My Good Bright Wolf

A Memoir

By: Sarah Moss

Narrated by: Morven Christie

“The Scottish actor Morven Christie is the narrator: her reading is measured and reflective, drawing out the forlorn beauty of Moss’s prose.”—The Guardian

"Christie's performance captures Moss's narrative voice, creating a quiet intimacy that invites the listener into Moss's world."—AudioFile

A New York Magazine Most-Anticipated Book of the Fall

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A brilliant thinker.

This book bears reading multiple times. The story is both a simple memoir and a complex observation of the confluence between female body image, food, feminine or feminist historical fiction, memoir and thought and patriarchal influences over the millennia. However, the profoundly honest story about the author at the heart of this book is what makes it a page-turner.

Profound Beauty and Pain

I loved everything about this book. There are deep wounds she has that I don’t but in seeking out her familiars I am reminded to seek out mine, Thank you Sarah.

Astonishing book and performance

I already loved Sarah Moss’s work before reading this but was unprepared for the philosophical and emotional power of My Good Bright Wolf.

I didn’t expect to relate to the experience of having an eating disorder, but Moss draws out the entire sexist, racist, fat-phobic context they develop in, which is a context we’re all shaped by in different ways. Sometimes the best kind of learning is an un-learning, and we get that here.

There’s a point in the book where writing is described as a gift, and the book really embodies that with its poetic language, innovative form and brilliant, empowering critique.

The performance is the kind that makes you realize what is possible with audiobooks. It’s a true work of art.

Honest and devastating

The language is beautiful; not overwrought, but capacious enough to describe the speaker’s intricate and contrarian interiority. I think all women will be able to relate, to greater or lesser degree, to the dystopia that attends being in a woman’s body.

A difficult, rewarding story

This autobiography by Sarah Moss is a story of the author’s complex, neurotic inner life from childhood to an adult as an accomplished writer. That inner life is her battle with anorexia and tracing its origins in her childhood. The author’s story is stressful to listen to and a bit difficult at first to follow. Ms. Moss’s writing can be lyrical as well as blunt especially when she deals with episodes of food anxiety.
The interesting counterpoint in this autobiography is that she is a successful, author and, as her therapist says, Ms Moss can function quite well as a professional.

The Audible narrator of this story is fantastic and contributed to my understanding of the book.