My Good Bright Wolf - by Sarah Moss

About the Book

"An unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves"--

Book Synopsis

Longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award
A Best Book of 2024: Kirkus, The Independent, and the New York Public Library
A New York Magazine Most-Anticipated Book of the Fall
A Library Journal Top Title of the Season

From the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall, Summerwater, and The Fell, Sarah Moss's My Good Bright Wolf is an unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves.

A girl must watch her figure but never be vain. She must be intelligent but never a know-it-all. She must be ambitious, if she is clever, but not in a way that shows. She must cook and sew and make do and mend. She must know (but never say) that these skills are, in some fundamental way, flawed and frivolous--feminine. Girls must stay small, even as they grow. Women must show restraint.

And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.

Here, with My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss takes on these rules, these lessons from the fables of girlhood, and uses them to fearlessly investigate the nature of memory, the lure of self-control, the impact of privilege, scarcity, parents, love. Through narratives of women and food, second-wave feminism and postwar puritanism, and her own challenges with a health care system that discounts the experiences of those it ought to serve, Moss seeks truth in the stories we tell ourselves and others. Harm can become power. Attention can become care. A body and a mind, though working hard together, can be at odds.

And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.

Beautiful and sharp, moving and unapologetic, erudite and very funny, My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir that breaks the rules.

Review Quotes

"Poetic . . . approach[es] truth, in all its messy, kaleidoscopic glory."
--Emily Gould, New York

"Stark and haunting . . . Moss's language has a dark, headlong allure"
--The New Yorker

"Novelist Moss (The Fell, 2022) excavates her personal history for this riveting, lacerating, blazing memoir of her long battle with anorexia...Moss' fans will be riveted, new readers stunned. Read it, and weep."
--Booklist

"Spellbinding imagination and sizzling prose . . . Described with such tenderness and poetry . . . [My Good Bright Wolf is] important literature: for women, for trauma survivors, for those struggling with mental health and good issues, and for vulnerable people searching in the dark for their power."
--Dina Nayeri, The Guardian

"There's something beautifully wild and dangerous about this book . . . An audacious attempt to reconcile the life of the body with that of the mind . . . My Good Bright Wolf is a howl both exquisitely anguished and profound. It's further proof that Moss is a towering figure in the contemporary literary landscape."
--Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph

"Full of daring... As full of devastation as it is wisdom. [Moss] brings to mind the work of the Nobel prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux, who interrogates her memory as she commits her life's story to the page.... Revelatory." --Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Guardian Observer

"[Moss] writes with such force and imagination . . . Heartbreaking . . . [My Good Bright Wolf deepens] our understanding of how our bodies are ourselves, and how we may live--allow ourselves to live--in this hard world in our soft and beautiful flesh."
--Erica Wagner, The New Statesman

"A stirring and singular achievement."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[My Good Bright Wolf] presents a compelling portrait of a sensitive, deeply intelligent woman struggling to reconcile a difficult emotional past with the misogyny that tainted the social and intellectual environments she inhabited. Rich, complex reading."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A dark, revelatory and an observational masterpiece, littered with sentences you want to read again and again."
--Chloe Gray, iNews

"Sarah Moss's gorgeous puzzle box of a memoir, My Good Bright Wolf, runs far and fast through the heart of memory, our love of stories, and the beautiful blur between the two."
--Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book

"In this searching, scorching work, Sarah Moss relays the echoes of that malevolent choir--parents, teachers, ministers, doctors, history, one's own skewed mind--the one that asks how dare you: how dare you need, how dare you hunger, how dare you believe you deserve. But here, Moss finds another voice more powerful, one that howls instead a bodily song of instinct, survival, and strength."
--Nina MacLaughlin, author of Wake, Siren

"Devastating, funny, and full of brilliant insights. This is a brave book, but more than that it is generous. It has made me think about how incredibly porous we all are: to our families, to society, to culture, to each other."
--Melissa Harrison, author of At Hawthorn Time

"Defiant in its anger and humor, My Good Bright Wolf is a compulsive and compelling story of how hard it is to break free of the punishing narratives around women's bodies and how easy it is to nearly lose yourself to them. And it is also a story of how words--painful and beautiful, wolf-sharp words--can be a way back."
--Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self

"An utterly original testimonial of great candor and eloquence, hope and redemption. An unflinching take on feminist and literary history, the indignities of illness, and the vulnerabilities of childhood."
--Gavin Francis, author of Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence

About the Author

Sarah Moss is the author of the novels The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall. These and others of her books have been listed among the best of the year in The Guardian, The Times (London), Elle, and the Financial Times and selected for The New York Times Book Review's Editors' Choice. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.