My Good Bright Wolf

PHILIPPA'S PICK

This first bite at the memoir cherry is a tousled, messy but ultimately satisfying piece of work by Moss, a novelist of great sensitivity and verve. Its bare bones are the hard truth of an eating disorder, but the flesh on those bones is made up of kindness and therapy, poetry and love. The wolf of the title stalks the book, a friendly protective ghost ready to be roused when he is needed. In the poem that calls up Moss's wolf, "The Question" by May Swenson, the creature is originally a dog: "body, my good bright dog is dead." The narrator is looking for her body to become her place of safety, to make peace with the fearfulness of the voracious appetites she owns. And to love and enjoy making and eating food, as well as making and consuming art. I loved that the poem at the crux of the memoir was called The Question (not the answer) and that the book helps us see both the difficulty and the joyous effort involved in marrying the life of the mind and the life of the body. -PD

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.

Hardcover | 320 pages | 5.38" x 8.25"