“How loudly you wish to acknowledge that there can have been no serious suffering in a childhood of ballet lessons and private school, in an adult life of homeowning and secure employment.” The issue of worthiness runs through Sarah Moss’s new memoir, My Good Bright Wolf, showing up again in this quote, towards the end of the book, as the author reflects on how difficult she found it to write about her troubled relationship with food and exercise over many decades.
The desire to be worthy, or the fear of not being worthy enough, takes many forms in this bleak, often brilliant personal history. It is a message received early in childhood, from parents who mistake willpower for morality and whose own frustrations, resentments and prejudices manifest in chronic dissatisfaction with the behaviour and needs of their eldest child.
The inherited shame affects all aspects of Moss’s life. She carries it into her relationship with her body, food, schoolwork, siblings and friends – and, once she has escaped the family domain, into her studies at university, where, desperate to divest herself of her perceived toxic femininity, she assumes that great literature is written by men.
Though her studies and love of reading eventually allow her to see this as fallacy, the uncertainty and insecurity are still poignantly evident in this particular book, in that even as Moss describes in brutal detail the legitimate traumas of her childhood, other voices – her own, her parents, that of the illness – continually interject to say that her story is either fictional or self-inflicted – on her worst days, quite possibly both.
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This fear of innate unworthiness is characteristic of anorexia, a sly, relentless illness for which nothing is ever good enough. Or nothing is exactly good enough, one of its many contradictions. Unsurprisingly for a writer who has been nominated for the Women’s Prize, the Ondaatje Prize and the Wellcome Prize, among other accolades, Moss describes with great nuance and perception the paradoxes of the illness and, more fundamentally, the constant push and pull within her own fraught mind.
Spliced through the memoir are literary essays on Arthur Ransome’s children’s series Swallows and Amazons, Jane Eyre, The Bell Jar and the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, where Moss’s academic background shines through and offers relief from the difficult personal recollections. “Good fiction,” she notes, “holds conflicting stories, invites us despite itself to read against the grain,” echoing her own style in My Good Bright Wolf.
Other formal inventions include switching, a little over the halfway point, from the oppressive second-person voice of the childhood section to a clinical third-person voice that relates a recent relapse resulting in a stint in the acute medical ward of a Dublin hospital. It is a stunning interlude that galvanises the story, injecting tension, clarity and pace, a portrait of an intelligent woman battling her own mind amid the degradations of an understaffed hospital during the pandemic.
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Shortly before Moss is admitted, after months of over-exercising and starvation put her heart in grave danger, she emails her GP in desperation, encapsulating the madness in a line: “I’m sorry to bother you but if I wait even a few minutes I won’t think this is a problem.” The power of this denial comes through again a few pages later, as, barely able to walk, she manages to cycle to the emergency department, “because it didn’t occur to her to find an alternative form of transport”.
Her experiences thereafter are an indictment of the state of public healthcare for eating disorders in Ireland. Ultimately she is helped by her connections, and by access to therapy through private means. Moss is keenly aware of her privilege as a white middle-class woman; in this instance it feels warranted, but collectively there is an undertone of worthiness in the repeated references to privilege throughout the book that seems uncomfortably close to the illness itself.
In a more conventional memoir, the final quarter of My Good Bright Wolf might have shifted voice to the first person, as the author begins to recover and once again inhabit her life. Instead she returns to second person, which feels fitting; no easy resolutions or neat endings here, only a fragmented offering of the impact of the illness at various junctures. The responsibilities of new motherhood. A disastrous residency in Italy. A travel-writing gig where “one bite is enough to describe flavour and texture”. An extremely moving episode hiking in the Alps with her husband and sons, where her obsessive preoccupation with water stands in for so much more.
Close to the end of the book, a good friend tells Moss that trying to get through to her when she’s ill is “like talking to someone in your third language, there’s no point trying to say anything that’s not both urgent and simple”. My Good Bright Wolf will undoubtedly be called brave, worthy and fierce, as it deserves to be, but, more than that, it is a painstaking effort by a gifted writer to tell her story the only way she can.
