My Good Bright Wolf
A Memoir
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award
A Best Book of 2024: Kirkus, The Independent, and the New York Public Library
A New York Magazine Most-Anticipated Book of the Fall
A Library Journal Top Title of the Season
From the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall, Summerwater, and The Fell, Sarah Moss’s My Good Bright Wolf is an unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves.
A girl must watch her figure but never be vain. She must be intelligent but never a know-it-all. She must be ambitious, if she is clever, but not in a way that shows. She must cook and sew and make do and mend. She must know (but never say) that these skills are, in some fundamental way, flawed and frivolous—feminine. Girls must stay small, even as they grow. Women must show restraint.
And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.
Here, with My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss takes on these rules, these lessons from the fables of girlhood, and uses them to fearlessly investigate the nature of memory, the lure of self-control, the impact of privilege, scarcity, parents, love. Through narratives of women and food, second-wave feminism and postwar puritanism, and her own challenges with a health care system that discounts the experiences of those it ought to serve, Moss seeks truth in the stories we tell ourselves and others. Harm can become power. Attention can become care. A body and a mind, though working hard together, can be at odds.
And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.
Beautiful and sharp, moving and unapologetic, erudite and very funny, My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir that breaks the rules.
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.
