My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss review – trauma response

The childhood Moss describes is devastating, though she is assiduous in pointing out at the beginning that “memory is fallible” and “the closest people have incompatible stories of shared experience … I speak only (at last) for myself”. The undoing of this clever, hungry girl who is willing to do anything to prove she has self-control, that she’s worthy of her parents’ love, is described with such tenderness and poetry, it is enough to make this important literature: for women, for trauma survivors, for those struggling with mental health and food issues, and for vulnerable people searching in the dark for their power.