My Good Bright Wolf is a thoughtful, quietly powerful memoir. Sarah Moss writes with intelligence and elegance, weaving themes of grief, motherhood, and academia. At times, the pacing drags and the emotional distance can be a bit frustrating, but there’s still something compelling in the way she tells her story. It’s not a page-turner, but if you’re into reflective, nuanced writing, this one definitely has moments worth sitting with.

I came to this memoir, like so many others, by way of the author’s incredible fiction. Her writing is incomparable and so I found this memoir to be.

I would counsel anyone to be patient at the beginning of this book. My first instinct was to run! It’s like putting on new glasses, you just have to adjust your gaze. But this is so worth acclimatising to. It is exceptional. I decided to listen to this on audiobook which really helped me slip into the exceptional narrative. Memoir really is an over simplification of this account. It is memoir via literary criticism, via social commentary..via Sarah Moss..

The first thing that stands out is the use of the second person pronoun. I have only read one other book this year ( I have read in excess of 55) which uses the second person pronoun and this automatically grabs the reader’s attention. I haven’t read anything about how or why the author wrote in this way, but I can only imagine that this gave her the distance and objectivity to really see herself. This is compounded by adding in a second voice - the critical voice that we all have living in our heads, but oh how well does Sarah Moss understand and articulate her voice!

This is a searingly personal and insightful account. Moss picks apart her childhood - there are all sorts of things that we might label her childhood - Sarah labels hers by giving her parents names. Suffice to say this made me deeply uncomfortable. Larkin tells us “they fuck you up” in reference to parents and we might say that of Moss’ parents. She doesn’t make such an accusation, but her mental battles are real.

There is a lot about food and relationships with food in this memoir. I would definitely add a trigger warning to this read. Many women will recognise the relationship that Moss describes and articulates so insightfully. However, that insight may be hard to read.
I don’t think you can only read this book once. I already feel I need to go back in and uncover more, listen harder ..I loved the literary references and found so much to think about in Moss’ interrogation of Austen, Alcott and Little House on the Prairie, among many others.

Exceptional. Thank you so much to Pan Macmillan and Netgalley for my digital copy of this book.

Unflinchingly honest and deeply affecting, Moss’s memoir traces the path to anorexia and the enduring legacy of self-erasure with a voice as distinctive as any I’ve encountered. Dark as it is, the book is utterly absorbing—I'd have read it in one sitting if I hadn’t started so late at night.

It offers a sharp, evocative lens on the tangled contradictions of middle-class virtue, female idealism, second-wave feminism, maternal ambivalence, and the quiet punishment society reserves for women who dare to take up more space.

Sarah Moss’s My Good Bright Wolf is a raw, inventive memoir that excavates the roots of her lifelong struggle with anorexia, tracing it from a childhood steeped in 1970s austerity and second-wave feminism to a harrowing relapse in adulthood. Written in a striking second-person voice, Moss confronts the relentless internal chorus of self-doubt and shame—interrupted by italicized rebuttals—while conjuring a titular wolf as a tender, retrospective guide for her younger self. Her prose is poetic and precise, weaving literary reflections on Brontë and Plath with visceral accounts of starvation and hospital wards. Though the experimental style and unflinching honesty may challenge some readers, this is a profound, haunting exploration of memory, control, and the body’s quiet rebellion, cementing Moss as a fearless literary voice.

I knew that My Good Bright Wolf was a memoir, it says it is in the title after all, but when I started reading it, I thought I’d downloaded the wrong book. I’m a lover of fairytales, and this memoir reads as such in places, especially as it’s written in the 3rd person. This also seems to create a distance between the author and their story.

At its heart is Moss’ battle with anorexia. After reading about her childhood and her parents, it would be unrealistic to think that both of these factors had nothing to do with her eating disorder. In fact, some of her most intrusive thoughts have her parents voices.

Throughout is Moss’ love of literature, and how the books she read - the girls and women that they portrayed - influenced her self-worth.

This is a story of how women are policed, constrained and ultimately how they are treated in illness. It’s also a story of never feeling that you’re good enough and a lack of control over everything - except the control over what you put in your body.

This really is a stunning, shocking, very emotional memoir, and it reinforces to me what an exceptional author Sarah Moss is.

A raw and exquisitely honest memoir from the talented author. Her literary fiction is exemplary with no words wasted and this offering is no different.
A powerful and reflective look at mental health, lifelong eating disorders, obsessive exercise and the distorted memory and perspectives of the child versus the adult. It’s also a story of love and family.
Incredible.
My thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own unbiased opinion.

A Good Bright Wolf is a memoir that offers a thought-provoking exploration of her childhood and mental health struggles. Moss delves deeply into the emotional distance between her and her parents, recounting her battle with anorexia and the broader impact of her upbringing. The memoir's immersive style brings readers into her disordered thinking, making it a challenging yet compelling read.
Moss confronts the contradictions of her past with unflinching honesty. Though she enjoyed the privileges of an affluent upbringing—private schools, ballet lessons, and a comfortable home—she also faced neglect and harsh, unspoken judgments about her body, similar to the treatment her mother received. Despite these challenges, Moss avoids self-pity. Instead, she questions her parents' values and behaviors, revealing a nuanced portrait of her formative years. Her reflections blend defiance and introspection, especially when she contrasts the warmth and acceptance she found at a childhood friend's home with the emotional coldness at her own.
The memoir takes an unconventional approach, steering away from a typical linear narrative. Instead, it intertwines themes of memory, literature, and personal reflection. Moss’s writing is evocative and rich with insight. A Good Bright Wolf will resonate with readers who enjoy introspective memoirs and those exploring the complexities of family and mental health. It challenges genre conventions and offers much for readers to reflect upon.

I’m not usually a non-fiction reader but oh how I love this brave and extraordinary memoir telling of the authors somewhat eccentric upbringing and her battle with anorexia as a teenager and adult. This book just blew me away. The writing style took me a little while to get used to but once I did I just could not put this book down . One of my books of the year and nothing I can say will really do it justice. Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for an honest review

I love Sarah Moss's fiction writing so was keen to read this memoir by her. I have to say that the writing is stunning throughout, and I love the way she's structured this book as almost stream of consciousness but clearly well thought out as she explores her demons. I found the subject matter really difficult to read at times so I did have to keep putting this book down and coming back to it - but it did always pull me back and I did want to keep reading. This is such a visceral and honest memoir about her eating disorder, her relationship with her parents and the ways trauma (our own and those that belong to family members who come before us) continues to affect us. This is a book that will stay with me, I recommend it.

Having read all of Sarah Moss’s fiction thus far, in addition to her travel memoir, I had very high expectations of this, her first true memoir. Somehow she managed to surpass them. Moss’s account of her teenage eating disorder and its reappearance during lockdown is told with devastating honesty. I found myself gasping several times at her frank descriptions, particularly of her decidedly cold upbringing. This book was not at all what I expected, but I have recommended it to everyone I can.

This is undoubtedly one of the books of 2024.

This is a truly devastating autobiography that’s less the story of Moss and more one of her eating disorder. Which makes it sound miserable, and it is a tough read for sure, trigger warnings all round, but Moss is such an amazing writer that it’s beautiful too.

Wolf is a life saver.
What a raw and is some ways beautiful memoir this is.
Personally I think the wolf is part conscience and part a repository for dreams and ambitions.
Sarah was born to idealistic parents, the Owl a frustrated American with a difficult past and the Jumblygirl, a clever but frustrated woman. From her parents Sarah receives lots of mixed messages, feminist ideas from her Mother, the power of men and violence from her Father. Neither parent offers and support only criticism, a lot of it to do with her weight. Thank goodness for her Grandmother, she helps her with reading, hobbies and believes in her. The Angel boy is born after Sarah, the perfect looking and well behaved baby that the parents had expected Sarah to be.
At school Sarah is bullied and her development is initially slow, she is bullied for standing out with her odd clothes and strange parents, occasionally visiting friends she sees his most families interact, she also becomes aware of the struggles with food and weight that a lot of women have.
Sarah takes dieting to extremes and ends up in hospital, feeling conflicted if she gives into feelings of hunger. An argument with a Nurse proved to be a no win situation here.
Different jobs take her away from home and sometimes increase her anxiety concerning food, she has suicidal thought and only overcomes them when she thinks of her two sons.
A thought provoking and at times a very moving read.
Thank you Sarah, NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for this ARC.

I have loved many of Sarah Moss' novels, and the sheer ferocity and directness of the writing here was something I have come to love.

However, what I didn't expect was what that would look like when combined with the frankness of her language when talking about some of her personal demons. This book's content is heavy, but Moss always manages to stay ahead of it, turning her gaze on finding new and inventive ways of discussing them, feeling totally innovative in patches. For example, the overlapping voices in the book, representing some of the harsher self-talk for Moss, both add to the wider narrative, whilst also unsettling the reader as someone who is suddenly privy to the deepest, darkest sides of Moss' self.

This is a staggering piece of writing, giving both background to several of the novels Moss wrote (and that I have adored) but also allowing Moss to articulate what is so often inarticulable.

I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss is a memoir about the author’s eating disorder which developed during her childhood with a serious relapse during the pandemic. I have enjoyed reading several novels by Moss over the years which often deal with food and illness, and her latest memoir is a complex account about these themes and also addresses control, memory and unreliable narrators. She writes about her emotionally neglectful childhood in Manchester and the books she sought solace in, with some analysis of their depictions of food and femininity. My Good Bright Wolf is mostly written in the second person, an unusual style for a memoir and a very powerful one too. The prose is intercut with Moss often berating herself, which sometimes felt relentless and intrusive to read but is very effective at showing the mental toll of anorexia. Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Brutal, brittle and searing exploration of a lifelong struggle with food, identity and femininity, Moss delivers a terrifying vision of how she has lived her own life. Without pity, explanation or excuses, she looks at it all and offers it up with true bravery. A devastating privilege to read.

As faultlessly crafted as the author’s novels, this truly is an artfully, insightfully and relatable examined life. Not at all what I imagined, but so much more, I’m in awe at its honesty and fearlessness. Deserves a place on the bookshelf of every woman, and frankly every man too. Raw, but so very compelling.

4.5

'My Good Bright Wolf', by Sarah Moss, is a gripping memoir told in the second person narrative.
I've been a fan of her fiction for years and she quickly became my auto-buy author, so I was really looking forward to her memoir.
'My Good Bright Wolf' exceeded all my expectations.
It's not an easy read, but it's an honest and powerful one.
It's about Sarah's lifelong struggle with an eating disorder, her upbringing and her complicated relationship with her parents. She talks about the literature she grew up with and books that influenced her. The memoir is also about memories, how they change over the years, and shape us and our lives.

Huge thanks to Netgalley and PanMacmillan for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

I am a big fan of Sarah Moss’s fictional work so I was excited to see how her writing would translate to a memoir. From the off, I loved the style. Written mostly in the second person, Sarah Moss uses an interrupting third party voice to question her narrative, her memory and belittle the stories she tells.

In the early chapters concerning her childhood, these voices are interpreted to be family members and the exchanges are reminiscent of how families hold different memories of events and how they can try to justify or manipulate past actions or omissions. As Sarah progresses into adulthood the source of the voices becomes more ambiguous but at times it is clear she is battling with herself.

It’s not an easy read, the passages which describe her hospitalisation due to an eating disorder are particularly frightening but the writing is compelling and compulsive. Despite some of the subject matter, Sarah Moss refrains from self pity; she is aware of and acknowledges her privilege and explores how this impacts her experiences.

There is so much here which resonated with me, from the small details like school dinners in the 1980s to descriptions of motherhood, which rang so true, they were like a slap across the face. The preoccupation with the body and the desire to be in control of it, is something which will feel familiar on varying levels, to many people.

It is brilliantly done, one of the best memoirs I’ve read and one that I will take something from.

My Good Bright Wolf, a memoir and compelling story of Sarah Moss is an extraordinary delve into the human psyche.

I wasn't sure what to expect, not knowing anything about Sarah Moss but this was such a captivating read.

A painful read at times as it navigates her childhood, her relationship with her parents, food, her body and the power of books.

This book is full of anguish and sadness and self doubt but also filled me with hope and made me laugh at times. A raw and honest account of her battle with an eating disorder is heart-wrenching, but her love of books and reading gave her a form of escape.

An incredible memoir, both brutal and poetic. A very powerful and thought provoking piece of writing.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for this ARC.

I have read and enjoyed several of Sarah Moss's more recent novels, so I was intrigued to find out more about the author herself. We're a similarish age and of a similarish background, so I thought I'd find some resonances with her life.

The memoir was gripping. The stylistic choice of writing the book in the second person made the action more immediate and as if the events happening to the young (and older) Sarah were actually happening to me. I have not suffered from anorexia, but the way the author explained it made it seem like almost a rational response to her upbringing and circumstances. Her analysis of her life was always thoughtful and I enjoyed the asides (which I read as if from her mother) denying that any of the occurrences depicted in the memoir happened or if they did, it wasn't quite like that. Memoirs are always subjective and subject to failures or embellishment of memory, so it was good to have that acknowledged while I believed absolutely in the emotional truth of the text.

A highly recommended read.