A Novelist’s Unnerving Memoir of Disordered Eating

“ My Good Bright Wolf ,” a new memoir by the novelist Sarah Moss, begins in dishabille. A narrator is speaking to herself in the second person, and she’s using language recognizable from fairy tales and old poetry. “In the middle of the journey of your life,” she says, “you found yourself in a dark wood.” A voice interrupts: “ Who do you think you are, Dantë? ” The narrator starts again—“once upon a time, deep in the forest, there was a wolf”—but doesn’t get far before the voice is back, insisting, “ There’s no evidence. You don’t know what you’re talking about .” Moss has heard this voice, and others like it, since childhood. They blame and criticize, hector and accuse. “ It’s all in your head ,” one of them says. “ You brought it on yourself .” They articulate her worst fears: “ Shouldn’t you have got over it, whatever you say it was, by now? . . . There’s something nasty here, something wrong in your head .” In novels including “ Ghost Wall ” (2018) and “ Summerwater ” (2020), Moss has explored the mind’s power to distort reality. Her characters live much of the time inside their skulls, in psychic spin chambers that feel realer to them than their physical surroundings do.“My Good Bright Wolf,” is, in some ways, a familiar tale—an entry into the genre of half-sincere autobiography that, under the guise of showing how dangerous the romance of self-deprivation can be, ends up propounding that romance. Moss, who is in her late forties, has struggled with anorexia since adolescence. Her issues with food and her body are the book’s through line, and the only parts of her adult life that she illumines. She wants to understand why she would squander so much time on something so destructive and antithetical to her values. Particularly vivid is the question of blame: Did she do this to herself, or was it done to her? What We’re Reading Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction. But the memoir is also weirder and wilder than this description […]

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