summer

Summer is the season that contains the entirety of Nightbitch's metamorphosis, the temporal frame within which a mother becomes something else entirely. The novel marks this transition with a stark declaration: one day the mother was a mother, but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else. That night arrives in June, at the start of summer, when her husband has been gone for his twenty-second weeklong absence of the year—a year in which only twenty-four weeks have passed. The season's heat and long days become the backdrop for her physical changes, her violent outbursts, and her gradual acceptance of a feral identity, making summer not merely a setting but an active force in her transformation.

The Season of Transformation

The summer months are defined by the mother's escalating physical changes, which begin with a patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck. This discovery comes after she has referred to herself as Nightbitch as a good-natured, self-deprecating joke, only to find the joke turning real. The season's oppressive heat and the late-summer cicadas become recurring motifs, their buzzing presence accompanying her most pivotal moments. During the night of the pack, when the dogs come for her, she feels the delicious buzz of the late-summer cicadas and the dewy weight of the pollen-heavy air, nearly seduced by it, pulled into its warm embrace. The season's sensory richness—the wetness of the night air, the bats flying through her periphery—becomes the medium through which she experiences her animal awakening, her ears twitching independently and her tail moving beneath her sweatpants.

The Season of Violence and Release

Summer is also the season of violence, the period in which Nightbitch discovers that what she needed all along was not medical attention or psychotherapy, not choosing happiness or adjusting her attitude, but to sink her sharp teeth into something living and bloody and feel its essence drain away. One night of violence, one night to not care what anyone thought, to shit where she pleased, to not be needed by any living thing—this is what the summer grants her. The season's heat and the long, light-filled days give way to nights of hunting and killing, of carrying dead animals in her mouth back through the neighborhood to bury them in the farthest corner of the lawn. The summer's abundance of life—the chipmunks, squirrels, and birds whose phantom scents she follows—provides the raw material for her transformation into a creature of instinct and anger, a body in motion in the dark.

The Season of Memory and Inheritance

The summer also brings a return of memory, a reconnection to the skills and knowledge of her Appalachian upbringing that she had purposefully forgotten when she left home. The great forgetting that helped her survive her childhood begins to dissolve in the season's warmth, and she recalls her grandmother's teachings: how to keep bees, dip candles, brush wool, use a spinning wheel, track an animal through the woods. She remembers her mother, who was good and responsible and holy and always somewhere far away in her own head, and she comes to see her mother's pushing her out the door not as abandonment but as her mother's best love. The summer's long days give her space to reckon with how many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely, and how evil it was to praise women for giving up each and every dream. This inheritance of knowledge and rage becomes part of her transformation, connecting her animal self to a lineage of women who knew how to live inside an entire life on their own.

The Season of Desire and Freedom

As summer progresses, Nightbitch's desires expand beyond the domestic sphere into fantasies of total freedom. Reading about the WereMothers of Siberia, who lived together and helped each other and were in a constant state of babies, transports her from her stuffy bedroom into the cold, clean woods where they lived. She finds something enticing and exhilarating in rejecting all established society for something remote and magical, a community suited particularly and only to the community's needs. The summer's heat fuels her wish to run and run and run into the cornfields all the way to a stream and then follow it to the ocean, to have very passionate sex with a stranger, to sit on a fully decorated cake without underwear, to perform a large anonymous act of extreme vandalism. She wants to be an artist and a woman and a mother, but more than that, she wants to be a monster. The season's abundance and warmth make such fantasies feel possible, even necessary.

The Season's End and the Gathering of Mothers

The summer concludes with a gathering that marks the culmination of Nightbitch's transformation. On a Monday at the end of the month, as summer makes her final overtures on fine September days with a heat that still inspires trips to the ice cream stand by the river, she and the boy go to the dog park, although they don't have a dog. It is one of the last perfect days to run beneath a blue sky and taste the sun-sweetened wind. The end of the season brings with it a universe of cicadas in full voice, inspiring in each mother that long, sad pull that arrives when the air touches their arms warmly, then departs with a chill. The mothers come to Nightbitch's house in groups of twos and threes, dressed in clothes reserved for nights away from small sticky hands, each looking lovely with an air of ease. It is the perfect time, the perfect night, for feeling and for drinking and for forgetting. The season's end carries the melancholic, hazy weight of all the years past, the what ifs and should have beens, the memories of beautiful, shirtless boys at the lake and a wet beach towel against the cheek. This gathering of the Book Mommies, the herbal-remedy crew committed to leggings and essential oils, becomes the stage for Nightbitch's final performance, the moment when her summer-long transformation reaches its public culmination.

The Season's Significance

Summer in the novel is not merely a chronological marker but a symbolic register that aligns Nightbitch's transformation with the natural world's cycles. The season's heat and abundance mirror her growing animality, while its end brings a melancholy that resonates with her own ambivalence about the changes she has undergone. The summer's final days, with their cicadas and warm-then-chilly air, create the conditions for the novel's climax, when the mothers gather and Nightbitch's identity as a creature of instinct and freedom is fully realized. The season's passing also carries a deeper meaning about the nature of transformation itself: that it happens in time, that it is tied to the rhythms of the natural world, and that it cannot be rushed or prevented. Summer is the season in which Nightbitch becomes what she was always meant to be, and its end marks not an ending but a beginning of a new way of being in the world, one that embraces the animal self and the unbroken lineage of togetherness that connects all living creatures.