My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss

and a nod to Eleanor Anstruther

I tested negative for Covid at the end of last week, and by Thursday I was able to creep off the boat and start figuring out how my body worked again. It wasn’t pretty. I felt a bit like a horse on its final journey to the knacker’s yard. I wobbled and huffed my way about, sweating buckets and regularly having to sit on a series of low walls to admire the view while my racing heart settled back into my chest. I did a lot of napping and more than a bit of feeling hideously sorry for myself.

I persevered because I had signed up for a course with the Slade Summer School which started on Monday and I was determined to go. The course was marvellously titled, ‘The Art of Looking: How Do You Tell a Good Painting From a Bad One?’ It was run by the artist Rose Davey. I’d seen an ad for it on Instagram and for once, the algorithm had got me bang to rights. I signed up immediately. It involved going to a lot of art galleries to see works in actual real life, so I needed to be able to walk for more than ten minutes without having a small cry. I got in training and by Monday I was reasonably proficient at driving my body again. I came home every day and dropped like a stone, but it was worth it. The course was amazing and I will be writing about it when I’ve had a few more days to think about everything we learned.

In the meantime I thought I’d check in and write about an astonishing book I read last week. I was lucky enough to get a proof of Sarah Moss’ upcoming memoir; My Good Bright Wolf. I’d read her fiction before, Summerwater was a Waterstone’s book of the month when I was working there. Moss is brilliant at creating small, intensely imagined worlds that are vividly rendered so that they become hyper real and rather sinister. They have a dreamlike, eerie quality that is unsettling but strangely addictive. As I read her, I caught myself thinking, what kind of person is capable of creating worlds like these? I was about to find out.

At this point I should mention that at the heart of this memoir is Moss’ relationship with the eating disorder that has shaped both her life and her body. As a woman who has lived in close proximity with her child’s eating disorder, I found this a difficult read at times. I knew what it was about before I read it, indeed it’s one of the reasons I requested it, but it pulls no punches and there were times when I had to step away from it for a while. It’s brilliant, breathtaking writing, but it does require you as the reader not to flinch. It leaves you nowhere to hide. It’s not that it has graphic descriptions of the nuts and bolts of an eating disorder. It’s more that it plunders the emotional landscape of someone in the grip of a disorder. It has a brutal, slicing logic to it that was tough to read. Tougher to live with, if you are lucky enough to survive it, that is.

We start in childhood and the book progresses as a running dialogue between memory and narrative in multiple voices. It reads like a slightly deranged fairy tale with a hectoring, shaming voice repeatedly stepping in to undercut the story. It provokes with accusations of lying, attention seeking and weakness. How could you remember that? You were just a child. You don’t understand. You’re selfish, spiteful, settling old scores. You’re greedy. So greedy. For food, for attention, for love, for care, for safety. You can’t have what you want because you won’t know when to stop, won’t be capable of sharing, won’t leave anything for anyone else. You’ll turn out like your mother, and we all know what she’s like.

This poisonous, restrictive rage slices across every narrative, through every safety net, through every rope thrown out from the banks of sanity. It sets Moss and the reader adrift on an increasingly rough sea. We find ourselves repeatedly going under, and every time our head breaks the story surface there is less breathing room before we sink again. The writing is a devastating tour de force of technicality, mimicking in prose what happens emotionally, psychically and physically to Moss over the years.

There is an ebb and flow to the writing, a constant tension between ground gained and lost, mapped out on the flesh or the lack thereof and in the mind, where Moss struggles to build, through her chosen career, a rational, logical voice that will, once and for all, silence the taunting voice of shame and disgust. Academia and geographical and temporal distance from her childhood give a lifeline which allows for a more normal seeming relationship with real life to flourish. But it is temporary.

Things begin to go badly awry when Moss begins to listen to podcasts on her daily runs. The podcasts are hosted by doctors, nutritionists and wellness experts. These voices are seductive and dangerous because they use the logic of her adult life to plug directly into the voice of her childhood terror and legitimise it. Here are all the reasons why you should starve yourself again. Here are all the cold, unimaginative facts that simply cannot be argued with. This is no longer about greed and fear. This becomes a story about science. Science that can be weaponised by the starving, rudderless child and the voices that pull and push her through life.

This is the story of what happens when a child is terrorised into not trusting or believing in herself, when she is taught over and over again that it is right to override instinct in favour of other, sinister, outside agendas. This is the story of the demonising of hunger in all its forms. This is the story of someone who was forced to create other worlds to survive in when the world she was born into was hostile to her body and her mind. This is what happens when a child does not feel safe.

Thankfully, it also turns into a story of hope. A glimmer of the potential for healing flickers through from time to time. Otherwise the weight of this narrative would crush you into dust, as it threatens to do to Moss herself.

It’s a tough read, but a brilliant one.

If this appeals to you, I also just finished reading

Eleanor Anstruther

A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries, which in a very different way, has many similar themes and ideas and is well worth your time.