My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir - Paperback

by Sarah Moss (Author)

"Heartbreaking . . . Beautiful." --Amanda Seyfried, The New Yorker

Long-listed for the National Book Critics Award for Autobiography
A Best Book of the Year: Kirkus Reviews, The Independent, and the New York Public Library
A Must-Read: New York, Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness

From the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall, Summerwater, and The Fell, Sarah Moss's My Good Bright Wolf is an unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves.

A girl must watch her figure but never be vain. She must be intelligent but never a know-it-all. She must be ambitious, if she is clever, but not in a way that shows. She must cook and sew and make do and mend. She must know (but never say) that these skills are, in some fundamental way, flawed and frivolous--feminine. Girls must stay small, even as they grow. Women must show restraint.

And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.

Here, with My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss takes on these rules, these lessons from the fables of girlhood, and uses them to fearlessly investigate the nature of memory, the lure of self-control, the impact of privilege, scarcity, parents, love. Through narratives of women and food, second-wave feminism and postwar puritanism, and her own challenges with a health care system that discounts the experiences of those it ought to serve, Moss seeks truth in the stories we tell ourselves and others. Harm can become power. Attention can become care. A body and a mind, though working hard together, can be at odds.

And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.

Beautiful and sharp, moving and unapologetic, erudite and very funny, My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir that breaks the rules.

Author Biography

Sarah Moss is the author of the novels The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall. These and others of her books have been listed among the best of the year in The Guardian, The Times (London), Elle, and the Financial Times and selected for The New York Times Book Review's Editors' Choice. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.