes that carries no with it, is something I think of a lot.

I do think Small Rain is structured around what is basically an apathetic paradox. The drama of the book is, here’s this guy in midlife, in a life that he did not expect for himself. His life had been characterized by adventures of various kinds, adventures abroad, sexual adventures. Now, here he is in Iowa, seven years into a relationship. He has a mortgage. His life, in some ways, I think he resents. He’s stopped seeing it as a source of wonder, then it gets taken from him by this pain that strikes him down and this crisis that he undergoes. And paradoxically, in taking that world from him, this experience also delivers that world back to him. He is awakened to this life and to what is really a very remarkable love that he has. Part of what I hope he comes to realize in the book is that domesticity itself is an adventure. It’s an adventure he wants to keep having as long as he can.

Yoder: I found it to be an incredibly romantic book with an incredibly romantic narrator.

Greenwell: That’s so kind. Thank you for reading the book so generously. It’s so nice, especially because the book’s about to come out, so I am just an utterly psychotic person.

Yoder: Oh, I know there’s no consoling or accommodating you, but it’s really remarkable and really beautiful, and I think you’ve achieved something so singular and breathtaking.

Greenwell: Well, thank you so much. And I am such a fan of your book too, and I’m so excited to see it take on this new life. You know, I really resist seeing films of books that I love. In fact, I almost never do it, but I love Amy Adams so much that I think I have to make an exception and see it.

Yoder: Thanks. And also just saying [going in], “Sure, this is an adaptation of the book, but it’s also someone else’s work of art,” and to just go and see what another artist has produced.

Greenwell: And to not hold it accountable to your book — I’ll try! [They laugh]

This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2024 issue.

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