I love Sarah Moss's fiction writing so was keen to read this memoir by her. I have to say that the writing is stunning throughout, and I love the way she's structured this book as almost stream of consciousness but clearly well thought out as she explores her demons. I found the subject matter really difficult to read at times so I did have to keep putting this book down and coming back to it - but it did always pull me back and I did want to keep reading. This is such a visceral and honest memoir about her eating disorder, her relationship with her parents and the ways trauma (our own and those that belong to family members who come before us) continues to affect us. This is a book that will stay with me, I recommend it.

Having read all of Sarah Moss’s fiction thus far, in addition to her travel memoir, I had very high expectations of this, her first true memoir. Somehow she managed to surpass them. Moss’s account of her teenage eating disorder and its reappearance during lockdown is told with devastating honesty. I found myself gasping several times at her frank descriptions, particularly of her decidedly cold upbringing. This book was not at all what I expected, but I have recommended it to everyone I can.

This is undoubtedly one of the books of 2024.

This is a truly devastating autobiography that’s less the story of Moss and more one of her eating disorder. Which makes it sound miserable, and it is a tough read for sure, trigger warnings all round, but Moss is such an amazing writer that it’s beautiful too.

Wolf is a life saver.
What a raw and is some ways beautiful memoir this is.
Personally I think the wolf is part conscience and part a repository for dreams and ambitions.
Sarah was born to idealistic parents, the Owl a frustrated American with a difficult past and the Jumblygirl, a clever but frustrated woman. From her parents Sarah receives lots of mixed messages, feminist ideas from her Mother, the power of men and violence from her Father. Neither parent offers and support only criticism, a lot of it to do with her weight. Thank goodness for her Grandmother, she helps her with reading, hobbies and believes in her. The Angel boy is born after Sarah, the perfect looking and well behaved baby that the parents had expected Sarah to be.
At school Sarah is bullied and her development is initially slow, she is bullied for standing out with her odd clothes and strange parents, occasionally visiting friends she sees his most families interact, she also becomes aware of the struggles with food and weight that a lot of women have.
Sarah takes dieting to extremes and ends up in hospital, feeling conflicted if she gives into feelings of hunger. An argument with a Nurse proved to be a no win situation here.
Different jobs take her away from home and sometimes increase her anxiety concerning food, she has suicidal thought and only overcomes them when she thinks of her two sons.
A thought provoking and at times a very moving read.
Thank you Sarah, NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for this ARC.

I have loved many of Sarah Moss' novels, and the sheer ferocity and directness of the writing here was something I have come to love.

However, what I didn't expect was what that would look like when combined with the frankness of her language when talking about some of her personal demons. This book's content is heavy, but Moss always manages to stay ahead of it, turning her gaze on finding new and inventive ways of discussing them, feeling totally innovative in patches. For example, the overlapping voices in the book, representing some of the harsher self-talk for Moss, both add to the wider narrative, whilst also unsettling the reader as someone who is suddenly privy to the deepest, darkest sides of Moss' self.

This is a staggering piece of writing, giving both background to several of the novels Moss wrote (and that I have adored) but also allowing Moss to articulate what is so often inarticulable.

I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss is a memoir about the author’s eating disorder which developed during her childhood with a serious relapse during the pandemic. I have enjoyed reading several novels by Moss over the years which often deal with food and illness, and her latest memoir is a complex account about these themes and also addresses control, memory and unreliable narrators. She writes about her emotionally neglectful childhood in Manchester and the books she sought solace in, with some analysis of their depictions of food and femininity. My Good Bright Wolf is mostly written in the second person, an unusual style for a memoir and a very powerful one too. The prose is intercut with Moss often berating herself, which sometimes felt relentless and intrusive to read but is very effective at showing the mental toll of anorexia. Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Brutal, brittle and searing exploration of a lifelong struggle with food, identity and femininity, Moss delivers a terrifying vision of how she has lived her own life. Without pity, explanation or excuses, she looks at it all and offers it up with true bravery. A devastating privilege to read.

As faultlessly crafted as the author’s novels, this truly is an artfully, insightfully and relatable examined life. Not at all what I imagined, but so much more, I’m in awe at its honesty and fearlessness. Deserves a place on the bookshelf of every woman, and frankly every man too. Raw, but so very compelling.

4.5

'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 am a big fan of Sarah Moss’s fictional work so I was excited to see how her writing would translate to a memoir. From the off, I loved the style. Written mostly in the second person, Sarah Moss uses an interrupting third party voice to question her narrative, her memory and belittle the stories she tells.

In the early chapters concerning her childhood, these voices are interpreted to be family members and the exchanges are reminiscent of how families hold different memories of events and how they can try to justify or manipulate past actions or omissions. As Sarah progresses into adulthood the source of the voices becomes more ambiguous but at times it is clear she is battling with herself.

It’s not an easy read, the passages which describe her hospitalisation due to an eating disorder are particularly frightening but the writing is compelling and compulsive. Despite some of the subject matter, Sarah Moss refrains from self pity; she is aware of and acknowledges her privilege and explores how this impacts her experiences.

There is so much here which resonated with me, from the small details like school dinners in the 1980s to descriptions of motherhood, which rang so true, they were like a slap across the face. The preoccupation with the body and the desire to be in control of it, is something which will feel familiar on varying levels, to many people.

It is brilliantly done, one of the best memoirs I’ve read and one that I will take something from.

My Good Bright Wolf, a memoir and compelling story of Sarah Moss is an extraordinary delve into the human psyche.

I wasn't sure what to expect, not knowing anything about Sarah Moss but this was such a captivating read.

A painful read at times as it navigates her childhood, her relationship with her parents, food, her body and the power of books.

This book is full of anguish and sadness and self doubt but also filled me with hope and made me laugh at times. A raw and honest account of her battle with an eating disorder is heart-wrenching, but her love of books and reading gave her a form of escape.

An incredible memoir, both brutal and poetic. A very powerful and thought provoking piece of writing.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for this ARC.

I have read and enjoyed several of Sarah Moss's more recent novels, so I was intrigued to find out more about the author herself. We're a similarish age and of a similarish background, so I thought I'd find some resonances with her life.

The memoir was gripping. The stylistic choice of writing the book in the second person made the action more immediate and as if the events happening to the young (and older) Sarah were actually happening to me. I have not suffered from anorexia, but the way the author explained it made it seem like almost a rational response to her upbringing and circumstances. Her analysis of her life was always thoughtful and I enjoyed the asides (which I read as if from her mother) denying that any of the occurrences depicted in the memoir happened or if they did, it wasn't quite like that. Memoirs are always subjective and subject to failures or embellishment of memory, so it was good to have that acknowledged while I believed absolutely in the emotional truth of the text.

A highly recommended read.

Sarah 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.

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss.
This was a difficult read. I did like the cover. That's what drew me to this book. I really did not like her parents at all. I did feel for Sarah. I just wanted to jump in and hug her and slap her parents. This was a unique and moving book. It took me a few days to read.

Definitely one of the best books I've read this year. I could NOT put it down; I basically read it in two sittings. Oh my God, I'm so glad that in my early 30's I read Marion Woodman's <i>Addiction to Perfection</i> (thank you Tori Amos!!) - it 100% saved my brain (not that my brain is, like, perfectly healthy, but whose is?).

I thought as a memoir this was absolutely fantastic, truly exceptional - the use of surreal techniques, the switch between second and third person, the use of academic close readings (most memorably <i>Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Swallows and Amazon,</i>, Dorothy Wordsworth's diaries). I would LOVE to read her PhD thesis on representations of food and eating in early modern literature. I'm fascinated by her recent comments on the use of the 'choral voice'. I also thought the theme of balancing the life of the mind (art, writing) and a life of caretaking was really fascinating, as were her observations about the white woman obsession with thinness/health/wellness (see Naomi Klein's <i>Doppelganger</i> for a similar discussion) and how that ties into a discourse of control/power/superiority over others. <i>"You don't think you find other people's fatness repellant, you don't think you believe that your thinness is superior to other people's larger bodies, but you certainly act as if you do. You can see exactly how the moralizing of health and strength and thinness complies with supermacist thinking; you just can't stop behaving as if you agree."</i> Really interesting to see Gen Xers reaching the point in their lives where they're writing memoirs that examine the beliefs they were raised with (looking forward to my fellow millennials hitting their mid-40s and doing likewise!).

Overall, my heart went out for the narrator of this book so, so much when reading this. I underlined like ten billion passages. Truly the best thing that Generation Z has given us (besides their love of Kafka and worship of the dark under eye circle) is the idea that all bodies are beautiful and acceptable. Hope that Gen X-ers and my fellow geriatric millennials take note! Moss is truly one of great UK writers at work right now.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

<i>"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."</i>

This memoir is powerful and brutally honest, filled with emotion and at the same time trying not to be completely subjective, trying not to "tell tales", trying to deal with the prejudice that writing is lying. Moss contemplates what being a woman means today and through history, she discusses misogyny, feminism, patriarchy, privilege, mental illness.
Why would we assume good writers are confident, happy and content with their achievements? Isn't a most common positivistic assumption that great art comes from great pain? If so, Moss had to become a great artist.
I thought not only her style was brilliant but her approach to her own life, childhood and mental illness was refreshing, different. She tries to figure out how and when it all sharted, why it came to be. Many small things in life seem insignificant but turn out to be the opposite. People make mistakes, patents make mistakes that specially affect their children. Realising and understanding it doesn't make the trauma go away. It is not a matter of blame but the need to get to the beginning, to the cause.
We can explain and understand, but the rational, the mind, cannot cure us, it is only a part of the problem.
Her battle with anorexia is constant, unrelenting, even when it seems to have faded, it comes back with a push, a neverending battle.
Her pain is constant, her struggle with food, eating, not eating, thinking about the body. The obsession with perfect female bodies isn't only a personal obsession, it is an intrusive thought imposed on us by society, history, patriarchy. It is not only a personal, intimate struggle, it is a communal one.
This is more than a memoir, this is a literary memoir and a memoir about reading, thinking, writing, being an artist and a person.
I was astonished by this remarkable piece of writing, it was ruthless, chilling, it made me feel all the hunger and the pain for the misunderstood child. An experience both sad and beautiful, a book that needed to be written.

I don't read many memoirs but I am a huge fan of Sarah Moss so thought I'd try this. It totally blew me away. Sarah is a little younger than me but grew up in an age when books were the only refuge for a non sporty child and her knowledge and analysis of the books I read as a child is spot on. Her journey with anorexia nervous hit a chord for reasons I won't go into but I wept along with her during these excruciating, bleak, lonely passages. Her experience of second wave feminism and the narrative that accompanied was also haunting.

It is moving and terrifying and yet funny and beautiful. I cannot stop thinking about this book and I will push it into the arms of anyone I can. An absolute tour de force. This has to win prizes

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 grew up 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 tale 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.

My Good Bright Wolf is an account of the author's virtually lifelong struggle with an eating disorder, and it is an astonishing book. Her gift for vivid and emotional prose won't be in any doubt to those (like me) who are fans of her previous work, both fiction and non-fiction alike, but this was almost on another level in its visceral depiction of mental illness and anorexia. Not an easy read, but an important and luminous one.

Adored!

Moss is the type of writer I aspire to be. Such a unique way of writing a memoir not that given her previous work I expected it to be anything but unique.

Loved the way in which she explored her life, thinking, experiences through the works of literature which have shaped her. As a fellow bookworm this was both inspired and inspiring.

Moss’ work is fairly dark in places. She is an unhinged and unreliable narrator of her own story. She plays with the idea of memory and the way we remember and reshape our lives as we grow.

I could relate with her level of self awareness and critical nature on a personal level that was both comforting and terrifying.

Her honesty regarding her struggles with anorexia were commendable in its bravery. It was intimately distance, striking a fine balance between telling her story whilst maintaining her privacy.

I hope she finds some peace in this world.