Novel Readings

She was surprised to find it more or less possible, most of the time, to follow her meal plan: it seemed that perhaps the battle was over, the endgame complete. She had followed the rules all the way to the end, until it was possible to go no further. She had met the experts’ standards until her heart and liver and kidneys failed in quantifiable and quantified ways, until other experts told her that it was time to stop and now, surely, there must be a period of grade, a little mercy.

If food issues or eating disorders are a problem for you, you may not want to read either this post or Moss’s book.

My Good Bright Wolf is a harrowing, disturbing, honest, vulnerable account of Sarah Moss’s anorexia, though that neat diagnostic term seems inadequate to the complexity of the story she tells about the childhood, the parenting, the schooling, the culture of femininity and beauty, and the “experts” that all played a part in making it impossible for her to accept food as nourishment her mind and body needed – never mind to embrace eating as pleasure.

How do you tell a story like this about your life, and especially about your family, that does justice to your own suffering, and your own rage, while still also, as far as is possible, doing justice to good intentions, to sound principles, to the tensions and struggles of the people who did you so much harm? How do you convey the extraordinary power of feelings – compulsions – that to other, “healthy,” people do not, cannot, make sense? How do you bring both yourself and your readers to an understanding that is not (because it can’t be) the same as an explanation? How do you orchestrate the voices in your own head, both the ones expressing your unreasoning, impossible, self-destructive conviction that you should not eat, and the ones – trained, educated, hyper-rational – that know better? While Moss’s experience would, I think, have been gripping and heart-rending if told in a more conventional expository way, the most remarkable thing about the memoir she has written is the form she created for it, which is constantly interrogatory, and which adopts elements of allegory or fairy tale to shift our thinking away from the strictly literal towards something at once more surreal and more affecting.

Her mother, for instance, is always “Jumbly Girl,” her father “the Owl.” They are characters as much as people; Moss is aware of that, self-conscious about herself as in some sense their creator, certainly their narrator. The artifice does not signal untruth, but truth, in memoir, is a function of memory, and she knows memory can never be wholly reliable:

They’re gods and monsters, your mum and dad, mythological. Larkin was right, they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats. Fools who taught them, one way and another, that love takes the forms of surveillance and judgement, that children will stay dependent and needy forever if not forced to grow up. Fools who taught them that care and attention are scarce resources, not to be wasted on the undeserving. And maybe they’re not really your parents, the Owl and Jumbly Girl, not really human at all, just voices in your head.

But their real voices – the ones she remembers – say things like “We know she’s fat” when she is taken for a mandatory weigh-in with the school nurse, who replies “She’s not overweight, nothing to worry about there,” much to her shock – “Next she’d be saying you could do maths. Nonsense.” They say things like “no need for any lunch, there’s plenty of meat on those bones.” They permit only “natural” foods, only organic produce, no fast food or processed food, no sweets – healthy, in theory, but punitive in practice. They preach (though the Jumbly Girl does not always practice) a doctrine of self-control, and eventually, in early puberty, Moss learns she can win at that game, “dieting” so much she stops menstruating:

You had only another two or three periods, not enough to learn how to manage or accept them. Bones emerged comfortingly, hips, clavicle, shoulders and then ribs. Even the popular girls . . . envied your bones, as they had never envied and would never envy anything else about you. You began to get tired on the two-mile walk across the city to school, to get a bit dizzy sometimes on the stairs, and you greeted it all with relief. Here was safety. Here was something you could do.

A severe case of frostbite from a sailing trip leads her to a doctor who is “concerned about how thin you are”; he diagnoses anorexia and refers her to a psychiatrist, but her mother says “we’re about to spend a month hiking,” so “she’ll have to manage.”

Sailing, hiking, trips to the Continent, ballet lessons, organic food: Moss is very aware – sometimes uncomfortably so, I thought – of her “privilege,” though her self-conscious admissions of it are unhappy echoes of her parents’ rebuttals (real? imagined?) of her “complaints.” “You must be sick in the head, complaining about this stuff, ballet and sailing and private school”;

Do you have any idea, even now, what a lucky girl you were? Have you forgotten the food collections for the families of striking miners another two junctions up the motorway, have you forgotten how skinny some of the kids at your first school were?

Answer me this: would it be better to know that your parents wanted to feed you and couldn’t, or to know that they could and didn’t want to?

Seriously?

Moss is astute about the social contexts and structures that meant her father, a professor, was away all day and resentful, at home, about incursions on his time and attention, and also about the frustration of her mother – indeed, her mother’s whole generation, able to get an education (her mother had a Ph.D. too) but then too often expected to conform, “clever girls . . . before marriage and maternity enclosed and enraged them.” Her mother cooked and sewed, and young Sarah admired and emulated those skills even while absorbing guilt, even hatred, of them fueled by feminist rejection of them. Her sympathy for her mother’s thwarted aspirations complicates her resentment at her own miserable treatment and fills her with ambivalence about her own ambitions: “Bad scholar, bad writer, bad clever girl.”

Through all of this, Sarah reads, and My Good Bright Wolf has long, fascinating sections about Little Women, about Little House on the Prairie, about Swallows and Amazons, about The Bell Jar, drawing out what they have to say about food, about nourishment, about ideal girls. Moss goes on, of course, to become both a literary critic and scholar and a novelist. This is not, by any means, however, a “literature saved my life” kind of book. The “life of the mind” she idealizes often seems, to her, to be at odds with her own physicality; the one argument that works, when any argument does, to get her to eat is that if she doesn’t, she will not be able to think and thus to write. Her success, as a student then an academic then a writer, only changes the terms and the stakes of the battle she fights with her body. Once – quite recently – in Italy, on a fellowship, in just the kind of circumstances that seem ideal for writing (“What a privilege, to have a room of one’s own with all meals found, all housework done, for six weeks!”), she finds herself in a particularly devastating spiral, unable to eat, dissociating, disintegrating. “I’ll get over it,” she insists to her therapist, who responds “You’re not safe” and insists that she come home.

My Good Bright Wolf is not, as I said, a book about writing (or reading) as salvation, and it is also not a recovery narrative, though by the end there are glimpses of reconciliation between Moss and her hungry body: “No making of art – or love, or war, or peace, or dinner – without a body, no body without food.” What would it feel like for her to be at ease, at home, in her body (“my house / my horse my hound,” as it’s called in her epigraph, May Sarton’s poem “Question”)? It would feel like the time she and a friend stop at a café in Lombardy, “with a view of the mountains and the sound of wind in the leaves”:

There’s a small bowl of the estate’s honey and one of preserved wild berries, and for now, for this sunny moment, you’re not scared, it’s just good food in a good place . . .

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

The moment is the opposite of anorexia.

It feels fragile, precious, whole.