My Good Bright Wolf

My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.

Sarah Moss, author of The Fell and Summerwater, confronts all of this in a book that pushes at the boundaries of memoir-writing. It narrates contested memories of girlhood at the hands of embattled, distracted parents in a time of disastrous attitudes towards eating and female discipline. By the time she was a teenager, Sarah had developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, and that illness returned in her adult life.

Now the mother and teacher of young adults, in My Good Bright Wolf she explores a childhood caught in the trap of her parents' post-war puritanism and second-wave feminism, interrogating what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did – and still does – with her hard-working body and her furiously turning mind.

Beautiful, audacious, moving and so very funny, Sarah Moss's memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself, and then offers a way out: it is a blindingly brilliant experiment in and celebration of what a creative mind can do. Sarah Moss has written several novels including the Sunday Times top ten bestseller Summerwater, and Ghost Wall, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize. She has also written a memoir of her year living in Iceland. She was born in Glasgow and grew up in the north of England. After moving between Oxford, Canterbury, Reykjavik, west Cornwall and the Midlands, she now lives in Dublin, where she teaches English and creative writing at UCD. An unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves.