When she teases apart the structural underpinnings that prescribe gender, her analytical skills are breathtaking. When she lets those structures tumble and gives voice to the child raised in a spartan emotional wasteland, she broke my heart ... Moss goes back into a dark past to bring forth childhood memories. Setting that childhood voice free comes at a cost. A second voice, rendered in italics, constantly challenges her memories, berating her for making up stories. She alternates that vulnerability with her mature intellect, which sees that the literature she read to escape actually enforced British imperialism’s moral values of racial superiority, robust physical health and modest womanhood.
Not a pleasant read and it’s not meant to be. It is a memoir of mental illness, specifically anorexia, and it is an extraordinary record of that particular variety of spiritual, emotional, and physical torment ... Raises the question of why we read illness memoirs. In the best case, such an account increases our empathy for and appreciation of what people (perhaps we ourselves) go through.
The memoir is also weirder and wilder than this description implies ... Moss’s language has a dark, headlong allure ... Perhaps Moss is worried that creating too nuanced or persuasive an adversary might warp our image of who is right and who is wrong—it’s as if she holds so much uncertainty in her own mind that she can’t afford to risk any in ours ... Moss sometimes seems to jeer at other women who appear complicit in the culture of disordered eating ... Moss is far from alone in seeking salvation in displays of power or violence that call themselves care. And yet there is no way out of the woods except to stop fearing, to stop fighting, to find the things that love you and to love them back.
Full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom ... A lesser writer would overdo these refrains. But Moss wears them lightly, subtly using the doubting voice and the heroic wolf to tangle preconceptions of reality as she forges her own way of writing memoir.
Extraordinary, clear-sighted ... There’s something beautifully wild and dangerous about this book ... A howl both exquisitely anguished and profound. It’s further proof that Moss is a towering figure in the contemporary literary landscape.
There’s a troubling layer that sits over the narrative, harming it. Moss frequently stops the flow to apologise for her privilege ... In memoir as in most art, the unintended cracks often make for the most revealing, instructive aspects of the work. Moss’s hand-wringing, the voices that haunt her, contain a sad beauty. They’re part of her trauma. They damage but don’t break her thought-provoking, tender midlife memoir, just as they damaged but didn’t break a brilliant mind.
Poignant ... Moss describes in brutal detail the legitimate traumas of her childhood .... Will undoubtedly be called brave, worthy and fierce, as it deserves to be, but, more than that, it is a painstaking effort by a gifted writer to tell her story the only way she can.
This is not the first book written by or about a highly intelligent woman who has an unhealthy relationship with food, who copes with fear by taking it out on herself; a whole genre has arisen from such narratives, encompassing fiction and memoir. At times Sarah Moss seems to doubt herself ... Powerful.
As a novelist, Moss exhibits compassionate attention and perspective—skills she applies autobiographically here. Her second- and third-person narration emphasizes the contrast between her thinking self and troublesome flesh ... Feisty and original, this feminist text exhorts self and readers alike to 'befriend your body.'
Though at times disturbing in the self-flagellation and personal fragmentation it depicts, Moss’ book also presents a compelling portrait of a sensitive, deeply intelligent woman struggling to reconcile a difficult emotional past with the misogyny that tainted the social and intellectual environments she inhabited. Rich, complex reading.
