Four books by Sarah Moss

Hello!

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Sarah Moss, a novelist and nonfiction writer whose interests include food in British literature, climate change, gender, travel writing, running, and the interconnectedness of everything. Moss has written six novels and six nonfiction books, including a memoir. I read four last month. I’m obsessed.

I have prepared for you a roundup of Sarah Moss’s four most recent books. But before I dive in, here are five quick things that you might want to know:

• Her novels are short (all three novels I mention here are around 200 pages).

• She does not shy away from dark subject matter (I’m going to mention anorexia and suicide) but her books are also laugh out loud funny in places.

• If you like audiobooks, I highly recommend listening to Moss’s books. She has an impeccable ear for internal monologue, and the readers (Morven Christie and Christine Hewitt) were excellent.

• She is an absolute master of close third person narration. If you write fiction, you might want to consider studying how she does it.

• She is a serious runner and hiker, and a woman setting off on a run or a ramble is often the catalyst for plot in her books.

OK, here we go. A few thoughts on three novels and a memoir by Sarah Moss.

My Good, Bright Wolf (2024)

I learned about this anorexia memoir from a footnote to a Substack post about braising by my friend Tamar Adler. Tamar has written beautifully about her own experience of disordered eating in The New Yorker, so I knew she wouldn’t lead me astray. From the very beginning, I was drawn in by May Swenson’s poem, “Question,” the basis of the title. I found so much to love in this searching book about girlhood, food, and the stories that form us.

My Good, Bright Wolf is about anorexia, but it is also one of my favorite kind of books: a book made of other books. Moss examines the ideologies behind the books that she read growing up. We share some of the same novels in our childhood canon: Jane Eyre, Little House on the Prairie, and Little Women. I thought I was pretty familiar with the problematic elements these classics, but Moss’s unflinching analysis made me think in a new way about