I want to be a monster

“I want to be a monster” is Nightbitch’s most concentrated expression of revolt against the demand that a mother remain useful, attractive, civilized, and emotionally available while surrendering the rest of her identity. The phrase turns the socially condemned figure of the monster into a desired alternative: a body with appetite, rage, sexuality, artistic ambition, and the power to refuse ordinary obedience. Its force lies in the correction embedded within it. Nightbitch begins to say that she wants to be an artist, a woman, and a mother, then revises the final identity into “a monster,” making monstrosity the name for a self that cannot be contained by those sanctioned categories.

Meaning and Immediate Context

The expression appears within an accumulating list of wishes. Nightbitch wants to wear the same linen dress for a year, stink, run through the cornfields to a stream and follow it to the ocean without returning, have passionate sex with a stranger, sit on a fully decorated cake without underwear, commit an anonymous act of extreme vandalism, and be an artist, a woman, and a mother—“I mean a monster.” The sequence places the phrase among bodily excess, sexual autonomy, public transgression, escape from domestic geography, and renewed artistic identity. It is not a detached fantasy of evil; it is the final pressure point in a catalogue of impulses that ordinary adulthood has forced her to suppress.

The wording also carries the strain of spontaneous self-discovery. Nightbitch does not calmly define a political program. She reaches toward familiar identities and then rejects their adequacy in the same breath. “I want to be a monster” therefore functions as both a declaration and an interruption: the sentence breaks away from the language of acceptable womanhood just as Nightbitch has repeatedly found that acceptable forms of motherhood and career have failed to accommodate her actual body and desires.

Motherhood, Work, and Mother-rage

The desire for monstrosity grows out of Nightbitch’s conviction that working, pumping, hurrying, and failing to hold her baby belong to a sham system. She inflates with mother-rage and directs elaborate arguments against capitalism, patriarchy, religion, gender roles, and biology. Her rage is not presented as an isolated temperamental defect. It is attached to the material organization of her life, in which paid work, childcare, breastfeeding, and domestic responsibility combine into an impossible burden while the surrounding culture insists that happiness is a matter of personal choice.

The same conflict makes the label Nightbitch itself unstable. She initially uses it as a good-natured, self-deprecating joke, presenting herself as a woman relaxed enough to make fun of herself. After the name is followed by coarse black hair at the base of her neck, however, the joke becomes physically alarming. When she tells The Husband that she thinks she is turning into a dog, he laughs, and she recognizes that he cannot take the concern seriously. The expression about becoming a monster develops from this failed communication: the figure that had been available as humor begins to describe a bodily reality that domestic language cannot absorb.

Nightbitch also recognizes that motherhood has cost her more than time. She sees herself stripped of her career, comely figure, ambition, and familiar hormones, and interprets marriage, adulthood, motherhood, and society as structures designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there. Her wish for monstrosity answers that containment with an identity that is excessive by definition. A monster need not make her anger presentable, her body desirable, or her refusal compatible with the expectations that made her feel trapped.

The Animal Body as an Alternative

The expression is inseparable from Nightbitch’s attraction to doghood. She likes the idea of being a dog because a dog can bark and snarl without justification, run free, and exist as body, instinct, hunger, rage, thirst, and fear. During childbirth, she had already experienced a comparable surrender to corporeal knowledge: she screamed, shat, swore, and followed her body’s instinctive direction while The Husband nearly passed out at the noises from her mouth. Her later longing to become an animal is thus not an entirely foreign transformation. It returns her to a form of embodied authority that civilized self-control had taught her to distrust.

After her first encounter with the Dog Pack, she raises her head from the driveway and feels her hair expand into a mane while her muscles roll in her haunches. The recognition that she is an animal is immediately followed by action. She snarls and lunges into the dogs, becoming hair, blood, bone, instinct, anger, movement, and darkness. The scene gives the monster wish a physical grammar: identity is not an abstract label but a shift in perception, posture, appetite, and relation to the surrounding bodies.

That transformation changes her understanding of motherhood as well. She concludes that she is becoming a better mother because she is becoming a better dog. She and The Boy drink from a stainless-steel dog bowl, share it with The Cat, and treat the act as a game in which they are good dogs. The dog identity does not simply erase maternal attachment; it offers a different account of care, one organized around bodily presence and animal life rather than professional productivity or self-explanation.

Her first kill intensifies this logic. After carrying a dead animal home in her mouth and burying it in the lawn, she moves through the yard by smell, following The Boy’s traces, The Cat’s path, the soil, tires, plants, and the phantom scents of other animals. She realizes that what she needed was not medical attention, psychotherapy, or an improved attitude, but the experience of biting something living and bloody and feeling its essence drain away. The violence restores, however troublingly, a sense of bodily agency. For one night she is not needed by any living thing and does not have to care what anyone thinks; she is only a body moving in the dark according to its own mandates.

Inheritance and the Beautiful Monster

Nightbitch’s wish is sharpened by her recovered understanding of Nightbitch’s Mother. As a child, she had experienced her mother’s distance, headaches, naps, and repeated demand to be left alone as abandonment. Remembering the past, she now reinterprets that distance as her mother’s best form of love: an attempt to push her daughter away from the sacrificial path that had consumed women for generations. The recollection reframes the monster as an inherited answer to a history in which women’s greatness was delayed until time extinguished it.

This inheritance is not merely emotional. Nightbitch remembers the extensive practical knowledge gathered during her Appalachian upbringing: keeping bees, dipping candles, brushing wool, spinning yarn, drying onions and garlic, developing photographs with vegetable juices, baking, braiding, singing, tracking animals, and reading the land. She can make a world and make a person to live in it, yet The Husband’s engineering and electronics skills are the abilities that generate the household income. The monster wish therefore gathers capacities that conventional economic measures have rendered secondary. It insists that a woman’s knowledge of bodies, materials, animals, and creation is not evidence of smallness or domestic limitation.

Her reading of the WereMothers gives the wish a communal and mythical horizon. She imagines a cold, clean woodland where these women live together, help one another, remain in a constant state of babies, and share life with many other wives. The arrangement appeals to her not only because it rejects established society, but because it appears efficient, intimate, and organized around the community’s own needs. The WereMothers make monstrosity beautiful by turning transformation into a collective mode of living rather than an individual failure to adjust.

Relation to the Book’s Final Vision

The phrase remains deliberately unresolved because the novel does not reduce monstrosity to either liberation or corruption. Nightbitch’s animality permits anger and appetite without justification, but it also involves blood, predation, and the unsettling abandonment of human moral categories. The expression consequently holds together a desire to escape responsibility and a desire to inhabit responsibility differently, through instinctive care rather than compulsory self-erasure.

Near the end, Nightbitch imagines animal existence as a radical recognition of shared embodiment. One creature’s skin is continuous with another’s; bodies gather in a warm cave, breathe together, dream together, and preserve one another through an unbroken lineage of togetherness. This vision expands the monster wish beyond personal rebellion. The monster is not only the solitary woman who refuses to return to the old life; it can also be a being who exposes the artificial boundary between mother and child, human and animal, individual and collective.

In that sense, “I want to be a monster” is both a rebellion against imposed identity and a demand for a larger one. It names Nightbitch’s refusal to treat civilization, femininity, and motherhood as fixed moral achievements when they require the destruction of her body and ambition. At the same time, it points toward a form of existence in which wildness, maternity, art, sexuality, violence, and interdependence are allowed to remain in tension rather than being separated into respectable and shameful selves.