My Good Bright Wolf
A Memoir
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.
Sarah Moss, author of The Fell and Summerwater, confronts all of this in a book that pushes at the boundaries of memoir-writing. It narrates contested memories of girlhood at the hands of embattled, distracted parents in a time of disastrous attitudes towards eating and female discipline. By the time she was a teenager, Sarah had developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, and that illness returned in her adult life.
Now the mother and teacher of young adults, in My Good Bright Wolf she explores a childhood caught in the trap of her parents’ post-war puritanism and second-wave feminism, interrogating what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did – and still does – with her hard-working body and her furiously turning mind.
Beautiful, audacious, moving and so very funny, Sarah Moss’s memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself, and then offers a way out: it is a blindingly brilliant experiment in and celebration of what a creative mind can do.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moss (The Fell) masterfully evokes the insidiousness of self-doubt in this poetic account of growing up with an eating disorder in 1980s Scotland. In forceful second-person narration ("You could never be small enough, blonde enough"), Moss catalogs the ways her mother's thwarted feminist ambitions and her father's anger chipped away at her own confidence, illustrating the long-tail effects by regularly interjecting a second, contradictory voice ("You must be sick in the head, complaining about this stuff, ballet and sailing and private school"). As she began to starve herself and her body shrank, Moss retreated into a life of the mind ("Poetry was safe and the female body, with its appetites and tides, was dangerous"). She weaves in erudite analyses of the writers who guided her girlhood, including Laura Ingalls Wilder and Charlotte Brontë. The "wolf" of the title functions like a spiritual caretaker—a wild aspect of Moss's personality liberated from her restrictive fears of food—that helps quiet her inner critic and heal her wounds. The narrative ends on a note of tentative hope, as Moss recovers from an anorexia relapse during Covid, allowing the wolf to "take food, this time, to the hungry child on the mountain" and acknowledging healing's often jagged path. This is a stirring and singular achievement.
