Published in 2024
8 hours and 28 minutes
Sarah Moss is the author of the novels The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall, among other books. Her works have been named among the best books of the year in The Guardian, The Times (London), Elle, and the Financial Times, and have been selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.
What is this book about?
A memoir about thinking and reading, eating and denying your body food, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.
In the household of Sarah Moss’s childhood she learnt that the female body and mind were battlegrounds. 1970s austerity and second-wave feminism came together: she must keep herself slim but never be vain, she must be intelligent but never angry, she must be able to cook and sew and make do and mend, but know those skills were frivolous. Clever girls should be ambitious but women must restrain themselves. Women had to stay small.
Years later, her self-control had become dangerous, and Sarah found herself in A&E. The return of her teenage anorexia had become a medical emergency, forcing her to reckon with all that she had denied her hard-working body and furiously turning mind.
My Good Bright Wolf navigates contested memories of girlhood, the chorus of relentless and controlling voices that dogged Sarah’s every thought, and the writing and books in which she could run free. Beautiful, audacious, moving and very funny, this memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself, and then finds a way out.
‘Confronts what it means to be a woman trying to find a way to be’ – Jan Carson
‘Moss writes so compassionately about human frailty while her own work is as close to perfect as a novelist’s can be’ – The Times
