Four books by Sarah Moss
In which a woman goes outside for a walk
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 literary heroines, whiteness, and restraint.
As I was listening to Moss’s exegesis on whiteness in Little House, I did catch myself wondering whether other readers would want to skip past some of that part. A memoir that includes miniature essays on literary works is not necessarily everyone’s thing, though it is very much My Kind of Thing. Anyway, please don’t think that My Good, Bright Wolf is a slog. As Katy Waldman writes in The New Yorker, “the memoir is weirder and wilder than this description implies.”
For example, she doesn’t write in first person. Most of the memoir is written to a “you” that represents an earlier version of the author. This allows Moss to bring in other voices: voices that criticize her for writing her story and question her memory of the past. Every writer who’s ever sat down to write a story from their own life knows this type of voice (if they don’t, they’re probably a psychopath or at least a clinical narcissist). Moss’s solution—including the voices in italics that I could hear in Morven Christie’s brilliant audiobook reading—reminds me of one of the best writing pieces of writing advice I’ve ever received: “Put the problem on the page.”
The book’s harrowing middle section is an exception to the second person voice. In this part, Moss suffers a midlife relapse, starving herself to the verge of organ failure by following the instructions of male podcast experts on intermittent fasting. This narrative is written in third person, which effectively conveys Moss’s profound dissociation from her body and the Kafkaesque situation she finds herself in while staying in an Irish hospital.
Another technique that Moss uses is the language of fairy tales and archetypes. She calls her father “the owl” and her mother “the jumbly girl, allusions to nonsense poems by the British poet, Edward Lear. And let’s not forget the titular wolf! Moss’s wolf protector is a figment of her imagination, a sort of spiritual canine guide that the author borrows from May Swenson’s poem and sends to watch over her younger self. There are other wolves in this book, both real and imaginary, such as the wolf that Moss encounters when she goes for a run in Italy.
Literary memoirs often dwell in a gray space between fiction and nonfiction writing. The author has to relate true events in the form of a compelling story, which requires using the devices of fiction: plot, character, setting, etc. My Good, Bright Wolf is a shining example of how expansive this genre can be.
The Fell (2022)
Reading Moss’s pandemic novel reminded me that my pandemic in a red state in the U.S. was entirely different from other people’s pandemic. I can see why Lidija Haas wrote about The Fell in the New York Times: “I can think of no book I’ve read since moving to New York from England that has made me feel so foreign.”
Set in the Peak District in northern England, The Fell focuses on four characters: Kate, a singer and health food nut who has been quarantined due to close contact with COVID; Matt, Kate’s 16-year-old son, who’s doing just fine in quarantine as long as he can play online video games; Alice, their widowed neighbor; and Rob, a volunteer on the local rescue squad. When Kate decides to break quarantine and suffers a bad fall, we witness the repercussions through the perspectives of all four characters in a stream of consciousness narrative that some might call Woolfian, but which I am beginning to think of as Mossy.
Kate is a woman who can’t stand to have the windows closed, because “houses need to breathe.” She has never spent a day in her life entirely indoors, and quarantine is driving her crazy. We see her organizing things that don’t need to be organized in the kitchen, dropping mugs, banging herself on the head. When she decides to break the law by going outside for a walk—risking social stigma, a fine, and possibly jail time—she leaves her phone behind. There is a dark ambiguity to her actions. Kate knows, as do the other characters, that hikers sometimes don’t make it back from the hills. Moss leaves it to the reader to decide whether Kate is actually suicidal or just driven to the brink by lack of human contact, cabin fever, and financial uncertainty (Kate works in a café that has been shut down).
I found the chapters in Matt’s perspective, as he waits for news of his mom, to be almost unbearably poignant.
This isn’t going to be all right, is it, it’s past the point where this can be all right. This is like the seconds between falling and landing, he thinks, you know how it’s going to end and you don’t want it to, all you can want now is for time to go more slowly than it does.
He checks his phone again.
He’s needed to pee for a while. He should go pee. He should move.
Matt stands up, the chair squawking on the tiled floor, goes into the cold bathroom where there’s Mum’s deodorant in the glass bottle she refills at the plastic-free shop and her hairs wrapped around the shampoo bar and her bamboo toothbrush with its bristles bent. When he’s washed his hands he picks up the glass bottle and throws it against the tiles over the bath and the shards tinkle into the worn enamel tub and the smell of rosewater and patchouli fills the room.
This is a new kind of pandemic novel for me: one where the possibility of infection is less terrifying than the other consequences of Kate’s decision to leave the house. The Fell reveals the inescapable truth that we are all connected even when we seem to be at our most isolated.
Summerwater (2020)
This novel takes place in multiple characters’ heads over the course of one rainy day in Scotland. (I wrote in my reading notes: “Mrs. Dalloway at the loch.”) The characters have come to the loch for a holiday and are growing restless between the four walls of their log cabins. Bored teenagers slam the doors on their parents and head out in search of danger. A husband takes the kids out to splash in puddles so his wife can have some “me time,” and she spends the whole hour wondering whether she should clean behind the faucets. A family of immigrants (no one can decide whether they are Romanian, Bulgarian or what—actually, they’re Ukrainian) have loud parties, disturbing the other families. Marriages are strained.
Summerwater came out in August 2020. It can’t have been written during the pandemic, but it shares the shut-in energy of The Fell. There is a sense of surveillance; we catch glimpses of the other characters through each narrator’s eyes, often behind windows. The external disaster in Summerwater is not COVID-19 but Brexit. A little girl tells the child of the noisy family, “You’re supposed to have left, you know, people like you, did you not get the message?”
This novel is a master class in close third person, as Moss inhabits both members of three couples in different stages of life. One young couple is trying to achieve simultaneous orgasm while the woman’s mind wanders to problematic fantasies of Don Draper. Another couple is elderly and trying to hide their infirmities from each other. For personal reasons, my favorite couple was the middle-aged Justine and Steve. Justine sets off the plot when she goes for an early morning run, despite the rain and the risk of disturbing her sleeping family:
Anyway, here it is, 5 a.m., as planned, daylight already. Time to get out and back and showered before the boys are wanting breakfast. Other people lie in, on holiday, especially after being kept awake half the night by those selfish fuckers with their loud music who must have known they were ruining the sleep and hence the next day for all the little kids and their parents and the old folk and all. Justine didn’t much mind, just read on her tablet until she was sleepy enough not to be bothered, and the kids slept right through the way they sleep through the smoke alarm at home—always cheering, that—but Steve got his knickers in a bit of a twist and Justine bets that family with the baby had a bad night, right next door to it as well. They’ve had parties twice this week, not really a problem you expect out here, away at the end of the road, it’s where you come for peace and quiet—anyway, she inches herself to the edge of the bed, not turning or rising or disarranging the duvet in any way that would subject Steve to a draught, not that it ever occurs to him to moderate his own insomniac walrussing to save her rest, coughing and scratching and throwing himself around. He won’t even sit down to pee now he’s started getting up in the middle of the night, would rather wake her pissing like a horse than sit like a woman just the once. It’s a thin partition, she says, I can hear everything, it’s not nice. It puts you off, lying there listening to aggressive peeing from someone who could perfectly well just bloody sit down but won’t because in his head the masculinity police are watching even in the middle of the night, hiding, peering in through the windows or crouching in the laundry basket. Which is admittedly big enough for a couple of coppers.
It’s hard for me to express how much I love that this passage ends, like so many of my thoughts, in a laundry basket. As in Moss’s other novels, there’s a question at the center of Summerwater about whether a woman has a right to move freely or should stay home and take up as little space as possible.
In between the chapters narrated by human characters, Moss places short fragments that let us see the natural world of the loch—the birds in the air (and people in an airplane), the fish in the water, a mother wolf nursing her cubs, hungry predators waiting for the rain to stop so they can go out and hunt. In true modernist fashion, we are also witness to the inner workings of characters’ bodies. Moss’s characters are in nature and nature is in them.
Each one of these characters is aware, to varying degrees, of how their world is changing: becoming more diverse, hotter, less predictable. A sense of impending calamity creeps into every character’s stream of consciousness, but Moss keeps the reader guessing as to what will be the proximate cause of calamity—will it come from the elements or some renegade “nutter” camping in the woods?
When I finished listening to Summerwater I started listening to it all over again and enjoyed it just as much, if not more, the second time.
Ghost Wall (2018)
Smart, sassy, 17-year-old Silvie Hampton accompanies her domineering father, Pete, a xenophobic bus driver with an amateur passion for studying the lives of ancient Britons, and her passive, exhausted mother, Alison, on a reenactment of life in Iron Age Northumberland. The novel opens with a scene from the perspective of a young, female human sacrifice to the bog. It’s not exactly subtle foreshadowing, but that’s OK. Does anyone really doubt what will happen when a modern-day patriarch gets to spend a few days pretending that he’s transported himself and his dependents 2,500 years into the past?
The Hamptons are not alone on this trip to the Iron Age, which is led by a university professor and three of his posh students. (Listeners to the audiobook will enjoy the accent play). Silvie is assigned to collect roughage with the older and savvier Molly, and the friendship that grows between the girls on their walks is Silvie’s salvation. I’m wary of projecting aspects of a novelist’s life onto her characters, but nonetheless, after reading about Moss’s difficult childhood in My Good, Bright Wolf, I can’t help but notice a pattern. Through the older girl, like she did with the wolf, Moss appears to be sending an emissary to keep watch over younger versions of herself.
Other interesting things
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the rapid COVID test herself.”
Sarah Moss loves to knit and run, but she doesn’t think it has anything to do with writing. “And is that when you think about your books, people ask, which is a nice idea, that all that time is really work, that hour and a half every day plus changing and showering plus core strength routine because that’s why I don’t get injured, but it’s not. If I’m writing or about to write, I think about my book almost all the time except when I’m running or knitting.”
Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile of documentary film editor Charlotte Zwerin (“the third Maysle”) feels like a good companion piece to this essay. In the old world of Hollywood, the manual process of film editing was considered “akin to sewing,” which is why it became a “realm in which women could thrive, but it had a glass ceiling.” In the artform of cinema verite, what happens in the editing room—shaping hours of fly-on-the-wall footage into a coherent story—sounds to me like what I love about writing:
Zwerin loved the associative logic that came from familiarity with the material: “You think of something, you go, you get the reel, and you run through it . . . and it reminds you, and then something else. The relationship comes to you that wasn’t there before.”
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Check out my latest essay in The Manifest Station, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Time.”
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Love Sarah Moss! So happy to have found this post. Highly recommend her memoir about her time living in Iceland too. It adds gorgeously talented travel writer to her list of talents!
Added her books to my cart! Thanks for the recommendation!