My Good Bright Wolf​, by Sarah Moss review - 'I wolfed it down'

Sarah Moss

Curiously, My Good Bright Wolf made me think that reading list appendices might be better at the start rather than the end of a book. Sarah Moss cites her own work, Spilling the Beans: Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in British Women’s Fiction 1770-1830, with a gloss – saying that since she wrote it, she has “developed better thinking” about some issues and “I would do it differently now”. Although it seems a model of humility and graciousness, the points rather loom in her new book. Best known as a novelist, she has written other non-fiction, but this is the first that is proper, delving autobiography, and it poses those questions. What would she do differently now and has she developed better thinking? Given her actions and thoughts led to hospitalisation, it seems pertinent to ask.

The book is structured in three unequal parts, “Unreliable narrators: inventing” takes up almost the first two-thirds, followed by “Logical conclusion: remembering” and finally “A body of one’s own: thinking”. The final part is necessary in terms of the narratology and gives a reason for the title (or does it? The reader is warned in the outset “Maybe I made up the Wolf, or maybe she’s as real as anything”) but it flags slightly in comparison. Given the honesty and insight of the earlier parts, this lassitude might be inevitable. Moss’s topic is the psychopathology of eating and its disorders, and inevitably this means analysing whether the problem is a form of diagnosis, or a side-effect or symptom of other problems. Moss plays her key rhetorical card immediately. “In the middle of the journey of your life – at least almost certainly more than halfway through – you found yourself in a dark wood. Who do you think you are, Dante? Shup up, no one cares what middle-aged women do in the woods.” This internal dialogue, hectoring, contradicting, belittling, is a kind of rhetorical short circuit, the embodiments of the paradox where a Cretan tells you that all Cretans are liars, to which she refers. It is, were the image not typically problematic in terms of the theme, having one’s cake and eating it writ large. The confession of fictionality means it can be flexed, so her parents are metamorphosed into “the Jumbly Girl” and “the Owl”. It allows for the introduction of the Wolf, a kind of floating signifier of threat, retribution, repression. This distancing and self-interrogation works surprisingly well, and introduces an element of comedy, albeit with a bitter tang. To continue the gustatory theme (and another part of Moss’s oeuvre), chocolate is permissible but only at 90 per cent cocoa solids.

Moss captures a certain contradictory period in second-wave feminism, and especially the manner in which those who would think of themselves as liberals were nevertheless screaming snobs. Admirable, even enlightened, though their views on sugars and processed foods were, they were laced with class horror. The Puritanism is such that the young Moss surreptitiously steals sips of paracetamol syrup as if it were confectionary. Holidays are about hiking and discipline and self-reliance rather than relaxation; indulgence of any sort is both morally and politically wrong. Irony of ironies, all this is disguised as, ambiguously, “taste”. As a childhood, it seems like a recipe for problematic eating (even the simile there shows the extent to which our language is saturated (there it is again) with food-talk). Moss does not go down the route of redemption by literature, but her readings of childhood classics are the high point of the memoir for me. She is forensic about the social, economic and political nature of food – and much else – in Arthur Ransome and Laura Inglis Wilder (even typing the name brings back onions under eaves, which I forced my Dad to do when they were in their The Good Life phase). Although she sensitively discusses the violence throughout Enid Blyton, I was surprised there was little about her strange relationship to the edible, particularly in the Surrealist classic, The Tale of Two Bad Mice. Her reading of Rossetti’s Goblin Market is a relishing in itself.

Moss is also astute on reading Jane Eyre and The Bell Jar as a teenager, probably quite the worst time to do so. She draws out the false syllogisms neatly: “Cleverness was unattractive and paying attention to your appearance was stupid. Obviously decent women valued mind over body, intellect over sexuality. By the age of sixteen, you had renounced sexuality for the life of the kind and announced your renunciation with your thinness”.

The pernicious nature of diet regimes and especially podcasts, with their soothing pseudo-science, is explored with candour. As is the experience of hospitalisation – its indignity, its challenges to outthink the whole thing: I know whereof I speak. It would be a disgrace if this were dismissed by male readers as “women’s stuff”. For a start, the pages on daffodils and the relationship between William and Dorothy Wordsworth are among the finest close readings I’ve read in a while, and one of the lines drawn out – “Life in the kitchen might not be a betrayal but a counterbalance to life in the library” is a welcome corrective to some more intransigent gender studies approaches. Pun intended, I wolfed it down. Now I can actually savour it.

My Good Bright Wolf​: A Memoir, by Sarah Moss, Picador, £16.99. Sarah Moss is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 25 August