My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading eating and not eating about
privilege and scarcity about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of
childhood. Sarah Moss author of The Fell and Summerwater confronts all of this in a book
that pushes at the boundaries of memoir-writing. It narrates contested memories of girlhood at
the hands of embattled distracted parents in a time of disastrous attitudes towards eating and
female discipline. By the time she was a teenager Sarah had developed a dangerous and
controlling relationship with food and that illness returned in her adult life. Now the
mother and teacher of young adults in My Good Bright Wolf she explores a childhood caught in
the trap of her parents' post-war puritanism and second-wave feminism interrogating what she
thought and still thinks what she read and still reads and what she did - and still does -
with her hard-working body and her furiously turning mind. Beautiful audacious moving and
so very funny Sarah Moss's memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself
and then offers a way out: it is a blindingly brilliant experiment in and celebration of what a
creative mind can do.
