1978

1978 marks the publication of Wanda White's A Field Guide to Magical Women, a work of mythical ethnography that the mother discovers in a tote bag of library books and that becomes the intellectual and spiritual cornerstone of her transformation into Nightbitch. The year functions as a fixed point in the novel's otherwise fluid chronology, a datable anchor for a book that claims to document the habits, diets, and patterns of mythical women across all seven continents. It is the year that makes Wanda White's authority legible, even as the woman herself recedes into mystery, and it quietly connects the mother's present-day unraveling to a decades-old tradition of female knowledge that has been dismissed, forgotten, and suppressed.

The Book's Discovery and First Impressions

The mother finds A Field Guide to Magical Women on a night when she is desperate for answers, having just fought her son through more than an hour of resistance to sleep. She flings herself onto the couch and digs through the tote bag of books she has collected from the library, a stack for the boy full of fire trucks, buses, and front loaders, and then two for herself, books she hopes might shed light on her current condition, though she greatly doubts they can. Her worries are physical and mounting: her teeth might or might not be sharpening, a tail might or might not now be in a constant state of near-sprout, and a carpet of fur is creeping, creeping down her neck. She sets aside the medical text as too cerebral, too long, too-small font, and opts instead for the second book, A Field Guide to Magical Women, with its 1978 publication date. The cover features fantastical creatures done in a style she associates with the 1970s and Nancy Drew and B-movies, lots of shadows and inky renderings, the edges of everything a bit blurred. She looks at the spine to confirm that it is, yes, nonfiction, which seems curious, then opens to the first pages.

The Author's Claim and the Mother's Reading

What the mother assumed would be a compendium of cheesy middle-grade stories about feminine monsters of yore turns out to be, as she peruses it, more a field guide than anything. The author, Wanda White, writes in her introduction that she went in search of mythical women, a research expedition that took her to all seven continents and spanned her entire professional career, and that the book is the culmination of that work. White acknowledges that colleagues have claimed the field within which she is working, namely mythical ethnography, is not a viable field of study, but she presents in these pages irrevocable data that counter their claims. She continues a bit later in the text that by understanding these creatures' habits, diets, and patterns, the reader too will be able to encounter them in the wild and experience their magic firsthand. For the mother, this is not idle reading; it is a mirror held up to her own bodily changes, a framework that transforms her terrifying transformation from pathology into tradition. The 1978 publication date gives the book a patina of age and authority, suggesting that the knowledge it contains predates her suffering and will outlast it.

The Year as a Marker of Wanda White's Elusiveness

The 1978 date also becomes a clue in the mother's increasingly obsessive attempts to locate Wanda White. Spurred by the harmony within her house, and then by her fear of having it all crumble around her, she writes another missive to White the same weekend, for she has not heard back since her first e-mail and wonders if she has the correct address, an academic one at the University of Sacramento, or if White is still alive. Based on the publication date of her book and other odds and ends Nightbitch has been able to piece together, she no doubt is in her eighties or nineties, though Nightbitch has not been able to find any obituary for her. She has not, in fact, been able to find much of anything about White on the Internet, which is quite peculiar indeed, for she considers her online searching abilities fairly advanced, given her catholic approach to searching, that is, to search any and all possible words and combinations in the near and not-so-near vicinity to the target subject. The 1978 date thus marks not only the book's origin but also the beginning of a mystery: a woman who published a definitive work in 1978 and then vanished almost entirely from the historical record, leaving only a book and a legacy that the mother must reconstruct on her own.

The Year's Resonance with the Mother's Own History

The 1978 publication date resonates with the mother's own sense of generational loss and suppressed female knowledge. She recalls her Appalachian upbringing, the skills she gathered during her quiet childhood: how to keep bees, dip candles, brush wool, use a spinning wheel and make yarn, dry onions and garlic, develop photographs with vegetable juices, bake absolutely anything, make every single sort of braid, sing every single sort of song, track an animal through the woods. She knew her cardinal directions, how to tell a fast pony from a slow one just from the look of its face. She knew enough to live inside an entire life all on her own, and yet her husband, with his electronics skills and his engineering, is the one who makes all the money, even though she could make a world, and then, too, make a person to live in that world. The book from 1978, published the same era as her own childhood, becomes a bridge between the forgotten knowledge of her grandmother and the dismissed knowledge of Wanda White, two generations of women whose expertise was never recognized as legitimate. The year thus marks not just a publication date but a moment in time when a certain kind of female wisdom was being recorded, even as it was being erased from the official record.

The Year's Afterlife in Nightbitch's Fame

In the aftermath of Nightbitch's final stage performance, the 1978 book takes on a new life. Sales of the once-out-of-print A Field Guide to Magical Women skyrocket, though no one, absolutely no one, can track down Wanda White. When researched by reporters, the University of Sacramento proves to be a short-lived institution no longer in operation and White herself a persona which exists only as an online profile at a defunct school. The 1978 publication date, once a marker of scholarly authority, becomes instead a sign of the book's strange durability: a work that was dismissed in its own time, that went out of print, and that now returns to prominence precisely because it was never properly recognized. The year 1978 thus frames the entire arc of the novel's engagement with female knowledge, from the mother's first doubtful reading to the cultural phenomenon that follows, a reminder that the truths Wanda White recorded in 1978 were waiting all along for the right reader to find them.