“How much you want to acknowledge that in a childhood of ballet lessons and private school and in an adult life with a home of your own and a secure job, there could have been no serious suffering.” The question of worthiness runs like a thread through Sarah Moss’ new autobiography, “My Good Bright Wolf,” and resurfaces in this quote toward the end of the book, as the author reflects on how difficult it was for her to write about her decades-long, problematic relationship with food and exercise.
The desire to be valuable, or the fear of not being valuable enough, takes many forms in this dark, often brilliant personal story. It’s a message that comes early in childhood from parents who confuse willpower with morality, and whose own frustrations, resentments and prejudices manifest themselves in chronic dissatisfaction with their eldest child’s behavior and needs.
The shame she inherits affects all aspects of Moss’s life. She carries it into her relationships with her body, food, schoolwork, siblings and friends – and, after escaping the domain of family, into her studies at university, where she desperately tries to break free of her perceived toxic femininity and the assumption that great literature is written by men.
Although her studies and love of reading eventually allow her to see this as a fallacy, the uncertainty and insecurity are nonetheless poignantly evident in this particular book. For even as Moss describes in brutal detail the real traumas of her childhood, other voices – her own, her parents’, the illness’s – keep speaking out and saying her story is either made up or self-inflicted – and on her worst days, perhaps both.
This fear of innate worthlessness is characteristic of anorexia, an insidious, relentless illness in which nothing is ever good enough. Or nothing is exactly good enough, one of its many contradictions. Not surprisingly, as an author shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Ondaatje Prize and the Wellcome Prize, among others, Moss describes the paradoxes of the illness and, more fundamentally, the constant back-and-forths in her own troubled mind with great nuance and empathy.
Interwoven into the memoir are literary essays on Arthur Ransome’s children’s book series Swallows and Amazons, Jane Eyre, The Bell Jar, and the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, in which Moss’s academic background shines through and offers relief from the difficult personal memories. “Good fiction,” she notes, “contains contradictory stories, invites us to read against the grain,” which reflects her own style in My Good Bright Wolf.
Other formal inventions include the switch from the oppressive second-person voice of the childhood section to a clinical third-person voice, just past the halfway point of the film, recounting a recent relapse that led to a stay in the acute ward of a Dublin hospital. It’s a stunning interlude that enlivens the story, bringing tension, clarity and pace – a portrait of an intelligent woman battling with her own sanity amid the indignities of an understaffed hospital during the pandemic.
( Sarah Moss: I find the expression “First World Problems” deeply offensiveOpens in new window. )
Just before Moss is admitted, having put her heart at great risk through months of overtraining and starvation, she sends a desperate email to her GP in which she sums up all her madness in one sentence: “I’m sorry to bother you, but if I wait even a few minutes, I don’t think it’s a problem.” The power of this denial is expressed again a few pages later when, barely able to walk, she manages to cycle to the emergency room “because it didn’t occur to her to find alternative transport.”
Her experiences thereafter are an indictment of the state of public health care for eating disorders in Ireland. Ultimately, her relationships and access to therapy through private facilities help her. Moss is acutely aware of her privilege as a white, middle-class woman; in this case, she feels entitled, but overall there is an undertone of dignity in the repeated references to privilege throughout the book that seems uncomfortably close to the illness itself.
A more conventional autobiography might have switched to first person in the final quarter of My Good Bright Wolf, as the author begins to recover and immerse herself again in her life. Instead, she returns to second person, which feels fitting; there are no easy solutions or clear endings here, just a fragmentary account of the effects of the illness at various turning points. The responsibilities of a young mother. A disastrous stay in Italy. A job as a travel writer where “one bite is enough to describe the taste and texture”. A hugely moving episode of hiking in the Alps with her husband and sons, where her obsession with water stands in for so much more.
Towards the end of the book, a good friend tells Moss that trying to get through to her when she is ill is “like speaking to someone in a foreign language. There is no point in saying something that is not both urgent and simple.” My Good Bright Wolf will no doubt be called brave, dignified and wild, as it deserves, but more than that, it is the careful effort of a gifted author to tell her story in the only way possible.
