Invoking fairytales and folklore, acclaimed author Sarah Moss’ new book My Good Bright Wolf (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) is an innovative and experimental memoir documenting her struggles with disordered eating. Writing at times in the second person and using archetypal figures in the place of real people, Moss explores how childhood lessons and the fables of girlhood influences her present. Overlaying this exploration of self My Good Bright Wolf  is also an interrogation of the role of memory in fragmenting one’s perspective of reality. Centered around an intense relationship with food, that is both restrictive and loving, critiques of racism in feminist politic and acknowledgments of her own privilege situate Moss’ memoir and life in a broader sociopolitical context.

In conversation with Literary Awards Consultant Lulu Schmieta, for this week’s PEN Ten, Moss explains the presence of The Wolf in the text, why she’s enjoying what she’s currently reading, and how she feels about publishing My Good Bright Wolf compared to her previous books. (Bookshop; Barnes & Noble)


Memoir is such an intimate genre— the reader is immersed in the author’s thoughts, experiences, and reflections. However, My Good Bright Wolf is written in the second person, which seems to create some distance between the author and reader. How did you come to the decision to write this book in the second person, and why was that the best way to write your memoir?

I played with several approaches, but I was sure from the beginning that I didn’t want an ‘I’ in charge, because it’s a book about fragmentation and kaleidoscopic points of view. There’s distance between author and reader but the second person also asserts the difference between author and narrator, which is always present but often ignored in memoir.

You write: “You could have told her that the most grievous aspect of your sickness was that you had lost the ability to write fiction, that you could no longer build or inhabit the world of a novel, only document your own unraveling.” While “documenting your own unraveling”, did you know it would become a memoir? How has your experience been, welcoming My Good Bright Wolf into the world, compared to the release of your fiction and previous books?

I didn’t know much at all while unravelled. I kept notes in hospital partly because writing is a way to assert that the patient is a person and not a thing, which medical systems tend to forget or deny. Later, I became fascinated by the incompatibility of madness and narrative prose, the way the fictions of non-fiction repel broken voices. I was naturally nervous about publication, probably more than with fiction, because it’s a very experimental book as well as because of the intimacy. But the intimacy is also an artifact. There’s almost nothing here about huge parts of my life.

I became fascinated by the incompatibility of madness and narrative prose, the way the fictions of non-fiction repel broken voices. I was naturally nervous about publication, probably more than with fiction, because it’s a very experimental book as well as because of the intimacy.

Particularly at the beginning of the book, when writing about your family history, the language you use and the epithets you incorporate for your family invoke fairytales and folktales. How were these stories told to you as a child (if they were)? Why do they play such a large role in how you remember your past?

I did grow up with fairytale and folktale, read and told by my grandmother. I’m using them here because I think adults remember childhood in archetypes: the caregivers of our childhoods are gods and monsters, witches and fairies, invested with strange powers. Sometimes they live on in those forms in our adult minds and lives. The Owl and the Jumbly Girl are archetypes, not real people, and that’s why they have names from nonsense verse.

Throughout the book, you call upon your wolf to comfort your past self or to offer younger-you advice or perspective. A wolf is often the villain or trickster in fairy tales and folktales and folk songs. How did this presence in your memoir anthropomorphize itself as a wolf?

It’s mostly playful. But for some of the voices in the book, anything that makes the narrator feel safe or reliable is a villain or trickster. The Wolf is the antiphone to the dangerous voices and so herself dangerous to them. The trick was to make friends with her villainy.

In the second part of the book, readers learn about how you relapse back into your eating disorder, and the writing switches into the third person. What does this change signify, and why was that section told in that way?

Again, it came through practice and experiment. In medical writing, the patient is always distanced, third-person, not an I or a you. That was my position while in hospital: a thing that keeps on speaking.

I think adults remember childhood in archetypes: the caregivers of our childhoods are gods and monsters, witches and fairies, invested with strange powers. Sometimes they live on in those forms in our adult minds and lives.

There is much food description and food writing in a book about food restriction. How was that experience and how did it compare to writing Spilling the Beans?

Writing My Good Bright Wolf was more fun. Spilling the Beans is scholarly, pretending to be more impersonal than it is; it was the era when you weren’t allowed to write academic books in the first person. I love food and cooking. Many people with eating disorders do, and many people who work with food and cooking have disordered eating. I think the common point is the intensity of the relationship with food, and I’d guess that people who just aren’t interested in cooking and eating and find no pleasures at the table are less likely to develop eating disorders. (I’m not sure I believe in those people, but that’s another matter.) In good times, the intensity is about pleasure and nourishment and sharing, but the same charge can move in other directions.

I loved the detail that your agent was able to get you in with a doctor. Was that your literary agent? Could you expand on how your book world and community was there as a resource and lifeline to you?

Yes, that was my literary agent, with whom I’ve worked from the beginning of my career as both of us raised our families from birth to adulthood. She and my publishing teams always believed in my intellect and my writing, even when both were on the rocks, and they have all made sure that this book is received with intelligence and grace.

Are you currently working on any fiction? How has it been to return to that genre, knowing that at one point you were unable to write it?

I have a novel out in May (in Britain). I keep describing it as ‘frothy’ and people look disbelieving, but by my standards it’s a sweet and joyful thing and I love it in ways I haven’t loved any of the others.

I love food and cooking. Many people with eating disorders do, and many people who work with food and cooking have disordered eating. I think the common point is the intensity of the relationship with food, and I’d guess that people who just aren’t interested in cooking and eating and find no pleasures at the table are less likely to develop eating disorders.

These types of stories have such rich oral history. I’m looking forward to experiencing My Good Bright Wolf through audio. While writing, was the future audiobook recording in your mind at all?

No, I write for the page, but I love the audiobook. Morwen Christie is a wonderful reader.

I loved reading about what books struck you as a child, as a teen, as an adult and how they impacted you. What are you currently reading, and what books have stuck with you during this recent part of your life?

A friend – the same one who suggested the poem from which I took the title of My Good Bright Wolf – suggested Christina Sharpe’s work, which has changed my mind, by which I mean not changed my opinions but altered the way I understand the world. I’ve found Kate Manne’s writing both exemplary in speaking from the academy to popular culture and a simultaneous liberation and call to arms. I sometimes avoid food memoir with recipes because they’re often sentimental books that assume all family meals and cooking are benign and nurturing, but when I came to Caroline Eden’s Cold Kitchen I loved it – intellectually rigorous, politically alert and celebratory food writing is rarer than it should be, and to be treasured.


Sarah Moss is the author of the novels The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall. These and others of her books have been listed among the best of the year in The Guardian, The Times (London), Elle, and the Financial Times and selected for The New York Times Book Review’s Editors’ Choice. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.