Mother Monsters

This story was originally published by Bitch Media on July 20, 2021.

As someone who doesn’t want children, pop culture like Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch, adapted into the 2024 movie of the same name starring Amy Adams; The Upstairs House by Julia Fine; and the Jennifer Lawrence-led movie Die My Love (2025), based on the 2019 novel by Ariana Harwicz, validate my decision. These works deftly portray the feeling of being utterly swallowed by the process of growing another human inside your body and ensuring said human thrives outside of it. But for those who either plan to birth and raise children or have done so already, these examples hold up a mirror to the fact that pregnancy and childbirth are a very real—and often underdiscussed—gamble with their mental health.

The Upstairs House follows Megan, the mother of a newborn and an academic trying to finish her dissertation on children’s literature, particularly the work of Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon. Megan begins envisioning a doorway above their apartment where there isn’t one. One day, it opens to reveal the dwelling of Brown herself, and Megan becomes embroiled in the author’s volatile relationship with socialite and actress Michael Strange, who in real life was Brown’s rumored lover. These hallucinations become such a feature of Megan’s daily life that she leaves her baby with Brown when she goes out one day, later coming home to find “the television remote was where it had been, the door to the downstairs bathroom cracked just as it had been when I left.... The pajamas I’d laid out across the bassinet still hanging there… Where had Margaret gone? Had there been some sort of emergency? Why hadn’t she called?” 

From that point forward, Strange enters the picture as a sort of malevolent poltergeist, leaving baths overflowing and turning on the gas. The Upstairs House deals explicitly with postpartum psychosis; Nightbitch, on the other hand, takes a more abstract approach, centering a different creative soul known only by her titular name. 

A visual artist at her wits end, she spends long days trying “to keep [her two-year-old] alive—that was the only artistic gesture she could muster,” and Yoder’s descriptions of this monotony are evocative and supremely relatable. One such passage reads: “For dinner, she made the meal she had planned—turkey loaf full of grated veggies, and roasted potatoes, and a green salad—and even though the week before the boy had liked all of these things, he refused to eat them that night, screaming, Macaroni, macaroni!, until she relented and made him macaroni and cheese and peas. He ate two bites of each, then dumped the rest on the floor.” 

And Nightbitch, like Megan, also has a maternal writer figure who looms large: Wanda White, the mysterious author of A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, which Nightbitch uses as a kind of manual to understand what’s happening to her. And what is happening to her? Nightbitch begins to notice the presence of a bump filled with hair on her tailbone, increased hair growth all over her body, and an insatiable taste for raw meat. 

Transformation into an animal is a familiar theme in fairy tales and horror movies, and readers can reasonably infer that Nightbitch’s physical changes are actually manifestations of postpartum psychosis.

In one of the lead promotional images for director Lynne Ramsey’s adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel Die, My Love (the comma was removed from movie title), Grace (played by Lawrence) is seen crawling through the overgrown grass like a leopard on the hunt. She’s searching for her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), in hopes that he’ll pay attention to her in the months after giving birth. She’s also hunting for her creative spark and for metaphorical sustenance for her baby, whom she feels unmoored from. 

These depictions of postpartum psychosis, particularly in The Upstairs House and Nightbitch, might sensationalize the condition for the purposes of storytelling, but they don’t demonize the women experiencing it

Both Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes in Hamnet, and Rose Byrne, who plays Linda in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, offered stunning, award-winning onscreen depictions of characters navigating motherhood and grief in 2025. But Lawrence’s animalistic depiction of postpartum depression and psychosis should have also been in the awards conversation. She imbues Grace, an isolated writer, with an electricity that reverberates offscreen. After a stint in a psychiatric hospital, Jackson, her family (which is actually his family), and her friends believe she is cured of her postpartum mental illness. Die My Love makes it clear she isn’t, though, and the film ends with Grace burning it all down—literally and metaphorically—and walking into the forest fire she set rather than spend another moment in the prison that is marriage and motherhood.

Postpartum psychosis, a sudden onset condition that occurs in around between 1% and 2% of births shortly after delivery, can include symptoms such as hallucinations, paranoia, and hyperactivity. It is a rare but very serious condition for those who experience it. Postpartum depression (PPD) is more common, with roughly 15% of people who’ve given birth being diagnosed with it. 

There is often a hormonal shift, known as “the baby blues,” that occurs within the first few days and weeks after giving birth. But postpartum depression lasts longer and can occur at any time during pregnancy and can continue throughout the first year of childrearing. PPD commonly includes feelings of emptiness, hopelessness, and anxiety. These conditions are often poorly understood, but pop culture like The Upstairs House, Nightbitch, and Die My Love is helping to bring these conditions to the fore.

The women in these narratives don’t have essential support, though. Their absent husbands aren’t interested in their struggles, and their families possess a dearth of understanding about the mental and physical toll of mothering. Megan’s family, for instance, quickly dismisses signs of postpartum psychosis that begin in the maternity suite when Megan begins seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. “Just focus on the baby,” they say, contradicting their later messages that Megan needs to focus on herself.

Their advice foreshadows the psychological messaging she receives in a different ward of that same hospital at the end of the book. “She just needs some space to write,” Jackson says, explaining away Grace’s compounding problems. “Maybe if I spend a little less time with my hands down my pants and a little more time writing, maybe I’d write something, maybe,” Grace retorts in another scene, indicating that her identity as a mother, a sexual being starved for her husband’s touch, and a writer are intertwined. 

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Meanwhile, Nightbitch fantasizes about how much easier it would be to drop her artistic ambitions and focus on being a mother if she renounced her humanness altogether: “Dogs don’t need to work. Dogs don’t care about art. Why had this never occurred to her before?” She’s able to let go of the version of her that wants to have an identity outside of her child, the version that struggles with how society might see her—“a privileged, overeducated lady in the middle of America living the dream of holding her baby twenty-four hours a day”—if she dared complain. Megan finds that the imagined presence of the ghosts in her house bothers her less when she’s writing more. 

These depictions of postpartum psychosis, particularly in The Upstairs House and Nightbitch, might sensationalize the condition for the purposes of storytelling, but they don’t demonize the women experiencing it; instead, they highlight the self-perpetuating loneliness and stress wrought by the condition itself and their worries about how it looks to their partners and others. Nightbitch’s narrator even discovers a mothers’ group–turned–herb-peddling MLM that she suspects is also a pack of neighborhood dogs who might understand her own condition. Yoder uses the language of wellness, women’s empowerment, and corporate feminism to illustrate how Nightbitch perceives her own failings as a mother: If she were more present, eliminated distractions, had “some confidence. Believe[d] in herself. [Made] the time,” then she, too, could be a supermom.

These stories are, of course, suffused with the fear that postpartum psychosis puts their protagonists’ children in danger. Megan leaves her baby alone, believing Brown is keeping watch. We frequently see Grace’s baby on the brink of danger as she plays with a knife or intentionally walks through a glass panel door. Nightbitch’s behavior pushes up against the borders of child abuse and abandonment, though her son revels in the “doggy game” that requires him to eat raw meat and sleep in a kennel unattended while his mother transforms. 

The nonexistent reactions of the women’s partners, meanwhile, underscore the isolating secrecy of their conditions. “While he was home, nothing happened. Nothing notable happened. Which is to say, he didn’t notice anything,” Fine writes of Megan’s home life. And though Nightbitch at first drops hints of her primal crossover to her oblivious husband, her embrace of it urges her toward recklessness. “What if I just didn’t do a thing? she wondered. What if I just stopped? Would he notice? Would he do anything? So far, her findings were no and no,” Yoder writes. 

The ill-received adaptation of Nightbitch, directed by the usually unimpeachable Mariel Heller and starring Amy Adams in yet another Academy Award-winning role that wasn’t, defangs the more visceral parts of Yoder’s book. In the film, Nightbitch’s husband is more sympathetic (though he still doesn’t remember that his son needs to wear sunscreen to play outside in the middle of the day) and, at the eleventh hour, comes to the epiphany that Nightbitch is a mother and a creative being separate from her relationship to her family. Please clap. 

This is apparently all it takes for Nightbitch to forget all the parental stressors that turned her into a dog in the first place and have another baby with him. Is it any wonder that of the pop culture discussed here, the one that trades more heavily in unreality is the one in which the protagonist is able to reconcile her motherhood with her art? Yoder, Fine, Harwicz, and Ramsey use these heightened concepts in mediums in which they and their protagonists work to bring these conditions to the forefront.

This story was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.

Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can read her previously published work on her website and through her Substack, The Scarlett Woman. Follow her on Bluesky at @scarletteharris.bsky.social.