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My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir
An unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves.
My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, privilege and scarcity, the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.
Pushing at the boundaries of memoir writing, Sarah Moss investigates contested memories of a girlhood with embattled, distracted parents, loving grandparents, and teachers who said she would never learn to read. Then, by the time she was a teenager, Moss developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, an illness that continued to affect her as an adult, despite her professional and personal success.
In My Good Bright Wolf, this bright light of contemporary literature explores the trap of postwar puritanism and second-wave feminism, the narratives of women and food that we absorb through our childhoods and adulthoods, and the ways in which our health-care system continues to discount the experiences of women, minorities, and anyone suffering from mental illness. With her characteristic commitment to finding the truths in stories, Moss examines what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did—and still does—with her hardworking body and her furiously turning mind.
My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, privilege and scarcity, the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.
Pushing at the boundaries of memoir writing, Sarah Moss investigates contested memories of a girlhood with embattled, distracted parents, loving grandparents, and teachers who said she would never learn to read. Then, by the time she was a teenager, Moss developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, an illness that continued to affect her as an adult, despite her professional and personal success.
In My Good Bright Wolf, this bright light of contemporary literature explores the trap of postwar puritanism and second-wave feminism, the narratives of women and food that we absorb through our childhoods and adulthoods, and the ways in which our health-care system continues to discount the experiences of women, minorities, and anyone suffering from mental illness. With her characteristic commitment to finding the truths in stories, Moss examines what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did—and still does—with her hardworking body and her furiously turning mind.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published August 29, 2024
206 people are currently reading
6739 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Moss
33 books1,882 followersSarah Moss is the award-winning author of six novels: Cold Earth, Night Waking, selected for the Fiction Uncovered Award in 2011, Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children and The Tidal Zone, all shortlisted for the prestigious Wellcome Prize, and her new book Ghost Wall, out in September 2018.
She has also written a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2013.
Sarah Moss is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick in England.
She has also written a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2013.
Sarah Moss is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick in England.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 228 reviews
September 15, 2024
There is an art to the howl, to writing de profundis, in extremis. Art is not required to be tranquil.
If ever a line could sum up a book, it's this one above. Moss's memoir of a lifetime's struggles with body image and an extreme eating disorder is itself a howl of rage and a plea for... something - understanding, change, different interventions? - as well as a hand reaching out to all women who have or do suffer from all the emotions around eating and body image and generally being a woman taking up space in the world.
This is certainly art and definitely not tranquil - it's harrowing and painful reading, even while Moss' intelligent analysis of the issues and record of experience give this intellectual heft. This kind of split consciousness is woven into the text itself as the narrative voice is undercut by that critical inner consciousness that interrogates, mocks and dismisses the very story we're reading, using all those freighted terms so associated with femininity: lies, deception, nastiness, hysteria.
For me, there were two main axes along which this memoir treads: the difficult mother-daughter relationship between Moss and The Jumbly Girl; and Moss' anorexia. While the cutesy names for her parents ('Owl' her father, 'The Jumbly Girl' her mother) jarred consistently, the story of Moss' mother is itself fascinating: she was one of those women who was highly-educated at a time when that was still unusual who then found her doctorate was supposed to be put aside while she settled down into her predestined fate as wife and mother. So many of her questionable behaviours might be assigned to her own angry frustration but I still found it hard (as someone who also has a difficult mother, but that's another story) to accept the way she took out her rage on young Sarah, designating her 'fat', 'greedy' and 'out of control' when she was no more than 8 or 9. Given that this was Owl's own way of attempting to, at best, assert his dominance over his wayward wife, seeing this being passed down to their daughter is painful to witness.
The second strand is, of course, Moss' anorexia. Having read other books about women's struggles with eating, I'd still say this is probably the most harrowing and detailed, probably reflecting the acute intelligence of the writer who straddles that line of knowing the theory but is still unable to struggle out of the emotional and physical morass is which women's (and some men's) eating patterns and relationship with food is so deeply embedded. The accounts of Moss' iron control, of self-starvation to the point of organ failure and near death, of being on a psychiatric ward are both riveting and acutely distressing to read. With her academic hat on, Moss brings Foucault to bear on issues of medical surveillance and medical power structures, adding real weight to her account.
In so many ways this isn't just Moss' story but that, as she is acutely aware, of many women. The bounding structures of patriarchy, the tools of shame, the self-policing, even the accusations of hysteria and self-imposed sickness as if women's mental heath issues are not worthy of time and medical intervention, are all under scrutiny here. And by the end there is a tentative, provisional peace - but an awareness that the war may well not be completely settled.
Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC via NetGalley
August 27, 2024
Author and academic Sarah Moss’s unorthodox memoir centres on the eating issues that led to a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa in her teens. Moss grew up in what she frames as a bourgeois, bohemian household during the late 1970s and 1980s. Both her parents had backgrounds in academia but having children disrupted her mother’s career prospects. Moss lived in a shabby chic house. Her father was either absent or shut away in his study, strictly off limits. Her mother, left to run the household, found children draining, desperate to fend off or, preferably, silence their demands. From her earliest years Moss recalls her mother’s awkward mix of outspoken feminism and resentful domestication; her father’s policing and vocal fat shaming of her mother’s body. His obsession with some notion of the feminine ideal meant he subjected Moss to regular weigh-ins, the results were then linked to his estimations of her worth. Her parents liberal, lefty but snobbishly-austere lifestyle made Moss the odd one out at her school: eating wholefoods, nose buried in a book, deeply envious of other girls who ate sweets and were allowed to play with Barbie dolls – plastic toys were banned in Moss’s home. All of which contributed to conflicted emotions around gender and how to navigate the world. This confusing environment was compounded by coming of age in the era of heroin chic, a society in which all that seemed to matter was that she be as thin as possible.
Moss connects her upbringing, her personal feelings about being/becoming a girl, to representations of food and femininity in favourite childhood books from the works of Arthur Ransome and Laura Ingalls Wilder to the heroines of novels like Jane Eyre: food as nurture; food as self-indulgence; food and class privilege. Examples of the meeting between the cultural and the personal that became central to her later academic research. With the aid of an unusually supportive psychiatric team, Moss herself was able to find ways to move forward and thrive. But later in her forties, during the Covid pandemic, Moss’s old concerns about food, and about the space taken up by her body, resurfaced; and she found herself locked in a Dublin hospital ward on the verge of major organ failure. This time round her treatment was far less sensitive and far more punitive.
Moss draws on a range of literary techniques to tell her story, from conventions taken from folklore and fairy tales to the incorporation of a hectoring inner voice who interrupts and undermines her recollections, constantly questioning her version of events. Moss writes as if examining herself from a distance, often referring to ‘she’ rather than using the first person, partly signalling her fragmented self, the ways in which narrative shapes and inevitably distorts her memories and presentation of her experiences. At first, I found Moss’s shifts in register and style slightly disorientating, even off-putting, particularly the more experimental opening segments but as this unfolded, I found it increasingly engrossing, powerful and provocative. I especially liked Moss’s use of literature from Woolf and Plath to Dorothy Wordsworth to talk about her predicament; her attempts to map relations between the social, cultural, and the individual, from pervasive forms of diet culture to the cultural myths and social control mechanisms that impact women’s relationships with their bodies. Constraints that Moss can recognise, analyse and interpret yet never entirely evade.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC
Moss connects her upbringing, her personal feelings about being/becoming a girl, to representations of food and femininity in favourite childhood books from the works of Arthur Ransome and Laura Ingalls Wilder to the heroines of novels like Jane Eyre: food as nurture; food as self-indulgence; food and class privilege. Examples of the meeting between the cultural and the personal that became central to her later academic research. With the aid of an unusually supportive psychiatric team, Moss herself was able to find ways to move forward and thrive. But later in her forties, during the Covid pandemic, Moss’s old concerns about food, and about the space taken up by her body, resurfaced; and she found herself locked in a Dublin hospital ward on the verge of major organ failure. This time round her treatment was far less sensitive and far more punitive.
Moss draws on a range of literary techniques to tell her story, from conventions taken from folklore and fairy tales to the incorporation of a hectoring inner voice who interrupts and undermines her recollections, constantly questioning her version of events. Moss writes as if examining herself from a distance, often referring to ‘she’ rather than using the first person, partly signalling her fragmented self, the ways in which narrative shapes and inevitably distorts her memories and presentation of her experiences. At first, I found Moss’s shifts in register and style slightly disorientating, even off-putting, particularly the more experimental opening segments but as this unfolded, I found it increasingly engrossing, powerful and provocative. I especially liked Moss’s use of literature from Woolf and Plath to Dorothy Wordsworth to talk about her predicament; her attempts to map relations between the social, cultural, and the individual, from pervasive forms of diet culture to the cultural myths and social control mechanisms that impact women’s relationships with their bodies. Constraints that Moss can recognise, analyse and interpret yet never entirely evade.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC
October 9, 2024
Part memoir, part confessional, part dark and feverish fairytale, this stunned me in its brutal honesty, unflinching intimacy, and beautiful language.
This also involves one of my favourite aspects of writing - an unreliable narrator. How does this work in a memoir, I hear you ask.
Throughout the memoir there are toxic whispers in her writing calling Moss a liar, manipulative, unappreciative. The voices are imagined interjections from her parents who contributed to a shocking childhood and a destructive self-worth, muddying the waters as to what was remembered, miscalled, or deception. The voices constantly remind Moss of her privilege, so how can she have truly had such an awful life?
This is a heavy book. The undoing of Moss as a young, intelligent, inquisitive girl who is willing to do anything to prove she has self-control, that she’s worthy of her parents’ love is described with such hurtful tenderness and poetry that your heart aches.
From controlling herself through hunger, weight, deprivation.
Ultimately,
…about thinking and reading, eating and denying your body food, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.
Unexpectedly, Moss also offers excellent critical analysis of the childhood literature she grew up reading over and over, such as Swallows and Amazon, Jane Eyre, and Little Women. Moss challenges the patriarchal views enforced through the novels that made me see the classics in a new light.
The purpose of writing is not competitive suffering. The making of art is always both privilege and necessity, always dependent on other people doing other work in the kitchen and in the nursery and in the library, in the fields and the factories. No making of art - or love, or war, or peace, or dinner - without a body, no body without food.
This accurately depicts the tensions of an eating disorder. The reality of never feeling enough, of needing to retain control, when everything is falling apart. When you are wasting away, you hold on to the feeling of being accomplished in at least one thing (despite it destroying your life).
The audiobook was stunning.
Bookstagram
This also involves one of my favourite aspects of writing - an unreliable narrator. How does this work in a memoir, I hear you ask.
Throughout the memoir there are toxic whispers in her writing calling Moss a liar, manipulative, unappreciative. The voices are imagined interjections from her parents who contributed to a shocking childhood and a destructive self-worth, muddying the waters as to what was remembered, miscalled, or deception. The voices constantly remind Moss of her privilege, so how can she have truly had such an awful life?
This is a heavy book. The undoing of Moss as a young, intelligent, inquisitive girl who is willing to do anything to prove she has self-control, that she’s worthy of her parents’ love is described with such hurtful tenderness and poetry that your heart aches.
From controlling herself through hunger, weight, deprivation.
Ultimately,
…about thinking and reading, eating and denying your body food, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.
Unexpectedly, Moss also offers excellent critical analysis of the childhood literature she grew up reading over and over, such as Swallows and Amazon, Jane Eyre, and Little Women. Moss challenges the patriarchal views enforced through the novels that made me see the classics in a new light.
The purpose of writing is not competitive suffering. The making of art is always both privilege and necessity, always dependent on other people doing other work in the kitchen and in the nursery and in the library, in the fields and the factories. No making of art - or love, or war, or peace, or dinner - without a body, no body without food.
This accurately depicts the tensions of an eating disorder. The reality of never feeling enough, of needing to retain control, when everything is falling apart. When you are wasting away, you hold on to the feeling of being accomplished in at least one thing (despite it destroying your life).
The audiobook was stunning.
Bookstagram
November 5, 2025
This is a highly ambitious and poetic memoir about childhood trauma and disordered eating, showing a grown-up artist still listening to internalized voices of disparagement. The ghost crossing timelines and standing by the narrator is the title-giving wolf, a wild and brave companion that helps her face what's hidden in the dark forest of her mind so she can overcome the forces within herself that want to destroy her.
Moss does an excellent job merging the conscious thoughts of her narrated self with the intrusive, toxic accusations emerging from the subconscious, rendered in the second person singular. The result is a haunting, claustrophobic tale of a woman trapped within a prison of internalized misogyny and anorexia, heightened in its effect by dark folk tale elements.
Still, I'm a bit of an outlier here, as I had trouble getting into into the book, but this was probably also a bad time for me to pick it up in the first place.
Moss does an excellent job merging the conscious thoughts of her narrated self with the intrusive, toxic accusations emerging from the subconscious, rendered in the second person singular. The result is a haunting, claustrophobic tale of a woman trapped within a prison of internalized misogyny and anorexia, heightened in its effect by dark folk tale elements.
Still, I'm a bit of an outlier here, as I had trouble getting into into the book, but this was probably also a bad time for me to pick it up in the first place.
July 8, 2025
This is a feminist cultural critique of disordered eating firmly set within Moss' lifelong, nearly fatal experience with anorexia. It is tough to read, but so much resonated with me both in her dealings with her parents and in her discussion of how seeding girls' lives with books like Little Women and Little House sets self-abnegation as the highest of virtues in those girls' minds. Excellent work that combines memoir with cultural and literary criticism to powerful and synergistic effect.
January 12, 2025
Utterly devastating reading. I didn’t know that Sarah Moss, one of my favourite literary fiction writers, has lived with anorexia since her early teens. Here she turns her fierce and humane intelligence onto the problem she cannot seem to solve: how is it possible that a woman with the powers of feminist critique, with knowledge of internalised misogyny; the racism and colonialism of beauty standards; and the white supremacy of wellness, cannot get past the voices that tell her to starve herself and diminish her body?
Moss explores her childhood and adolescence - the messages her father and mother gave her; the diet culture of the 1980s and 1990s that underpinned her teen aesthetic - and then segues to 2020 and her most recent hospitalisation. She weaves powerful, astute analysis of books, art and criticism through her own story, making super smart thematic connections between topics as varied as frontier asceticism, motherhood and knitting. These sections - where her life as a writer and a literature professor are to the fore - are contrasted with chapters that are pure howls of pain, hunger and irrational self-destruction. It’s deeply uncomfortable to see Moss’ powerlessness to heal herself by thinking her way out. She knows better but cannot do better.
This isn’t a story of hope and recovery. It’s clear that, by the end of the book, Moss is still suffering, still - at times - starving. She gives a list of resources at the end for people who want to learn about thinking differently and more lovingly of their bodies - the Maintenance Phase podcast is on there, and Aubrey Gordon’s book. But there’s no reassurance that Moss herself is there, or even getting there. As she writes, addressing herself:
‘You don’t think fatness is repellant, you don’t think you believe that thinness is superior to larger bodies, but you certainly act as if you do. You can see exactly how the moralising of health and strength and thinness complies with supremacist thinking; you just can’t stop behaving as if you agree. Your eating disorder has made you a hypocrite. Your integrity, your wholeness, has failed.’
This is a difficult and terrible thing to admit but I’m sure it will resonate for a lot of people, whose values are suspended every time they body check themselves in a storefront window. It shows how insidious these ways of thinking are and how vulnerable we make ourselves when we confront them.
Highly recommended but, be warned, there is a lot of talk of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviour and thinking in this book. Since Moss is constantly struggling with anorexia, and we are in her head, it is relentless at times.
Moss explores her childhood and adolescence - the messages her father and mother gave her; the diet culture of the 1980s and 1990s that underpinned her teen aesthetic - and then segues to 2020 and her most recent hospitalisation. She weaves powerful, astute analysis of books, art and criticism through her own story, making super smart thematic connections between topics as varied as frontier asceticism, motherhood and knitting. These sections - where her life as a writer and a literature professor are to the fore - are contrasted with chapters that are pure howls of pain, hunger and irrational self-destruction. It’s deeply uncomfortable to see Moss’ powerlessness to heal herself by thinking her way out. She knows better but cannot do better.
This isn’t a story of hope and recovery. It’s clear that, by the end of the book, Moss is still suffering, still - at times - starving. She gives a list of resources at the end for people who want to learn about thinking differently and more lovingly of their bodies - the Maintenance Phase podcast is on there, and Aubrey Gordon’s book. But there’s no reassurance that Moss herself is there, or even getting there. As she writes, addressing herself:
‘You don’t think fatness is repellant, you don’t think you believe that thinness is superior to larger bodies, but you certainly act as if you do. You can see exactly how the moralising of health and strength and thinness complies with supremacist thinking; you just can’t stop behaving as if you agree. Your eating disorder has made you a hypocrite. Your integrity, your wholeness, has failed.’
This is a difficult and terrible thing to admit but I’m sure it will resonate for a lot of people, whose values are suspended every time they body check themselves in a storefront window. It shows how insidious these ways of thinking are and how vulnerable we make ourselves when we confront them.
Highly recommended but, be warned, there is a lot of talk of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviour and thinking in this book. Since Moss is constantly struggling with anorexia, and we are in her head, it is relentless at times.
July 25, 2024
A brave, honest and very powerful memoir about hunger and food , mental health, feminism, books, thinking and reason. I love Moss’s novels and this is as great and poetic as ever.
Thank you Picador/Netgalley UK and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux/Edelweiss for the ARCs.
Thank you Picador/Netgalley UK and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux/Edelweiss for the ARCs.
April 21, 2025
This was a fascinating read providing lots of food for thought. Right from the get go we know that this book is going to focus on control of various appetites. Deprivation -not eating to maintain control is a particularly strong theme.
In Sarah Moss' community growing up - "Nice people didn't mention skin colour, that it was rude to notice paler and darker skin, but necessary to judge larger and smaller bodies as if one form of supremacy could be separated from another."
In school Moss' math teacher warned her class: "Don't ever learn to type [...] and don't ever learn to make a cup of tea that way you can't end up as someone's secretary." She concluded that "domestic competence was the enemy of promise."
A fair amount of the book is dedicated to eating or not eating as a means of control. Moss writes about controlling the size of your waist by wearing a corset: "The idea of outsourcing the minimization of your waist measurement to a physical restraint seemed delightful. How much easier to tighten a corset that keep watch over every mouthful and never satiate hunger."
Wild camping offered a reprieve from the focus on eating versus not eating: "There was little temptation in your camping food, so the constant battle against your appetite was less work than at home."
Controlling emotions also featured. Moss writes: "Men have been telling women their emotion is madness since the Garden of Eden and meanwhile men's emotion leaves bruises on your legs and broken crockery on the floor and that's your fault too, you drive them to it. Your madness leaves them no choice."
The following passage about being a new mother especially resonated with my own experience with my firstborn. I think new mothers are especially vulnerable during the first year and are often relegated to the background, rather than cared for and listened to.
Moss writes: "The opportunities for failure increased after the birth. Breast feeding was hard - the discourse around it punitive, everything you did or said or thought, every move you made might harm the baby now and for the rest of his life."
Once you have children, you are never alone. I appreciated what Moss wrote about the quiet sense of alone-ness, undisturbed privacy to read that comes from being able to lock the bathroom door against intruders even familiar ones. "The convention of leaving people in peace in the bathroom respected even in your house promised security you felt nowhere else."
This following quotes stood out to me as I am currently reading another book about adult children whose parents are emotionally immature:
"Loss of control was also your greatest fear. The deal in your family, you'd always thought was that the parents preferred freedom to responsibility which meant that the children were given freedom instead of care."
"You think that often the un-mothered have learned to look to the wider world for nourishment of one kind or another and have found what was needed. The un-mothered are excellent foragers."
Moss analyses some of my favourite reads: The Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Also include, but not one of my favorites: Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Moss provides an interesting feminist view of these books, which set me to thinking.
For example: "Little Women is uncompromising and narrow in its vision of the good life. Marmee tells her girls to be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing that can happen to a woman."
About Pilgrim's Progress Moss writes: "It's a recipe for striving, with the constantly deferred promise of eternal rest. Work harder than seems possible now to earn leisure after death."
Moss explores further - "The logic strikes you as not unlike that of starving now to earn eventual eating, get thin enough and you can have cake, save hard enough and you can be rich, hate yourself enough and you will be loved. You'll be thin enough, you'll have done enough self depravation when you're dead."
Moss writes extensively on Mary Wollenstonecraft considered by many as "the first British feminist, like all of us she saw through the glass of her own time and place and saw further and more intelligently than most."
She goes on to write that "[Wollenstonecraft] paid a higher price for publishing female intelligence than any woman in Britain would now and her critic of marriage would take centuries to reach the mainstream."
Indeed, "The venom with which the major thinkers of her day received her work is as alarming as any modern internet reaction to feminist writing."
One example of a fellow writer's contempt: "Samuel Johnson, author among other important works of the first English dictionary, called her a hyena in petticoats."
"The cost of the female mind was the female body. You couldn't be clever and enjoy eating, you could't be a good woman and like sex. If you wanted to take on the patriarchy you had to prove that you weren't greedy, weren't interested in shopping or cooking, could discipline your appetites and control your body."
She adds that: "Only by such regulation and repression might she prove that a woman's reason is equal to a man's."
I enjoyed listening to Morven Christie's voice as she read this audiobook.
In Sarah Moss' community growing up - "Nice people didn't mention skin colour, that it was rude to notice paler and darker skin, but necessary to judge larger and smaller bodies as if one form of supremacy could be separated from another."
In school Moss' math teacher warned her class: "Don't ever learn to type [...] and don't ever learn to make a cup of tea that way you can't end up as someone's secretary." She concluded that "domestic competence was the enemy of promise."
A fair amount of the book is dedicated to eating or not eating as a means of control. Moss writes about controlling the size of your waist by wearing a corset: "The idea of outsourcing the minimization of your waist measurement to a physical restraint seemed delightful. How much easier to tighten a corset that keep watch over every mouthful and never satiate hunger."
Wild camping offered a reprieve from the focus on eating versus not eating: "There was little temptation in your camping food, so the constant battle against your appetite was less work than at home."
Controlling emotions also featured. Moss writes: "Men have been telling women their emotion is madness since the Garden of Eden and meanwhile men's emotion leaves bruises on your legs and broken crockery on the floor and that's your fault too, you drive them to it. Your madness leaves them no choice."
The following passage about being a new mother especially resonated with my own experience with my firstborn. I think new mothers are especially vulnerable during the first year and are often relegated to the background, rather than cared for and listened to.
Moss writes: "The opportunities for failure increased after the birth. Breast feeding was hard - the discourse around it punitive, everything you did or said or thought, every move you made might harm the baby now and for the rest of his life."
Once you have children, you are never alone. I appreciated what Moss wrote about the quiet sense of alone-ness, undisturbed privacy to read that comes from being able to lock the bathroom door against intruders even familiar ones. "The convention of leaving people in peace in the bathroom respected even in your house promised security you felt nowhere else."
This following quotes stood out to me as I am currently reading another book about adult children whose parents are emotionally immature:
"Loss of control was also your greatest fear. The deal in your family, you'd always thought was that the parents preferred freedom to responsibility which meant that the children were given freedom instead of care."
"You think that often the un-mothered have learned to look to the wider world for nourishment of one kind or another and have found what was needed. The un-mothered are excellent foragers."
Moss analyses some of my favourite reads: The Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Also include, but not one of my favorites: Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Moss provides an interesting feminist view of these books, which set me to thinking.
For example: "Little Women is uncompromising and narrow in its vision of the good life. Marmee tells her girls to be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing that can happen to a woman."
About Pilgrim's Progress Moss writes: "It's a recipe for striving, with the constantly deferred promise of eternal rest. Work harder than seems possible now to earn leisure after death."
Moss explores further - "The logic strikes you as not unlike that of starving now to earn eventual eating, get thin enough and you can have cake, save hard enough and you can be rich, hate yourself enough and you will be loved. You'll be thin enough, you'll have done enough self depravation when you're dead."
Moss writes extensively on Mary Wollenstonecraft considered by many as "the first British feminist, like all of us she saw through the glass of her own time and place and saw further and more intelligently than most."
She goes on to write that "[Wollenstonecraft] paid a higher price for publishing female intelligence than any woman in Britain would now and her critic of marriage would take centuries to reach the mainstream."
Indeed, "The venom with which the major thinkers of her day received her work is as alarming as any modern internet reaction to feminist writing."
One example of a fellow writer's contempt: "Samuel Johnson, author among other important works of the first English dictionary, called her a hyena in petticoats."
"The cost of the female mind was the female body. You couldn't be clever and enjoy eating, you could't be a good woman and like sex. If you wanted to take on the patriarchy you had to prove that you weren't greedy, weren't interested in shopping or cooking, could discipline your appetites and control your body."
She adds that: "Only by such regulation and repression might she prove that a woman's reason is equal to a man's."
I enjoyed listening to Morven Christie's voice as she read this audiobook.
July 26, 2024
Sarah Moss is a unique writer, and so it comes as no surprise that her memoir would also be unique. Told mostly in the second person, with unflinching honestly and generous detail, she remembers everything about growing up, giving an account of food disorders from the beginning wherein despite assurances from the school nurse that she is not overweight for her frame, she is constantly being reviled as too fat, food and other indulgences being held up as evil. There is also quite a bit of abuse from the "owl," which she calls her father, making this a study of life under a paternalistic system. I particularly liked the deep analyses of books that influenced her, mostly 19th century works such as Jane Eyre and the works of Laura Ingalls. This is the second author biography I've read recently, and find the way their novelistic style influences their memoirs.
August 31, 2025
I have loved Sarah Moss novels. When I learned that she had recently written a memoir, I was interested. In this unusual memoir, she hints at a childhood of neglect, bullying and perhaps violence inside her home. She became anorexic, which eventually led to hospitalizations and therapy. I would guess that she will never outrun all her demons in this struggle to allow herself to eat, but I think it was very courageous to write about so honestly. Well done!
November 21, 2024
I'm starting to think Sarah Moss is one of those authors I think I like more than I actually do (it probably doesn't help that I keep confusing her with Sarah Hall, either). But this book felt like my usual experience with her work - on the one hand, she writes exquisite prose, on the other I find myself kept at a distance from the heart of the work and unable to connect with it at anything more than a level of technical admiration.
This is part memoir, part confessional, and unsparing in its examination of tough subjects like anorexia. But ultimately I found the style wearying. It constantly contradicts itself - a narrative voice correcting the story with some iteration of "that never happened, or if it did, you deserved it" which at first feels like an accurate commentary on the unreliability of memories (as someone whose entire childhood is a blur, I can relate) but it starts to wear thin. If this isn't true, does it matter? What are we being fed here?
And while it's always good to have someone own their own privilege, Moss does it to such an extent that it's exhausting and starts to feels performative - she's constantly tying herself in knots to remind us she knows her upbringing was more privileged than many, she knows how unprogressive some of the books she grew up loving were, she knows how unfeminist some of her opinions about bodies and weight and womanhood were / are. Like, we get it.
In the end the quality of the writing wasn't enough to make me care about the content.
This is part memoir, part confessional, and unsparing in its examination of tough subjects like anorexia. But ultimately I found the style wearying. It constantly contradicts itself - a narrative voice correcting the story with some iteration of "that never happened, or if it did, you deserved it" which at first feels like an accurate commentary on the unreliability of memories (as someone whose entire childhood is a blur, I can relate) but it starts to wear thin. If this isn't true, does it matter? What are we being fed here?
And while it's always good to have someone own their own privilege, Moss does it to such an extent that it's exhausting and starts to feels performative - she's constantly tying herself in knots to remind us she knows her upbringing was more privileged than many, she knows how unprogressive some of the books she grew up loving were, she knows how unfeminist some of her opinions about bodies and weight and womanhood were / are. Like, we get it.
In the end the quality of the writing wasn't enough to make me care about the content.
September 23, 2024
this was a spur of the moment netgalley request (thanks to this review) that i ended up being pleasantly surprised by! i haven’t read any other sarah moss books so i wasn’t sure what to expect. this is an unconventional memoir that plays with form, recounting moss’s struggle with anorexia and her fraught relationship with her parents, among other things.
moss acts as a bit of a time traveler here, examining the forces that shaped her parents and how those forces influenced their interactions with her. her parents’ own upbringings and society at the time caused them to repeat the neglect and uncaring behaviors that they themselves had faced. moss also wonders if their rocky relationship is due to her not being the right child for them, which is a heartbreaking question to explore.
“You need a reverse ghost here, a present voice to haunt the past.”
another interesting question that brings the titular wolf to life - what would you say to your former-child self to protect them from future harm? moss arms the metaphorical wolf, inspired by a poem a friend shared with her, with advice for her younger self, wisdom that was hard won after the restriction of her childhood. she asks the wolf to go back to that young girl and reassure her that the struggles she faced with anorexia were not her fault, resulting in some really touching passages.
we also have the reoccurring concept of the unreliable narrator. an italicized voice questions moss’s memory and accuses her of making things up about her parents- what is the line between fact and fiction when you’re trying to recall traumatic events that happened to you 40 years ago? it was a really thought provoking way to explore the uncertainty moss feels as a novelist trying to write a memoir, due to her penchant for creating stories. i think it also allows her to accept that multiple things can be true at once, that there can be good experiences from her childhood, hidden amongst the bad ones.
examining little house on the prairie, little women, and jane eyre, among others, she utilizes literary criticism as a way to discuss privilege. throughout literary history, she shows how feminism has been used as a cover for racism, classism, and fatphobia. she also explores how her ability to choose sustainable consumption and to choose what kind of femininity she presents is a result of the privilege she has. i thought there was a lot of nuance in these sections of the book.
i think this was a really effective experimentation within the memoir genre. all of the elements she was working with really came together for me and kept me compelled. it’s a difficult read at times as she discusses her eating disorder and the hospitalization that was resulted from it in depth, so be mindful of that if you pick this one up. overall, though, it was unlike any other book i’ve read!
moss acts as a bit of a time traveler here, examining the forces that shaped her parents and how those forces influenced their interactions with her. her parents’ own upbringings and society at the time caused them to repeat the neglect and uncaring behaviors that they themselves had faced. moss also wonders if their rocky relationship is due to her not being the right child for them, which is a heartbreaking question to explore.
“You need a reverse ghost here, a present voice to haunt the past.”
another interesting question that brings the titular wolf to life - what would you say to your former-child self to protect them from future harm? moss arms the metaphorical wolf, inspired by a poem a friend shared with her, with advice for her younger self, wisdom that was hard won after the restriction of her childhood. she asks the wolf to go back to that young girl and reassure her that the struggles she faced with anorexia were not her fault, resulting in some really touching passages.
we also have the reoccurring concept of the unreliable narrator. an italicized voice questions moss’s memory and accuses her of making things up about her parents- what is the line between fact and fiction when you’re trying to recall traumatic events that happened to you 40 years ago? it was a really thought provoking way to explore the uncertainty moss feels as a novelist trying to write a memoir, due to her penchant for creating stories. i think it also allows her to accept that multiple things can be true at once, that there can be good experiences from her childhood, hidden amongst the bad ones.
examining little house on the prairie, little women, and jane eyre, among others, she utilizes literary criticism as a way to discuss privilege. throughout literary history, she shows how feminism has been used as a cover for racism, classism, and fatphobia. she also explores how her ability to choose sustainable consumption and to choose what kind of femininity she presents is a result of the privilege she has. i thought there was a lot of nuance in these sections of the book.
i think this was a really effective experimentation within the memoir genre. all of the elements she was working with really came together for me and kept me compelled. it’s a difficult read at times as she discusses her eating disorder and the hospitalization that was resulted from it in depth, so be mindful of that if you pick this one up. overall, though, it was unlike any other book i’ve read!
July 1, 2024
Devastating work. Powerful, poetic, and stripped down to the bone of what you can tolerate as a reader, which is a magnificent achievement given the subject matter. This is hard to read and there were times when I just had to put this down and walk away from it. My daughter was diagnosed with an eating disorder and so much of this writing connected me to dark, difficult places. The beauty of this writing is that it is real. This is it. This is how it is. In the shifting negotiation between what you know and what you feel, what you remember and what you think you remember, what you believe and how you take that out on yourself, this is true. I've read a lot of stuff around eating disorders and this feels like the truest thing I've ever read. I am in awe of the author for what she has done here. It's brutal and beautiful.
May 28, 2025
Having just finished Moss's transplendent new novel, Ripeness, I thought I'd backtrack and read this, her second memoir, which came out late last year - and other than some early academia, is the only other work of hers I'd yet to read.
I don't read much non-fiction as a rule, and rarely memoirs either (I made the rare exception for her FIRST one, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland, about the year she spent in Iceland - which was fascinating!) - I MUCH prefer fiction to 'real life', but I did find this rather compelling, and it is up to Moss's usual high standard as far as the excellent prose goes. I had a few minor issues - I'd have preferred a more through-line chronology, rather than the skipping around in time dictated by subject matter, and there were a few instances where I thought we were getting a bit far off the beaten track (mainly in the last quarter).
Be that as it may and given that I could not personally relate to much of the feminist and anorexia issues at the forefront of this disquisition, I did speed through it in only two days, so it did have a propulsive force to it. And it made me appreciate Moss's fiction even more, if possible, so there's that as well.
My sincere thanx to Netgalley, the author and FS&G for the ARC in exchange for this honest review.
I don't read much non-fiction as a rule, and rarely memoirs either (I made the rare exception for her FIRST one, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland, about the year she spent in Iceland - which was fascinating!) - I MUCH prefer fiction to 'real life', but I did find this rather compelling, and it is up to Moss's usual high standard as far as the excellent prose goes. I had a few minor issues - I'd have preferred a more through-line chronology, rather than the skipping around in time dictated by subject matter, and there were a few instances where I thought we were getting a bit far off the beaten track (mainly in the last quarter).
Be that as it may and given that I could not personally relate to much of the feminist and anorexia issues at the forefront of this disquisition, I did speed through it in only two days, so it did have a propulsive force to it. And it made me appreciate Moss's fiction even more, if possible, so there's that as well.
My sincere thanx to Netgalley, the author and FS&G for the ARC in exchange for this honest review.
March 24, 2025
In her 2024 memoir My Good Bright Wolf, English academic and novelist Sarah Moss recounts her lifelong battle with an eating disorder, from its origins in her childhood to exacerbations later in life that lead to an inpatient hospitalization. Moss's narrative choice is to refer to herself by the second person and to refer to her parents and her brother by childish nicknames (her father becomes The Owl, her mother becomes The Jumbly Girl, and her brother, apparently the golden child, becomes The Angel Boy), which I found odd and off-putting. The first half of the book is devoted to perseverations on Moss' childhood, which, while important context for the beginning of her eating disorder, could have been condensed substantially without watering down the plot. The second half of the book explores Moss' eating disorder in the last decade or so, largely skipping over Moss' 20s and 30s when she completed her PhD, had her children, and built her career (though glimpses of these moments are told in retrospect).
Given Moss' literary background, she also plays into the trope of taking inspiration from influential books about young women and coming of age in recounting her own story -- from the March sisters in Little Women to Jane in Jane Eyre and others. I didn't find these comparisons particularly insightful - they felt more pretentious than anything.
Overall, an uneven effort.
Further reading: memoirs focusing on body image
Outofshapeworthlessloser: A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out by Gracie Gold | my review
Empty by Susan Burton | my review
My statistics:
Book 94 for 2025
Book 2020 cumulatively
Given Moss' literary background, she also plays into the trope of taking inspiration from influential books about young women and coming of age in recounting her own story -- from the March sisters in Little Women to Jane in Jane Eyre and others. I didn't find these comparisons particularly insightful - they felt more pretentious than anything.
Overall, an uneven effort.
Further reading: memoirs focusing on body image
Outofshapeworthlessloser: A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out by Gracie Gold | my review
Empty by Susan Burton | my review
My statistics:
Book 94 for 2025
Book 2020 cumulatively
September 15, 2024
Brutally honest, viscerally moving, Moss's memoir describes the road to anorexia and it's lifelong legacy of self subjugation in as unique a style as I have ever read. Despite it's darkness it is utterly compelling, would have been a one sitting read if I hadn't started it so close to bedtime.
A vivid and insightful lens on the complexity and contradictions of middle class virtue, female idealism, second wave feminism, maternal resentment, and the backlash against women who try to take up some more space.
This one has imprinted itself on my brain.
A vivid and insightful lens on the complexity and contradictions of middle class virtue, female idealism, second wave feminism, maternal resentment, and the backlash against women who try to take up some more space.
This one has imprinted itself on my brain.
December 8, 2024
Wow. This book reached inside my brain and scooped lots of buried stuff in there out into the open. I listened to it as an audiobook, and usually that makes me like a book less, but the narrator was so, so good I can't imagine having just read it on paper. Will be reading more Sarah Moss and listening to more by that narrator!
dnfed
October 12, 2024I love Sarah Moss’ novels, particularly Night Waking & The Tidal Zone, but I found the Iceland memoir underwhelming & couldn’t stand what she was doing here sadly.
January 31, 2025
They’re gods and monsters, your mum and dad, mythological. Larkin was right, they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats. Fools who taught them one way and another, that love takes the form of surveillance and judgement, that children will stay dependent and needy forever if not forced to grow up. Fools who taught them that care and attention are scarce resources, not to be wasted on the undeserving. And maybe they’re not really your parents,… just voices in your head.I’m vacillating between thinking of this as relatable memories of a repressed and directionless child and young woman with neglectful parents, and as self-indulgent oversharing of things most of us have dealt with and forgotten. But then that’s pretty much what a memoir is, isn’t it? And pretty much why most of us don’t bother writing memoirs? This is actually quite entertaining, with passages detailing remembered experiences, and intrusive, italicized interjections by a second narrator who sounds annoyingly like my own mother most of the time. Th is is, I think, a brilliant examination of anorexia and how it affects the person who has it, with illuminating descriptions of its dual nature - tangible, observable experience and groundless fantasy may be two incompatible things, but your brain can propel them both at once like paddles in a pinball machine.
Maybe you invented them, after they invented you.
You know you can’t have grown so much, but your eyes and your brain conspire in misrepresentation, and if you’re seeing what is not there, what other delusions could you harbour?The GR blurb called this "unsparing" - wow, parse that word for all its layers of meanings, eh? - but the last sections are actually quite beautifully written, and I enjoyed it enough to put it on my re-read list. 5 stars
***
Insight doesn’t naturally lead to action. Understanding a problem is not the same as solving it. It is possible to exist for a surprisingly long time with life-limiting difficulties whose solutions are known. The human capacity for getting used to things can be a terrible strength.
January 28, 2025
The personal is political in this eating disorder memoir. Moss describes growing up in an austere, controlling household and forming her idea of womanhood from the classics: Little Women (all denying/reducing their natures to prove they are worthy of their father's approval), Jane Eyre (quiet and mousy wins over loud and out of control), and the Little House series (women as survivalists).
Three stars because I found her use of the second person narration, such as, "You were told....," to be distancing. That being said, I loved the lighter, more authentic voice she uses to chime in and challenge herself: 'You were always cold in the house (you're such a baby, it was fine, you just needed to wear a sweater).' This voice is a tragicomic representation of how she was trained, shamed, and molded by her parents, and it felt like her real voice.
I'm drawn to addiction and eating disorder memoirs, I think because people are opening up their lives for the rest of us to recognize pieces of ourselves in their story. In this case, I too formed my ideas of womanhood from those classics that we all read and reread a million times. Seeing Little Women as four girls told to sacrifice what they most cared about to make themselves virtuous is a big bummer when you think about how many of us imprinted on that family as a model.
Three stars because I found her use of the second person narration, such as, "You were told....," to be distancing. That being said, I loved the lighter, more authentic voice she uses to chime in and challenge herself: 'You were always cold in the house (you're such a baby, it was fine, you just needed to wear a sweater).' This voice is a tragicomic representation of how she was trained, shamed, and molded by her parents, and it felt like her real voice.
I'm drawn to addiction and eating disorder memoirs, I think because people are opening up their lives for the rest of us to recognize pieces of ourselves in their story. In this case, I too formed my ideas of womanhood from those classics that we all read and reread a million times. Seeing Little Women as four girls told to sacrifice what they most cared about to make themselves virtuous is a big bummer when you think about how many of us imprinted on that family as a model.
January 4, 2025
Oh, my gosh. A respite from a severe drought of memoirs that miss. My Good Bright Wolf includes fan-fav themes: coming-of-age, feminism, eating disorders, academia, the UK, and madwomen. Moss tells her story and invites readers to think introspectively with her. I loved this.
It took me a while to get into Moss’ writing style. She shares about her childhood like she’s writing a kid’s storybook, naming main characters with pseudonyms, writing in the third person, and giving the child an innocent and trusting disposition. The child-like tone gives the air of ease when in reality the girl’s (Moss’) relationship with food becomes more troublesome.
Moss is smart. It’s as though she adapts her literary criticism notes from her class lectures and transposes them into a memoir by interlacing biographical details. She critiques white feminism, racism in 19th- and 20th-century classic lit by women, patriarchalism, European Protestantism, and eurocentric colonialism as she describes work including Jane Eyre, Little Women, and The Bell Jar. All the while, she consistently gaslights herself. I want to sign up for a class with her asap.
Starting off strong, 2025 books.
It took me a while to get into Moss’ writing style. She shares about her childhood like she’s writing a kid’s storybook, naming main characters with pseudonyms, writing in the third person, and giving the child an innocent and trusting disposition. The child-like tone gives the air of ease when in reality the girl’s (Moss’) relationship with food becomes more troublesome.
Moss is smart. It’s as though she adapts her literary criticism notes from her class lectures and transposes them into a memoir by interlacing biographical details. She critiques white feminism, racism in 19th- and 20th-century classic lit by women, patriarchalism, European Protestantism, and eurocentric colonialism as she describes work including Jane Eyre, Little Women, and The Bell Jar. All the while, she consistently gaslights herself. I want to sign up for a class with her asap.
Starting off strong, 2025 books.
June 12, 2024
I adore Sarah Moss' fiction and was bowled over by this extraordinary memoir.
From the start it was clear that this was no ordinary life. The style is written once removed, with chunks of judgements emphasised by the use of the second person and passive tense. Moss was subjected to careless, disinterested parenting which, whilst giving her great freedoms, did not remove expectations of how she manged this and was perpetually found wanting. Love and care were completely absent and holidays were spent mountain walking or sailing without supplies as she wasn't going to "waste away".
But waste away is exactly what she did. Taking control by stopping eating and developing a lifelong eating disorder. Even then, "You are still too fat, you heard, It would be good if you wasted away. You applied yourself to the task"
It is common for parenting styles to swing between generations but it is assumed (by me anyway) that you learn along the way, adapting to your child's needs. This did not happen for Moss despite her "liberal" academic, feminist parents whose own needs trumped hers. It occurs to her toward the end of the book "..not for the first time, that the advantage of your upbringing was having little to miss, no home to pull you back"
I found reading this compulsive yet raw, distressing yet enlightening memoir stunning. It captured so clearly the true essence of her life and how she has used (and been hampered) by her experiences. Another Moss book to recommend.
Thank you to #NetGalley and #PanMacmillan for the opportunity to read and review
From the start it was clear that this was no ordinary life. The style is written once removed, with chunks of judgements emphasised by the use of the second person and passive tense. Moss was subjected to careless, disinterested parenting which, whilst giving her great freedoms, did not remove expectations of how she manged this and was perpetually found wanting. Love and care were completely absent and holidays were spent mountain walking or sailing without supplies as she wasn't going to "waste away".
But waste away is exactly what she did. Taking control by stopping eating and developing a lifelong eating disorder. Even then, "You are still too fat, you heard, It would be good if you wasted away. You applied yourself to the task"
It is common for parenting styles to swing between generations but it is assumed (by me anyway) that you learn along the way, adapting to your child's needs. This did not happen for Moss despite her "liberal" academic, feminist parents whose own needs trumped hers. It occurs to her toward the end of the book "..not for the first time, that the advantage of your upbringing was having little to miss, no home to pull you back"
I found reading this compulsive yet raw, distressing yet enlightening memoir stunning. It captured so clearly the true essence of her life and how she has used (and been hampered) by her experiences. Another Moss book to recommend.
Thank you to #NetGalley and #PanMacmillan for the opportunity to read and review
November 28, 2024
Moving and empowering. Painfully recognisable on some fronts, challenging on others. Moss takes a deep dive in her own life, exploring feminism, perseverence culture, the glorification of rationality, diet culture, the concept of sanity and the relationship between her body and mind, and analyzing them with a progressively more critical view. She decribes the struggles in her life in clear and confronting detail, the wolf a thread of self-love and healing throughout.
August 29, 2024
I believe this book was written as a part of psychotherapy exercise. There are sections of it which were extremely painful to read. Not once I had to stop to take a deep breath. All this felt way too familiar - although our circumstances in life are very different we ended up with a set of quite similar neuroses. I think Sarah Moss is a very brave woman indeed to share her experience with such naked honesty. I would never dared.
August 30, 2024
'My Good Bright Wolf', by Sarah Moss, is a gripping memoir told in the second person narrative.
I've been a fan of her fiction for years and she quickly became my auto-buy author, so I was really looking forward to her memoir.
'My Good Bright Wolf' exceeded all my expectations.
It's not an easy read, but it's an honest and powerful one.
It's about Sarah's lifelong struggle with an eating disorder, her upbringing and her complicated relationship with her parents. She talks about the literature she grew up with and books that influenced her. The memoir is also about memories, how they change over the years, and shape us and our lives.
Huge thanks to Netgalley and PanMacmillan for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.
I've been a fan of her fiction for years and she quickly became my auto-buy author, so I was really looking forward to her memoir.
'My Good Bright Wolf' exceeded all my expectations.
It's not an easy read, but it's an honest and powerful one.
It's about Sarah's lifelong struggle with an eating disorder, her upbringing and her complicated relationship with her parents. She talks about the literature she grew up with and books that influenced her. The memoir is also about memories, how they change over the years, and shape us and our lives.
Huge thanks to Netgalley and PanMacmillan for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.
February 24, 2025
A body of one’s own - i listened to the audible which brought out the many themes relating to women’s lives from a personal POV. Shame it wasn’t included in the women’s prize for non fiction list - perhaps too dangerous and raw. It meant more to me as I had just studied ‘a room of one’s own’ for a course and SM was obviously influenced by the book. She references it frequently and also uses the trope of looking at famous female novelists; then discusses children’s literature as a form of redemption. The Irish psychiatric ward sarah was in reminded me of Woolf’s stay in twickenham. Like VW she uses a new female narrative form to show disintegration by having the voice of Wolf (clever pun) providing an internal dialogue. I’ve read all Moss’s fiction and appreciate her dark humour and style and think she writes equally accessible nonfiction. The only point of irritation was the nick names for her parents, but I can see why that was done. Second wave feminism is honestly explored which I found very relevant. Morven Christie always narrates beautifully and is a good choice for the audible.
April 2, 2025
i've loved moss as an author, but this memoir was enthralling and excruciating on a different level. moss does an incredible job of weaving academic thinking and emotion, all while underscoring the unfortunate truth that understanding something and acting on it are two different things.
this book is a remarkably intersectional exploration of feminist history and literature and how hunger, food, and pleasure are gendered and restricted. and most brutally, how these elements foster moss' own eating disorder. avoiding the cliches of an illness journey, moss walks us through her life's periods of control and release, never fitting into a neat arc. throughout the memoir, moss makes her doubts and insecurities known in a cutting second voice that compels us to think about our harshest internal critics. will definitely be reading this again someday.
this book is a remarkably intersectional exploration of feminist history and literature and how hunger, food, and pleasure are gendered and restricted. and most brutally, how these elements foster moss' own eating disorder. avoiding the cliches of an illness journey, moss walks us through her life's periods of control and release, never fitting into a neat arc. throughout the memoir, moss makes her doubts and insecurities known in a cutting second voice that compels us to think about our harshest internal critics. will definitely be reading this again someday.
August 15, 2025
In many ways this was a difficult book to read, not least of all because of the intensity of the pain and suffering that Sarah Moss’ disordered eating caused her. I am incredulous that she is/was able to function so highly as a writer when subjected to such restricted eating and excessive exercise.
Her description of her contemplation of suicide was powerfully honest and scary.
I have read most of her fiction, including her latest, Ripeness, and now see these works in a completely different context.
Her description of her contemplation of suicide was powerfully honest and scary.
I have read most of her fiction, including her latest, Ripeness, and now see these works in a completely different context.
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August 29, 2024Sarah Moss is one of my favourite living writers—top three easily. Her memoir about surviving an emotionally neglectful childhood and navigating a lifelong eating disorder is, I think, leaps ahead of what she's been doing in fiction for the last few years. Summerwater and The Fell, her previous two novels, were as skilful as ever but felt a bit like Moss was treading water; My Good Bright Wolf is a huge push forward, sharp and smart and relentlessly self-interrogative. The voice she's landed on for this is mostly second-person (except for a brief period of hospitalisation, which is told in limited third: "you" becomes "she") and constantly intercut with a bullying, belittling voice that accuses her of lying and attention-seeking, demands to see corroborating evidence for her family stories, and generally undermines the narrative at every turn. The voice is never embodied: at various points it seems to ventriloquise her father, her mother, her own negative self-talk, the sound of generalised societal pressures, or all of the above. It's a brilliant device, showing how profoundly a person's—specifically a girl's, then woman's—sense of self and reality can be sabotaged, and how that sabotage comes not just from one ill-equipped parent but from the whole world. I also loved—though some may not—her readings of beloved children's literature and 19th-century fiction: Swallows and Amazons, Little Women, Jane Eyre, the Little House on the Prairie books, Beatrix Potter, and more are evaluated with a loving but un-indulgent eye, revealing their foundations and investments in a white European cult of thinness and female self-control. It's stunning stuff. Apart from the fact that I have the added bonus of Type I diabetes, which complicates my relationship to food considerably, it's a perfect model for what I want my most recent nonfiction project (temporarily shelved while PhD-writing) to do. Source: Netgalley. Published 29 August 2024
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February 21, 2025I'm not sure how many stars to give this one. This is a professor/author's memoir of her own (lifelong) (ongoing) struggle with mental illness. It's really beautiful, and the craft of it is compelling. She has her own inner critic act as a secondary narrator. She jumps among perspectives, indicating dissociation. It's very literary, in the sense that she's also finding resonant themes in the literature that shaped her as a child and as a student. I listened to it on audio, and it held my attention through many commutes.
But I'm not sure why I read it, which is the problem I encounter with many memoirs. I think that this probably isn't the right book for you if you are actively struggling with serious mental illness (be careful!), and if you aren't, it will be difficult to find much light.
But I'm not sure why I read it, which is the problem I encounter with many memoirs. I think that this probably isn't the right book for you if you are actively struggling with serious mental illness (be careful!), and if you aren't, it will be difficult to find much light.
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