For Sarah Moss, the body is a hungry wolf

“My good light wolf,“The debut memoir of the distinguished British writer Sarah Moss is not a pleasant read, nor should it be. It is a memoir of mental illness, particularly anorexia, and an extraordinary account of this particular variety of spiritual, emotional and physical torment.

Moss recreates his experience, creating a constant battle for control on the page. The “discordant voices” she hears in her head break in frequently and abruptly, accusing the second-person narrator of lying, self-aggrandizing, and self-pity, saying things like, “It never happened. This entire episode is fabricated for your incomprehensible purposes.” “You have no one to blame but yourself.” “Everyone knows you’re a professional liar.”

The book opens with a story about her unhappy childhood, deliberately leaning towards a fairy tale. Moss’s father is Owl, her mother is Promiscuous Girl, her brother is Angel Boy, and the story is written in the second person, as in: “You didn’t like Angel Boy.” And the Owl and the Clumsy Girl didn’t like you very much. Among other accusations and insults, her parents say she is fat and control her diet. They are also obsessed with strenuous hikes, poor sleep and skipping meals, all of which pass for weekend family fun.

She weaves characters from her favorite books into this lonely landscape.”Little House on the Prairie“, “Little Women,” And “Swallows and Amazons“, always up to date with food and nutrition. A typical passage begins with a recollection of a passage from one of the Swallow books, where one of the older children, Susan, “thought it would be nice if the captain and the rest of the crew ate something solid. She opened a jar of pemmican and made pemmican sandwiches, nice thick ones, from one of the loaves she had brought from the island.

As a child, Moss’s reading was colored by a literal hunger and longing for someone to take care of her the way Susan took care of her siblings. She superimposes this story with a scene of reading a book to her children and then moves on to political analysis. “Food acts as simple sustenance, fuel for active bodies, and through food the colonial and class aspects of these books become uncomfortably clear. … You internalized assumptions about whiteness without noticing them when you learned to read.”

This sometimes alienating journey through hardship, abuse and political correction features the Wolf of the book’s title. The wolf is the narrator’s protector and protector, a she-wolf with “clattering claws” and a “stalking tail”, “summoned” at various points in the narrative for retribution or at least a corrective point of view. Like Naomi Wolf, whose “The myth of beauty” the author read at age 17 (although she does not indicate the pun.) Mae Swanson’s poem, which equates the human body to a “good smart dog”, is reworked as a wolf because the author is afraid of dogs. And although she never mentions it, perhaps she wants us to understand this: wolves are the most common metaphor for hunger. Hunger is a life force that she must accept or die.

She nearly dies in the middle section of the book, which deals with an anorexia relapse that occurred during the pandemic and landed her in the hospital. This terrifying section is written in third person. It all starts with a friend who ironically notes that all women’s crises and changes in life begin in the bathrooms. It is here that she sees the “number” that will force her to run miles and miles, eat less and less, completely submitting to “the obesity experts, the Owl and the Promiscuous Girl in her head, her juries and judges,” those “dissonant voices” that we’ve heard it all along.

By this time, a husband and sons had more or less magically appeared – I would like to hear more about these lovely people who, together with several friends, were responsible for the most pleasant moments of history. The husband, by trying to get her to eat a reasonable amount of food, provides much-needed balance to the other counter-voices.

“In this case, you compare a woman who ran twenty kilometers and did not eat for eighteen hours with a man who had a good breakfast, sat in the garden and wandered off for coffee and cake, you are, of course, hungrier than me. I am. …You know, he says, that there’s nothing about masculinity that burns calories? You know, the Y chromosome isn’t some magical power plant fueled by cakes and ale?

A little kindness, a little humor. Finally.

Ultimately, My Good Light Wolf raises the question of why we read illness memoirs. At its best, such a story enhances our empathy and understanding of what people (perhaps ourselves) are going through, the “terrible power” of the disorder. While there is no obvious solution or cure, there is a beautiful moment in Italy where the narrator miraculously experiences what food is supposed to be.

“Sunlight, earth and water become grass, milk, cheese, you become walking, thinking and writing.

“This moment is the opposite of anorexia.”

MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF

Sarah Moss

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $28.

Marion Vinik hosts the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader.” She is the author of “Big Book of the Dead“