My good bright wolf A memoir

Moss (The Fell) masterfully evokes the insidiousness of self-doubt in this poetic account of growing up with an eating disorder in 1980s Scotland. In forceful second-person narration ("You could never be small enough, blonde enough"), Moss catalogs the ways her mother's thwarted feminist ambitions and her father's anger chipped away at her own confidence, illustrating the long-tail effects by regularly interjecting a second, contradictory voice ("You must be sick in the head, complaining about this stuff, ballet and sailing and private school"). As she began to starve herself and her body shrank, Moss retreated into a life of the mind ("Poetry was safe and the female body, with its appetites and tides, was dangerous"). She weaves in erudite analyses of the writers who guided her girlhood, including Laura Ingalls Wilder and Charlotte Brontë. The "wolf" of the title functions like a spiritual caretaker--a wild aspect of Moss's personality liberated from her restrictive fears of food--that helps quiet her inner critic and heal her wounds. The narrative ends on a note of tentative hope, as Moss recovers from an anorexia relapse during Covid, allowing the wolf to "take food, this time, to the hungry child on the mountain" and acknowledging healing's often jagged path. This is a stirring and singular achievement. Agent: Anna Webber, United Agents. (Oct.)