My Good Bright Wolf
a boundary-breaking memoir about one woman's body and mind
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- 5,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Winner of Scotland's Non-Fiction Book of the Year
A memoir about thinking and reading, eating and denying your body food, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.
'Extraordinary . . . Moss is a towering figure in the contemporary literary landscape' - The Daily Telegraph
‘Devastating, funny . . . a brave and important book’ - Melissa Harrison
'Full of daring . . . revelatory' - The Observer
'An observational masterpiece' - The i
In the household of Sarah Moss's childhood she learnt that the female body and mind were battlegrounds. 1970s austerity and second-wave feminism came together: she must keep herself slim but never be vain, she must be intelligent but never angry. Clever girls should be ambitious but women must restrain themselves. Women had to stay small.
Years later, her self-control had become dangerous, and Sarah found herself in A&E. The return of her teenage anorexia had become a medical emergency, forcing her to reckon with all that she had denied her hard-working body and furiously turning mind.
My Good Bright Wolf navigates contested memories of girlhood, the chorus of relentless and controlling voices that dogged Sarah’s every thought, and the writing and books in which she could run free. Beautiful, audacious, moving and very funny, this memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself, and then finds a way out.
From Sarah Moss, the Sunday Times bestselling author of Summerwater, My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir like no other.
'Compulsive and compelling' - Emilie Pine
‘Confronts what it means to be a woman trying to find a way to be’ - Jan Carson
'Moss writes so compassionately about human frailty while her own work is as close to perfect as a novelist’s can be' - The Times
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.
