My Good Bright Wolf

Starred review from August 19, 2024
Moss (The Fell) masterfully evokes the insidiousness of self-doubt in this poetic account of growing up with an eating disorder in 1980s Scotland. In forceful second-person narration (“You could never be small enough, blonde enough”), Moss catalogs the ways her mother’s thwarted feminist ambitions and her father’s anger chipped away at her own confidence, illustrating the long-tail effects by regularly interjecting a second, contradictory voice (“You must be sick in the head, complaining about this stuff, ballet and sailing and private school”). As she began to starve herself and her body shrank, Moss retreated into a life of the mind (“Poetry was safe and the female body, with its appetites and tides, was dangerous”). She weaves in erudite analyses of the writers who guided her girlhood, including Laura Ingalls Wilder and Charlotte Brontë. The “wolf” of the title functions like a spiritual caretaker—a wild aspect of Moss’s personality liberated from her restrictive fears of food—that helps quiet her inner critic and heal her wounds. The narrative ends on a note of tentative hope, as Moss recovers from an anorexia relapse during Covid, allowing the wolf to “take food, this time, to the hungry child on the mountain” and acknowledging healing’s often jagged path. This is a stirring and singular achievement. Agent: Anna Webber, United Agents.

Starred review from October 1, 2024
A novelist's memoir about the relationships and memories that informed her later compulsions. Moss remembers her mother and father as the "gods and monsters" who dominated her girlhood and taught her that "care and attention [were] scarce resources." Yet as she tells the stories of growing up in Scotland and northwestern England, she also contests those memories with dueling voices: that of the storyteller she would become and that of the self-critical, self-loathing skeptic who often chided herself for an otherwise comfortable, privileged life. As a teen, Moss took refuge in novels by authors like Charlotte Bront� and Sylvia Plath, feminist-inflected analyses of which she interweaves into a narrative of a youth spent becoming the "clever girl" who consumed books while struggling with an eating disorder. A university scholarship eventually took her away from a fraught home life. Success as a scholar and writer followed, yet she remained haunted by her past and, in particular, the "northern Protestant work ethic fused with second-wave feminism" exemplified by the Ph.D. mother who "fum[ed]" in suburbia. Yet in the shadows of outward good fortune, the author's body shame continued to lurk, driving her to control her physicality with punishing diets and exercise regimens that forced hospitalization and psychiatric intervention. Though at times disturbing in the self-flagellation and personal fragmentation it depicts, Moss' book also 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.

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November 1, 2024
Novelist Moss (The Fell, 2022) excavates her personal history for this riveting, lacerating, blazing memoir of her long battle with anorexia. From a second-person narrative in the opening chapters, in which she argues with herself on the page over the veracity of the stories told about her parents' and grandparents' history, Moss moves into a third-person telling of her struggle with a resurgence of anorexia during COVID-19. Her childhood memories take readers through a home life with Owl and Jumbly Girl (aka her parents), who were indifferent or cruel when dealing with their intelligent and complex daughter. Recounting episodes with doctors and psychiatrists, including her recent stay in a mental health facility, has the sort of dark humor most associated with One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Moss' happiness and even survival are no sure things, and her determination to set down her truth is admirable. Not for the fainthearted, this memoir lays bare the notion that anorexia is anything other than a devastation wrought upon the body. Moss' fans will be riveted, new readers stunned. Read it, and weep.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.