The desire to be worthy, or the fear of not being worthy enough, is explored in this moving memoir
Sarah Moss: Her book is a painstaking effort by a gifted writer to tell her story the only way she can. Photograph: Hugh Chaloner/Picador“How loudly you wish to acknowledge that there can have been no serious suffering in a childhood of ballet lessons and private school, in an adult life of homeowning and secure employment.
The inherited shame affects all aspects of Moss’s life. She carries it into her relationship with her body, food, schoolwork, siblings and friends – and, once she has escaped the family domain, into her studies at university, where, desperate to divest herself of her perceived toxic femininity, she assumes that great literature is written by men.
Spliced through the memoir are literary essays on Arthur Ransome’s children’s series Swallows and Amazons, Jane Eyre, The Bell Jar and the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, where Moss’s academic background shines through and offers relief from the difficult personal recollections. “Good fiction,” she notes, “holds conflicting stories, invites us despite itself to read against the grain,” echoing her own style in My Good Bright Wolf.
Shortly before Moss is admitted, after months of over-exercising and starvation put her heart in grave danger, she emails her GP in desperation, encapsulating the madness in a line: “I’m sorry to bother you but if I wait even a few minutes I won’t think this is a problem.” The power of this denial comes through again a few pages later, as, barely able to walk, she manages to cycle to the emergency department, “because it didn’t occur to her to find an alternative form of transport”.
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