My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir

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.