How We Live Now: Sarah Moss on memory and meaning-making

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Hello,

Recently, I interviewed Sarah Moss about her incredible new memoir, My Good Bright Wolf, an account of growing up as a difficult girl in a difficult family, and how this ultimately led to her eating disorder. Throughout the book, she repeatedly argues against herself. A voice rises up in the text and says, What are you trying to claim here? That’s not how it happened! Why can’t you tell the truth?

The point she makes is that we are unsteady in our remembering. We’re often incredibly uncertain, not just about the content of our memories, but also what they represent. We're unsure when the meaning-making took place. Was it something that arose at the point that those events happened? Or was it something we constructed far later in adulthood? And if so, what purpose did they serve?

My Good Bright Wolf also shows how a self is constructed from these memories - in Sarah’s case, a self that believed it was necessary to starve in order to be a good person - a clever, disciplined one. This is one of the best accounts of anorexia that I’ve read, but it’s not truly about that. Instead, it’s a meditation on how we’re made, and how we contain a multiplicity of selves. Ultimately, it’s redemptive: in that multiplicity, we can rescue ourselves, too.

If you’ve already read Sarah’s novels, such as Ghost Wall, Summerwater and The Fell, I’m sure you’ll need no encouragement to listen to this interview. But if you’re new to her work, you’re in for a treat. Without a doubt, she’s one of our greatest living writers.

Sarah Moss Transcript

Take care,

Katherine