I enjoyed listening to this book, it was neat to hear the authors story and all that she had overcome in her life.

My Good Bright Wolf was an excellent memoir. I really appreciated the imagery of her parents as owls and wolves, I liked the internal monologue responding to itself. It was vulnerable and raw and super interesting. Loved the narration!

Engaging, immersive, and expertly narrated. A recommended purchase for collections where memoirs are popular.

A raw and powerful memoir, a story of a life lived with trauma, written by an author who is very well known for her fiction, and who cannot resist playing a trick or two on the reader, beginning with her identification as a perhaps inevitably “unreliable” narrator. The author’s memoir is also aided by some unique and interesting literary tools, including a cacophany of mostly jeering voices from her ancestral past, and what she will describe as her own “good bright wolf” — a metaphorical creature, loyal and always available, that the author can send back to assist, inform, or simply reassure her past struggling selves as they are revealed to us.

Packed with literary insights and discussions, these ideas are as foundational in the development of the author’s identity as they are critical to her escape from her truly appalling and abusive family life, ceaselessly pounded by the dual strikes of brutal and misguided Puritanism, and her mothers own conflicted entanglement of motherhood and patriarchy.

I found this book impossible to put down. As her parents lay down the gut-wrenching and sociopathic tracks that will define her upbringing (in their role as “gods and monsters”) the author cannot, unfortunately, escape unscathed, (no spoilers here) channeling her neglect, shame, alienation, lack of control and fear into an eating disorder — anorexia — which will become a life-threatening obsession.

“the less you eat, the more you want food and the more you want food, the more frightening food becomes.”

An eye-opening and incredibly tragic journey into one woman’s enforced descent into trauma, her resilience in finding a path to recovery, and her life-long battle to stay healthy — despite a familial, political and social structure aligned with just the opposite outcome.

A great big thank you to #Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

Moss lays bare her struggle with a life long eating disorder that began in childhood. This book will be
break your heart into many pieces. Moss’s prose is as close to poetry as a writer can get. Her skills seem boundless and to feel her suffering is akin to being struck over and over again…so best to take her memoir in small bites. This is a vivid reminder of the power of words to do physical harm.
Highly recommended, especially for parents of young girls or anyone really who is tempted to comment on someone else’s body.

Maybe I do not like memoirs that break the rules.

I appreciate the thought and creativity Sarah Moss put into this, but I apparently do not appreciate it enough. I’ve endured 35% of the audiobook and it’s one of the most tedious listening experiences I’ve ever had. This is not what I want from a memoir. I want Moss to tell me her story, and I mean really tell it to me. I don’t need her probing at her own memories. Just give me what you remember to be true and let me sort it out on my own. I don’t think experimental formatting is a good fit for me, and I wish I’d realized this sooner.

I can relate to the food restrictions and harmful comments about weight in childhood. I, too, found myself disappearing under the bones of anorexia, as well. And I know that’s where she’s going with this, but we’re still not even there. Everything is torturously protracted and I just cannot force myself through any more of it.

Sarah Moss writes novels. I haven’t read any of them but have read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for which she wrote the Introduction. I don’t think that really counts. So I’m not sure why I picked up her memoir The Good Bright Wolf which came out yesterday knowing nothing about her. Except I loved the title.

There are people who say there are no coincidences. Sarah Moss is anorexic. She has written a memoir that brings the illness of anorexia so intimately to the reader that I felt myself catch my breath several times. When I wrote my book Saving Sara A Memoir of Food Addiction, I wanted to do what I had never read in all the literature of eating disorders. Bring the reader into the mind, insanity, and horror of binging. Until I read A Good Bright Wolf, I never comprehended anorexia. I thought it a completely different animal than binging or bulimia. After reading this memoir, I don’t feel very different from Sarah with an ‘h’.

At the end of the memoir, Ms. Moss tells us how hard the book was to write, not just because it is so intimate but because she comes from a good background, had a great education, has a successful profession, and owns real estate. Which, to my mind, only confirms that eating disorders have no bias. Rich, poor, black, white, American, European, these diseases don’t discriminate.

This memoir is beautifully written, courageously written. She is able to convey the dialogue that goes on in our minds when “under the influence.” The part of her that convinces herself that she isn’t really sick, and even as she is inches away from death, she tried to convince a doctor that there are really sick people in the hospital and he should be attending to them.

She writes about the cult, the politics of being Thin. I related to everything she said: the judgments that thin people were better people. I hated my body because I was fat. She hated her body because she wasn’t thin enough. Her last chapter is entitled “My body, my home.” Just those four words gave me a severe jolt. I’ve always been looking for home. What if home is the shelter we carry with us all the time. Like a turtle, we can go to safety by pulling into our homes.

I listened to A Good Bright Wolf. It was narrated by Morven Christie. “"Morven Christie's limpid, Scottish-inflected voice and gentle, enticing tone combine to lure listeners into Sarah Moss's astonishing (memoir) as effectively as mermaids tempt sailors into the sea" —AudioFile on Summerwater (Earphones Award winner). Morven’s voice is strong and she enunciates with beauty. It is as if she had written the book, she knew just when to inflect, when to emphasize, when to talk to herself (as Moss) with contempt.

There is an emerging breed of memoir writer: Sarah Moss, Maggie Smith, Leslie Jameson who write poetically, lyrically. Who bring us into their worlds in a soft rocking manner but the subject matter is so serious, the self-talk so vicious and this style makes everything much easier to bare and also to relate to.

I’m not great at book reviews. And wish I could do this memoir justice. If you are at all interested in disordered eating, at the insanity behind the disease, and how one anorexic describes it and dealt/deals with it, I urge you to read this book.

Although the story presented as very interesting, as her writing style is very different, I was sadly disapponted.; I didn't mind the writing in second person. Her vivid des descriptions, and relatable subject matter would have usually compelled me to plow thru this memoir. However, the narration was a negative for me. My Good Bright Wolf, is one to be read with your eyes, as opposed to our ears. I do look forward to other works of this author.

Wow. This book is not quite what I had expected but it is something a lot deeper and darker, both super raw memoir weaving in literature, including many books I read when I was younger, such as Little Women, the Little House on the Prairie series, and Jane Eyre. The author writes from her own perspective but also gives voice and perspective, a whole POV, to the shame, to the critical internalized voice, contradicting her own narrative, beautifully illustrating how painful it is to be in our own bodies in this world. I really relayed not necessarily to the specific details of her childhood, but to the overall tone, and the internalized messages about the size a woman is meant to be.

Like many women, I have struggled with undiagnosed disordered eating my entire life. Like the author, when it began (and for me, still now), it wasn’t ever seen as disordered because of my size. I have a critical voice in my head that chides me for not having the willpower of the author, who describes herself as being good at not eating. I was never good at not eating, and fainted the first day I really tried to not eat at all. The author, of course, is not really good at it, she has an eating disorder. She developed anorexia as a teen. Later, in adulthood, following recommendations from “experts,” her foray into intermittent fasting leads her right down that path toward raging anorexia again.

It was a really fascinating book to listen to and think about how much I related, but also, how much I didn’t. There is such a wide spread of experiences that women have and yet, one of the biggest takeaways that we hear is to take up less space, to be as small as we can. I do think I would have a better time at an all-inclusive resort than the author did - the way she described it, I did hear why she struggled with it, but wow, I also heard, “babe I gotta get to one of those places like nowww!”

Overall, I truly enjoyed this book and felt I gained some real thought and insight from it. I hope that the author is able to find peace!

What a stunning memoir. I loved the writing style and the parts about eating disorders in particular really took my breath away. So stunning and transparent, I love this author.

As a fan of Sarah Moss' fiction, I was immediately drawn to this book, but I was still blown away. There are three aspects of the craft of this book that I especially appreciated. First, the use of "you" and "she" to describe her past self in many cases, which can be interpreted in so many ways, but which I understood both to be a way to force herself to look at her childhood self compassionately, and a nod to the disassociation she experienced as an adult. Second, the literary criticism and discussions of food, girlhood, and white feminism. As a big nerd, I enjoyed them intellectually so much, always looked forward to them. From a craft level, they allow the reader to breathe during some of the most harrowing portions of the book, mirroring how the books themselves might have functioned in the writer's life. Third, the inclusion of the voices in her head while recalling her trauma, the voices of shame, contempt, and abuse. The audiobook narrator did a fantastic job differentiating the multiple narrative voices. I'm so thankful for the chance to listen to this book pre-publication because I will be shouting about it wherever I go.