My Good Bright Wolf
by Sarah Moss
£18.99
This book is published on 29th August and can be preordered now. Sarah will join us for an event on Tuesday 27th August.
“Some have long been complaining about the absence of Moss’s novels on recent major prize longlists – Ghost Wall and Summerwater in particular – but if My Good Bright Wolf receives similar treatment from non-fiction awards I’m poised to take to the streets…A howl both exquisitely anguished and profound. It’s further proof that Moss is a towering figure in the contemporary literary landscape.”
– Lucy Scholes
From Sarah Moss, the Sunday Times bestselling author, My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and denying your body food, about privilege and scarcity, 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.