Home Books My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir

My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir

My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir

by Sarah Moss

Farrar, Straus and Giroux ·2024 ·320 pages ·Memoir
Top of the Pile
Top of the Pile
I Index
76/99
Top of the Pile

86/99

Critics

Near the Top

67/99

Readers

n/a

Scholars

76/99

Rating

95/99

Volume

59/99

Rating

75/99

Volume

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About This Book

An unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves. My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, privilege and scarcity, the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood. Pushing at the boundaries of memoir writing, Sarah Moss investigates contested memories of a girlhood with embattled, distracted parents, loving grandparents, and teachers who said she would never learn to read. Then, by the time she was a teenager, Moss developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, an illness that continued to affect her as an adult, despite her professional and personal success. In My Good Bright Wolf, this bright light of contemporary literature explores the trap of postwar puritanism and second-wave feminism, the narratives of women and food that we absorb through our childhoods and adulthoods, and the ways in which our health-care system continues to discount the experiences of women, minorities, and anyone suffering from mental illness. With her characteristic commitment to finding the truths in stories, Moss examines what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did—and still does—with her hardworking body and her furiously turning mind.


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Reviews

"When she lets those structures tumble and gives voice to the child raised in a spartan emotional wasteland, she broke my heart ..."

Lorainne Berry· Los Angeles Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"She weaves literary analyses into her complex, textured story."

Sylvia Brownrigg· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Moss describes in brutal detail the legitimate traumas of her childhood ...."

Sarah Gilmartin· The Irish Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"As a novelist, Moss exhibits compassionate attention and perspective—skills she applies autobiographically here."

Rebecca Foster· Shelf Awareness Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Masterful...poetic ..."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"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."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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