MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF

Credit…Enda Bowe/Guardian/eyevine, via Redux MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF: A Memoir , by Sarah Moss “ You won’t think your way out of this , your therapist says,” Sarah Moss writes toward the end of her powerfully original and unsettling memoir about anorexia. “ You have to act, and it will be difficult and uncomfortable and you will have to do it consistently .” By this point in a story that stretches from the English novelist’s fraught childhood to her successes as author and professor, the reader is so relieved to hear a sympathetic voice addressing Moss that the therapist’s simple, if painfully difficult, directive has a poignant resonance. Moss has indeed spent much of this inventive narrative trying to think her way through her illness, tracking its origins, personal and cultural, and has taken us down many brilliant pathways. But for her sake we hope, finally, that she will also act. Some who write about anorexia’s fierce compulsions address the disease as an addiction. For Moss, it is an endless argument, one that began — as it often does for girls — in adolescence, then roared back with near-lethal vengeance in her mid-40s. From early days, Moss has heard critical voices calling her greedy and troublesome, and she captures their harshness not just in passages about her eating, but also as an irritable chorus questioning her memoir’s very project. The first of the book’s three sections covers Moss’s upbringing in the north of England with two self-involved, withholding parents — her father an American academic prone to occasional rages, her mother a feminist fighting her own demons and passing along weight anxiety to her daughter. The narrator’s memories of a household where “care and attention are scarce resources, not to be wasted on the undeserving,” are challenged by her italicized critic: “ Other people, eyewitnesses, would tell it quite differently, this story, you have no right, no right at all, you always make stuff up, you can’t resist —” The interruptions give the telling a staccato rhythm, but also convey the precarity of the writer’s trust in her own […]

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