A Novelist’s Unnerving Memoir of Disordered Eating

“My Good Bright Wolf,” a new memoir by the novelist Sarah Moss, begins in dishabille. A narrator is speaking to herself in the second person, and she’s using language recognizable from fairy tales and old poetry. “In the middle of the journey of your life,” she says, “you found yourself in a dark wood.” A voice interrupts: “Who do you think you are, Dantë?” The narrator starts again—“once upon a time, deep in the forest, there was a wolf”—but doesn’t get far before the voice is back, insisting, “There’s no evidence. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Moss has heard this voice, and others like it, since childhood. They blame and criticize, hector and accuse. “It’s all in your head,” one of them says. “You brought it on yourself.” They articulate her worst fears: “Shouldn’t you have got over it, whatever you say it was, by now? . . . There’s something nasty here, something wrong in your head.”

In novels including “Ghost Wall” (2018) and “Summerwater” (2020), Moss has explored the mind’s power to distort reality. Her characters live much of the time inside their skulls, in psychic spin chambers that feel realer to them than their physical surroundings do.“My Good Bright Wolf,” is, in some ways, a familiar tale—an entry into the genre of half-sincere autobiography that, under the guise of showing how dangerous the romance of self-deprivation can be, ends up propounding that romance. Moss, who is in her late forties, has struggled with anorexia since adolescence. Her issues with food and her body are the book’s through line, and the only parts of her adult life that she illumines. She wants to understand why she would squander so much time on something so destructive and antithetical to her values. Particularly vivid is the question of blame: Did she do this to herself, or was it done to her?

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But the memoir is also weirder and wilder than this description implies. The fairy-tale forest evokes a little girl’s interpretation of the world, a garbled dreamscape of prohibitions and pleasures. In this telling, Moss’s family members appear in coded form—the grandmother is a witch, the father an owl, the mother “the Jumbly Girl,” the younger brother “the Angel Boy.” The detective in her whodunnit is a wolf, who represents Moss’s wisdom in the present. “Let’s dig, Wolf, let’s dig it all up, let’s open the graves,” she writes. To solve the case, she and the wolf must go back and reconstruct her psyche: they must identify where the voices came from and how they grew so powerful.

And so Moss interrogates her family history and upbringing—“Are you crazy because of your childhood difficulties,” she asks, “or was your childhood difficult because you’re crazy?”—and picks apart cultural fallacies around women, food, and madness. At every turn, the voices call her a liar and out of her mind. She speaks over and through them to reënact the coalescence of her mental illness, an inner war that left her sense of self so precarious that only the most rigid habits could keep it together.

Moss’s account of her childhood is stark and haunting. (A disclaimer cautions, “Memory is fallible. . . . I have worked hard to hold space for the narrator’s fallibility and for others’ denial of her version of reality.”) In the book’s early chapters, she describes a home governed by anger and taboos. The Owl, the father figure, flies into rages, yelling and occasionally lashing out with a hand or foot. He believes in vigorous exercise and hounds his wife relentlessly about her weight. The family hikes on weekends, the routes “plotted by the Owl to maximize the achievement of miles, summits, ascents, and technical challenges,” Moss writes. The children are made to forgo lunch, told that they have enough meat on their bones and will hardly waste away. Meanwhile, the Jumbly Girl, the mother character, resents the burdens of domesticity and espouses a “puritan feminism” that requires “self-discipline, self-denial, hard work” and offers moral superiority as a reward. Moss is taught to scorn “tarty women” and to fear her own appetites: “You had to be kept away from food, couldn’t be trusted,” she writes. “It was only the adults’ surveillance that stopped you eating everything and becoming huge.”

A picture emerges of two parents who are unprepared for the reality of raising kids and who mask their ambivalence about caretaking with an ethic of self-reliance. When Moss contracts frostbite on her fingers during one of the family’s outdoor excursions, the Jumbly Girl buys her a pair of gloves to cover the blackened flesh but delays calling a doctor. “We know she’s fat,” the Jumbly Girl tells Moss’s new nurse. “We don’t have sweets or cakes . . . I don’t know what more we could be doing.” But the nurse reassures her: her daughter isn’t overweight at all. The nurse is more concerned about a bruise on Moss’s leg, which Moss explains came from the Owl kicking her—she hadn’t been fast enough coming down the mountain. The Jumbly Girl laughs. Her daughter, she maintains, is “always making up stories, can’t tell fact from fiction.”

In the next sections, Moss leaves the hothouse of childhood; anorexia accompanies her, in loco parentis, through college, marriage, motherhood, and a successful career. For the most part, she manages her illness, but the pandemic pushes her to a nadir. She is admitted to a hospital. A doctor tells her, “Your organs are failing. . . . Even with our best care you are and will remain for some time at immediate risk of death. You are severely malnourished. Your blood chemistry is alarming. If we do not feed you now, you will die.”

After Moss is released from the psychiatric ward, she resumes her strict running regimen, which had consisted often to fifteen miles per day; she prepares elaborate meals for her family and follows tortuous codes that prevent her from eating more than half of what others are eating, regardless of how much she’s exercised or how hungry she is. The reader aches for Moss, on guard against a gluttony that she fears will “burst out like a fly from a maggot and pollute and gobble until you had eaten the whole world.”

Moss’s language has a dark, headlong allure. She transforms a memory of mountain climbing into a vision quest: “Watch me,” she writes, “thinner and faster, thinner and faster, higher and higher. Wolf, walk beside that fading girl. Tell her: what you love can hurt you.” Who wouldn’t dream of being the waif led to heaven by a dangerous love? I found myself wishing that Moss had left the seductiveness to her voices, who function, instead, as ludicrous mustache-twirlers, unambiguously villainous. For the reader, they’re easy to tune out; their outbursts feel rote or silly or self-serving, as when they check Moss’s privilege (“You must be sick in the head, complaining about this stuff, ballet and sailing and private school”) and reflexively call her a liar. (“You’re telling lies again, how do you think you make us feel?”) On the one hand, Moss appears to want to convey the destructive glamour that anorexia patients associate with the disease; on the other, she doesn’t appear to want to fully attribute that glamour to the disordered voices; some of it redounds back to her, to her way with words. Perhaps Moss is worried that creating too nuanced or persuasive an adversary might warp our image of who is right and who is wrong—it’s as if she holds so much uncertainty in her own mind that she can’t afford to risk any in ours.

As a rule, the arc of a mental-illness narrative may be long, but it bends toward growth. In the later parts of her memoir, Moss, attuned to built-in demands for uplift, starts to lay the groundwork for hope. She documents her epiphanies, her insights, the solace she derives from the Georgian-era diarist Dorothy Wordsworth’s “radically sane” approach to work and leisure, the life-affirming pleasure she takes in trees, wind, cows. These passages, which I began to think of as “notes toward a future recovery,” are interesting, the writing is lovely, and they are presented as recompense or restitution for the suffering of their author. At the end of the book, Moss imagines herself guarded by her wolf and eating a delicious meal.

But these assurances of Moss’s recovery are accompanied by other, more troubling signs. Narrative writing about eating disorders has a tendency to cordon off the author or protagonist from other anorexics: she restricts because she is a seeker, and has a turbulent soul, whereas they restrict out of vanity. “My Good Bright Wolf” isn’t immune. Moss sometimes seems to jeer at other women who appear complicit in the culture of disordered eating—“amateur,” she calls one of them. Not only are their motives less pure than her own but they can’t match her self-control. “Milly’s mum weighed everything she ate and wrote down the calories.” (Poor silly Milly’s mum!) “In your friends’ houses the fridges held special food for the mothers, fat-free yogurts and low-calorie cheese and bunches of celery,” Moss recalls. “In the evenings women served themselves miniature portions of the family meal, though often sneaked leftovers in the kitchen while clearing up. Oh, I really shouldn’t, they said. A moment on the lips. Oh, I can’t help myself.”

When puberty and diet culture come for Moss and her classmates, she’s “the only one to whom it occurred to skip lunch as well as breakfast, the only one who could choose not to eat cake however good it looked and however hungry you were.” Moss is, of course, mocking her own sense of achievement, drawing it coquettishly around her while her terror flaps in full view underneath. Still, an earnest pride in her accomplishment has not been fully excised.

As the eating disorder takes hold of her life, her unhappiness increasingly manifests as self-aggrandizement and irritation. The book goes out of its way to identify enemies: health-care workers, ignorant friends, sexist academics, rude strangers. One of the nurses at the hospital confronts Moss because she wants to use the downstairs toilets, where “white basins gleamed” and “the mirrors were spotless.” The bathrooms on Moss’s floor are disgusting, with “unidentifiable yellow and brown puddles and smears on the walls, basins and taps.” Human dignity squares off against institutional violence. “Bring it on, lady,” Moss thinks. “We’ll see who’s best at words.”

Moss is the best at words. The nurse lets Moss pass, and the moment scans as a righteous victory. Speaking—and, by extension, writing—has granted her a sliver of control. But Moss’s writerliness more often seems to oppose or complicate her recovery. She portrays her wish to shed weight as inextricable from a yearning to seal herself off from the material world and to dwell only in art and language. Her therapist tries to convince her that she must sustain her health in order to fuel her art, but she discards the advice, seemingly unable to relinquish the idea that self-mortification ignites her creativity. “You don’t much care about the thinning of your bones and the collapse of your white blood cells,” Moss writes, “but you do care very much about this experiment in writing, about the work of choral prose, about the narrative of contested memory.” Her physical self lies beneath consideration, eaten by a memoir, subjugated and brutalized to prop up an identity.

The title that Moss has chosen for her memoir riffs on a poem that May Swenson published in 1978. Moss explains that a friend sent her the poem, “Question,” after she confided in the friend about her eating disorder. It begins:

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

At the climax of the poem, the speaker asks:

How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

These lines always take my breath away, in part because of the impact I imagine them having on people who have learned to fear and hate their bodies. With shocking tenderness, Swenson invites these readers to picture the stuff they’re made of not as a threat or liability but as a “good bright dog,” a sweet and loyal friend who travels with them wherever they go. The poem awakens possibility, or at least curiosity: What would it be to approach your physical form as though it were an independent creature? How would it feel to love the body that supports you as you might love an animal, the one who wags his tail when you come home and pushes his nose into your hand when you’re sad?

But Moss immediately segues into a discussion of how dogs terrify her, how she can’t stand them. When she was a child, the Owl was “magnificent” whenever she encountered a dog. “Shameless, fearless, his appetite for confrontation for once working spectacularly in your favour,” she recalls. He’d snarl, “I don’t care, madam, how friendly your dog might be, it is frightening my daughter and you will control it or I will kill it here and now.” This behavior marked him as “your defender, your protector,” Moss writes. “You imagined him horsed, armoured, sword-wielding, yourself precious and important to him, your vulnerability answered by care rather than shame.” Moss is far from alone in seeking salvation in displays of power or violence that call themselves care. And yet there is no way out of the woods except to stop fearing, to stop fighting, to find the things that love you and to love them back. ♦