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A Memoir
by Sarah Moss
Book Reviewed by: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.
Sarah Moss has been afflicted with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa since her pre-teen years but was able to keep the condition under some control for decades. During this period she completed a D.Phil (equivalent to an American Ph.D.) in English literature at Oxford University, became a successful professor and lecturer, and wrote several well-regarded novels (including Night Waking and Ghost Wall), among many other personal and professional achievements. As her disorder recurred, however, she found she was unable to write fiction, and so turned to setting down her experiences as a sort of therapy. Her memoir My Good Bright Wolf is the result. Moss's prose is gorgeous, bordering on poetic, and her account is both troubling and harrowing...continued
Full Review
(816 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
In her memoir My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss conjures up an imaginary wolf spirit to support her childhood self. She claims the idea came from a line in one of the first poems she memorized, "A Dirge" by English dramatist John Webster, widely regarded as the last of the great Elizabethan playwrights, second only to William Shakespeare.
Not much is known about Webster. He was born sometime around 1580 in London. Scholars believe he was probably a coach maker, as that was his father's profession. Additionally, his father was a well-regarded member of the Guild of Merchant Taylors (a London-based livery company that at the time was a trade guild), making it likely that Webster attended the Merchant Taylors' School. It'...
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