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.
"Moss masterfully evokes the insidiousness of self-doubt in this poetic account of growing up with an eating disorder in 1980s Scotland...This is a stirring and singular achievement." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Though at times disturbing in the self-flagellation and personal fragmentation it depicts, Moss' book also presents a compelling portrait of a sensitive, deeply intelligent woman struggling to reconcile a difficult emotional past with the misogyny that tainted the social and intellectual environments she inhabited. Rich, complex reading." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Moss is the author of Summerwater, a best book of the year in the Guardian and the Times (London), and Ghost Wall, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a best book of the year in Elle, the Financial Times, and other publications. Her previous books include the novels Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light, and Signs for Lost Children, and the memoir Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland. She was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.
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