Sarah Moss on memory and meaning-making
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Sarah Moss on memory and meaning-making
———
Recently, Katherine 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.
Listen to the Episode
-
Please note this is an automated transcript and as a result there may be errors
Katherine May: [00:00:00] There is a moment at the beginning of Sarah Moss's incredible new memoir, My Good Bright Wolf, where someone cleans out her ears and we feel the violence of that moment. The sense of being a child held in place while someone invades the inside of her body, takes away her agency and causes her pain. And as with the rest of the book, as soon as she's reported this as an act of aggression, another voice rises up in the text to argue with her.[00:01:00]
Katherine May: It says, Are you seriously claiming that this was some kind of assault? Do you really want people to read this? As an act of penetration, why do you have to make quite so much fuss about everything? And it really encapsulates for me exactly what that book does so well, which is to show how our memories are complex and contested, how we argue often against ourselves, how the voices of our parents loom up in our heads sometime until we don't know which is theirs and which is ours.
Katherine May: And indeed, who is right?[00:02:00]
Katherine May: Hello, I'm Katherine May. I am the author of Wintering and Enchantment. But you might know that already. And we haven't done this for a long time, have we? I used to record an introduction for my podcast like this all the time. Walking along by the sea
Katherine May: and we haven't done it for a while because I needed a little break from recording a podcast. It became a lot. It's an expensive enterprise recording a podcast and it takes up a lot of time and I needed to make sure for a while that I really had something to say in it. But then the opportunity to speak to Sarah Moss came up and I absolutely couldn't resist.[00:03:00]
Katherine May: She's a real literary hero of mine. An incredible writer who can really capture the shifting dimensions of the patriarchal family. She's written non fiction before, but this, I think, is by far her most revealing book. But we shouldn't really value it for what it reveals. I think we should value it for the craft that went into it, for her skill as a writer.
Katherine May: To make us think beyond the mere facts, the lurid issues that tempt us in, and the things that we personally relate to as well. But into considering what it takes to make us think in that way. What skill, what experience she [00:04:00] has, what raw talent. that brings this right into our hearts as well as our minds.
Katherine May: One thing that I noticed, and one thing that points to the complications of hosting a podcast is that when I recorded this and went back into my podcast platform, I noticed that the advertising that paid for the last few episodes included a diet company. And having just had an intensely felt conversation with Sarah that drawn her experience as well as mine of the profound problems of diet culture and the harm it's doing to our bodies and our minds and our souls, that [00:05:00] felt very upsetting and I quickly found two That I couldn't stop that from happening if I was to advertise at all.
Katherine May: That I couldn't make a decision about who advertised on my work. And so there's no ads this time. But, that may be a relief for you as a listener. I want you to remember this. That making the podcast you really enjoy costs a lot. It's money and takes a lot of time
Katherine May: and while we all love getting these things for free, we need to understand that they have value. They aren't just things that occur and arrive in our ears. That somebody is making them, [00:06:00] and that the people making them, producing them, promoting them, editing them, administrating them, need and deserve to be paid and to be paid properly.
Katherine May: It's not a hobby, and that's without me being paid. And I've definitely, definitely never been paid for my own podcast. I've definitely spent much more on it. But it was made in return. Anyway, that's a little pointer towards the economics of podcasting. But today, we're going to try this one episode and see if it starts something again.
Katherine May: I must admit, I think I've been bitten by the bug a bit. Watch this space.
Katherine May: Just a content warning, this podcast [00:07:00] and interview touches on the experience of eating disorders and although it handles it very carefully, If that's not for you today, or this week, or this year, or this decade. then that's absolutely fine. Please feel free to give yourself some relief.
Katherine May: Sarah, thank you so much for joining me this afternoon. It is fantastic to speak to you and I think we should probably own that we are the afternoon following the Trump election. Yes. So, um, quite interesting to talk about a book that so carefully unpicks patriarchal thinking today. Yeah. Our ears are ringing slightly and, um, yeah, weird, weird mood to be approaching and interviewing, but there we go.
Katherine May: Um, so we're here today to talk [00:08:00] about My Good Bright Wolf, which is your absolutely exquisite new memoir. And I, as I, I think we've talked about this already, but, but let's own this out loud because one of the ways that I open the conversation with you is to talk about how being a memoirist often means lining yourself up for loads of really difficult interviews where you can feel really exposed and I, I'm really interested in figuring out how we approach these, these things a bit better.
Katherine May: How, how do you feel about that switch into memoir? I know you've written nonfiction before, but this is a pretty personal book.
Sarah Moss: This one's much more revealing. Yeah. I think there were, well, there were several answers to that for me. One of them is that I wouldn't have published it except with a team that I totally trusted and had worked with before.
Sarah Moss: And I was absolutely right about that. Picador have been brilliant at marketing it in a way that protects me and stands up for what the [00:09:00] book is really about, which is writing and memory and how narrative prose can encounter madness. Um, and really steer it away from anything more voyeuristic. I think also at this stage in my career I have a little bit more experience and a little bit more power than I might have done earlier.
Sarah Moss: Um, and also I'm an academic so I'm quite good at answering a question adjacent to the one I've just been asked. Yeah,
Katherine May: being able to construct a wall around you that makes it nice and safe. Um, And so what, what motivated this, this move into writing something so personal? I mean, it struck me that you are writing about very similar things to the stuff that you write about in your fiction, maybe, but that you're abandoning the protective wall that it can build.
Sarah Moss: I think for me, it's not so much about protection. It was that the The [00:10:00] experience of having an anorexic breakdown in midlife was such a violation of narrative prose. It was really the way the stories in my mind were broken and fragmented and interrupted and not working anymore. And narrative prose has been my trade and my calling my entire life and it doesn't really do that.
Sarah Moss: It's not good on cognitive impairment or contested memory or really anything that doesn't have linear coherence. And my experience of mental illness was was deep and profound and absolutely one of cognitive, cognitive collapse. So I was really interested in how you can make narrative prose represent a world that's not coherent.
Katherine May: That makes loads of sense and it is, uh, it's a really interestingly constructed piece for those reasons. You've, you've [00:11:00] kind of created yourself a kind of toolkit. Is that fair to say? It's almost like it to me as a reader, I felt like you'd. You'd created yourself a set of kind of building blocks to play with that let you talk through this.
Katherine May: Can you tell me a little bit about those?
Sarah Moss: It's for me and for the reader. I didn't, it's all in second and third person, which is unusual for memoir, but I didn't want there to be an I, because the whole experience of Breakdown was that the, the I wasn't holding together anymore. There wasn't really an I.
Sarah Moss: There were competing voices and I never had auditory hallucinations. I mean, they never seemed to me to be coming from outside my head, but my thinking was constantly collapsing on itself and being interrupted. So I needed ways, ways to. represent that in literature, and I found myself thinking about a fairy tale.
Sarah Moss: I think part, I mean there were a lot of archetypes in it, most of the, all the characters other than me are archetypes, because I think that particularly as adults [00:12:00] thinking about our childhoods. our parents and carers and the people around us become archetypes in memory. I mean, there's no way you can think if you're remembering yourself at five or six and how you saw your mother or your father, you did not see them as whole flawed human beings going about their business as best they could.
Sarah Moss: You see them as, gods and monsters, you know, invested with enormous powers and capable of saving or damning you. And of course, that's not actually the experience of being a parent, although once you realize that that's how you appear to your child, it can be quite frightening. But I think that in Madness, particularly, the world takes archetypical form.
Sarah Moss: So that really pushed me towards thinking about fairy tale and about those, those kind of inherited I'm reaching for godlike, but I don't mean a Judeo Christian god, I'm thinking about the squabbling pantheons of ancient Greece and Rome.
Katherine May: Much more fun to play with. Much [00:13:00] more fun, yeah.
Sarah Moss: I would say in some ways much more convincing.
Sarah Moss: Um, we won't go into that.
Katherine May: My son, when he was younger, announced that he believed in God. And I was like, oh, do you really? And he said, yeah, the Greek ones.
Sarah Moss: Well, yeah, I mean, ones that fight and don't, you know, you don't then have to deal with the benevolence and omnipotence problem. Um, anyway, nevermind. I wasn't dealing with either of those problems.
Sarah Moss: So that, that pushed me. That's why it's you and she and why the archetypes run through it, because they're really tools for thinking. about an experience that's not in some ways realist.
Katherine May: And that, that lets them accuse you quite often, doesn't it? Those, those voices, particularly there's an italicised voice that kind of runs through it that seems to undermine everything you say that deliberately contradicts and questions your memory and questions how much you as a storyteller are [00:14:00] prone to kind of making things up.
Katherine May: Yes.
Sarah Moss: Because those memories are contested, I mean for a while it seemed that I wouldn't be able to write it because other people who were there remember key scenes differently.
Katherine May: And
Sarah Moss: I thought actually the only The only honest way of representing that is just to say, part of the problem here is that my memories are disputed.
Sarah Moss: I have no idea what happened and what didn't happen because I have been told all along that what I think happened is not what happened. So I want, rather than say my version is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and I am excluding all other versions from this narrative, I wanted to depict the experience.
Sarah Moss: of not trusting your own memory of being told that you're crazy or that you're making it up or that you're lying. And I think in the end that's why I've come back to being okay with it being a memoir. For a while I did, I just didn't want it to be labeled as memoir or fiction because who knows.
Katherine May: Yeah, [00:15:00] yeah.
Sarah Moss: And then I thought, no, it's memoir in that this is what I remember. I mean, I am absolutely certain that it's what I remember. I'm not certain that what I remember is what actually happened. But I know that that's in my head, that that is what I remember. So the point about the interrupting voices was that it's what I remember, but it's not what other people remember.
Sarah Moss: Yeah.
Katherine May: Yeah, you're you're allowing for the way that that that memory is is kind of constructed in your life. And I mean, it struck me as, um, You know, as a memoirist as well, that, that lets you hold the real life difficulty of writing memoirs. And another thing you do is you change the names of the people, of the key kind of characters.
Katherine May: Um, can you talk a bit about, you've named, you've renamed your parents and your brother essentially, haven't you? Yes. Yeah. Give them a more archetypal form.
Sarah Moss: It's exactly that. It's that in this book they are archetypes, they're [00:16:00] not, you know, there are real people in the world going around, but the characters that lived in my head were not the people who go to the supermarket and queue up at the post office and, you know, spend too long reading the news or whatever it is, they're these figures of great looming power.
Katherine May: And
Sarah Moss: I think maybe part of the work, part of the midlife work of those of us who had difficult childhoods, is to go back and hold those childhood gods and monsters, hold them up next to the surviving real people and think these, these are not the same. Yeah.
Katherine May: Yeah. Yeah. They don't match up, but they still, they still have that incredible potency.
Katherine May: That's right. That's almost residual in our minds that becomes those kind of voices that contradict and question us. Yes. Yeah. It's a, it's really fascinating. And Talk to me about the owl, who is [00:17:00] the father figure, um, who I think people might recognize in your novels as well. This, this sort of, for me, I mean, I'll tell you my reading and you can tell me that I've got it all wrong, but for me, what came across was this sense of a, of a man who knew, like knew how to be really right on, who in many ways feels really contemporary to us and who feels like he gets it right over issues like, um, I don't know, like over sexual assault, for example, he will say he knows how to say the right things about that and probably believes them and who protested for black rights in America in his youth and who understands the kind of the form there.
Katherine May: But perhaps who, when it comes to a contest between your comfort and his, will choose his every time.
Sarah Moss: Yes. And my guess is that particularly in academia, we've all [00:18:00] talked beside and served on committees with men who fit precisely that mould. I think that declaring a, an abstract allegiance is very, I mean, And this, I mean, this also comes up repeatedly when I'm thinking about whiteness in the book.
Sarah Moss: I mean, in my own practice, declaring an abstract allegiance is very different from coping in your own life and body with the consequences of that allegiance. So to say, for example, that all bodies are equal and that it is not morally better to be thin, if you really believe that, then you would stop dieting.
Katherine May: And
Sarah Moss: as long as you go on dieting, you are in your actions in the world going on promoting the idea that it is better to be thinner. And there's no way around that. I mean, it's a place where integrity fails. And I think it does for all of us all the time in various ways. I mean, we don't live up to our [00:19:00] own standards and that's because we're human beings and that's okay.
Sarah Moss: But also, I think particularly where structural injustice is concerned, we need to be able to think about that and recognise it. And I think that white people need to be thinking about whiteness in the same way that men need to be thinking about patriarchy. You know, you cannot leave that mess for somebody else to clear up.
Sarah Moss: That's work that we have to do.
Katherine May: Yeah. And it's interesting that this is a book of the pandemic, perhaps, you know, that the crisis comes in the pandemic era, which led us all to think a lot more deeply about that stuff than ever before this space opens up. But I think also the space opened up for a lot of us to disintegrate a bit too.
Katherine May: And for that, I mean, you've used the word mad, which I've often used for my own past as well. And I, you know, loads of people would find that controversial. I. I find that a really, actually a really useful word. I feel like it gives me lineage with those Victorian consumptive [00:20:00] girls, you know, wandering in nightgowns in dark corridors.
Sarah Moss: Yes. And I think also, I mean, it's not a word I would apply to anybody else unless they invited me to do so, but I know the difference between Cognition that works and cognition that doesn't work.
Katherine May: Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I like, in a way it's, it's a kind of un uh, unsanitized way of describing that.
Katherine May: Yeah. That loss of clear thinking. Yes. That loss of control. Like, I, I prefer the unsanitized version. So do I when it, when it comes to me. ,
Sarah Moss: same. Same here. I mean, I find the phrase mental health. deeply irritating. People use it when they mean mental illness all the time.
Katherine May: Yeah, that's right. And it
Sarah Moss: is, it is sanitizing and it's very much the kind of fainting on couches end of things.
Katherine May: Yeah. Yeah, but also it, it kind of, I don't know, for me, it has this [00:21:00] obligation to find like an end point somehow. It kind of, it's the language of medicalization in lots of ways. It's the language of there being one fixed point that we should be aiming for, which is health. You know, and that you're at the wrong place on that binary at the moment.
Katherine May: But I think one of the things that really rose up for me reading your book was how rational a response this was. This, this, this unhappiness, you know, that, I mean, the thing I wrote in my notebook was, Oh my God, you know, all these years that I've I've repeated this line about or repeated this line to myself that I just didn't want to take up enough space in the world and I needed to find a way to take up space and actually I've just been told explicitly not to eat in so many different ways over so many different areas of my life.
Katherine May: Like it's a rational response to that.
Sarah Moss: Yes, I mean, all I did was followed the instructions in various very mainstream diet books. And it [00:22:00] took four months to end up in hospital with organ failure.
Katherine May: That's extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah. And as you got older, you were listening to podcasts as well. That was something that I've not diced with, and I hope never to.
Katherine May: But I was really struck by how having that in your ears as you ran around must have been a really potent set of instructions.
Sarah Moss: I've been thinking quite a lot. It's interesting that we're saying this on a podcast. I've been thinking a lot about podcasts recently because I mean, I still run far too much and I listen to podcasts while I'm running.
Sarah Moss: They're no longer podcasts that drive me to death because that wasn't a good plan. Um, but it's so, it's intimate partly because nobody else can hear them. It's very private. Nobody knows what I'm listening to. You know, I queue up what I want on my phone. I think in some ways my podcast feed would probably tell you more about my darker secrets and anxieties than anything else anybody could come across.
Sarah Moss: And unless I happen to mention it, nobody knows what I'm listening [00:23:00] to or what voices are inside my ears for an hour and a half every day. So I think when they do harm, they can do a lot of harm very fast. But the other thing I'd say about that was that the, those voices, those expert voices were experts.
Sarah Moss: I mean, it wasn't that I was searching the outer reaches of the internet for alternative advice. Some of it was on the BBC. It was totally mainstream, well authenticated, people with very well regarded professorships at Russell Group Universities, giving their best possible advice. And that best possible advice is always always to eat less and move more and be smaller and take up less space and there is never a moment where they say, and there's a point where you have to stop doing this.
Sarah Moss: The idea, the idea is that they've replaced the idea of the diet, which we all know doesn't work where you're supposed to starve yourself for a certain amount of time and then miraculously remain at that starved size without [00:24:00] eating anymore. Um, they've replaced that with the idea that this is for life.
Sarah Moss: Well, it is for life because if you actually do it, it will kill you.
Katherine May: I mean, there is so little in our culture that is saying what you're saying right now, honestly. And I think we're both addicts of maintenance phase, which is, which is the more positive voice in our head. But I don't, you know, like I, I had, I've lived with disordered eating all my life.
Katherine May: And I feel like my year, my last few years listening to Maintenance Phase have healed me more than anything else, honestly. Yes. There is that voice. There is that positive voice finally saying this is all bullshit. Like, what are we doing? Yes.
Sarah Moss: Yeah. Well, it's a way of, partly it's about individual solutions to structural problems, which always serves capitalism very well.
Sarah Moss: So if you tell people that, Well, partly they're all, first of all, all their problems are caused by food, which is highly questionable. But [00:25:00] then that what they eat is a matter of total individual control and in no way environmentally determined. And or that the even if it is environmentally determined, you can control it only on the individual level, and it is your responsibility to do so.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Sarah Moss: It's much, much better for capitalism in all its forms, to have all of us surrounded by this food that's really bad for us and trying desperately not to eat it, then it would be, if we were out on the street saying, why are we surrounded by this food that's really, really bad for us?
Katherine May: Too much of what we want and not enough of what we need.
Katherine May: That's my, that's my catchphrase about capitalism.
Sarah Moss: Yes, but the wanting is also deliberately created.
Katherine May: Right, yeah.
Sarah Moss: It's not actually what we want, it's what we've been taught to want, or what we've been told is available, or what we've been manipulated into wanting. We have no idea what we might want without that.
Katherine May: And also this belief that a good life requires discipline, and that the discipline itself is the virtue, like we've replaced other virtues, a much kind of more [00:26:00] complex set of virtues, which were never less problematic. Yes. With this, this virtue of discipline, which applies to work, it applies, it applies to education, it applies to how we eat, it applies to how we exit, like it encompasses everything.
Sarah Moss: And it's also culturally specific and imperial. I mean, that's the logic of empire and striving and social aspiration. It's not the only, it's not globally the only logic available. It's just the one that we're being fed and that we've learnt and our parents learnt and their parents learnt from infancy but there are other ways of thinking.
Katherine May: And one of the things that I, I really noticed was this sense of being a good girl and particularly a good high achieving academic girl and what we're taught in the process of that, which is self abnegation, uh, determination, which when you apply those things to dieting, that, that stuff that we've been trained to do [00:27:00] very specifically and praised for, it's like letting a bomb off in your brain, because actually I, I can, I can follow a set of instructions really well, even if they're really uncomfortable.
Katherine May: And guess what? It's really bad for me. Yeah.
Sarah Moss: The interesting thing is that mostly I can't. I'm not a natural rule follower at all, and I was not brought up to be. I mean, the ethos in my house growing up was very much that rules are for other people, and we defy them, and we do what we want, and you know, we're edgy and different, which has its own idiocies.
Sarah Moss: Um, but I sometimes think that, One of the, one of the ways anorexics get into trouble is by taking the dietary advice literally. I mean, it didn't cross my mind that you weren't actually supposed to do it, but clearly you're not actually supposed to do it, because the logic is that if you have to get it, if you follow this stuff for life and the idea is that you are permanently in energy deficit and permanently getting thinner.
Sarah Moss: Of course you're going to die. I mean, there has to come a point where you decide that you've had [00:28:00] enough, but that's never mentioned.
Katherine May: But I
Sarah Moss: have no trouble at all completely disregarding all kinds of other sets of rules. I mean, I'm not interested in beauty culture. I almost never wear makeup. I've never dyed my hair.
Sarah Moss: I very rarely do anything about body hair. I'm totally immune to a whole lot of this stuff, but somehow the bits around, I think it's around production and consumption. I think, you know, good girls consume minimally and produce maximally and that's also what good academics do.
Katherine May: Mmm, that's an interesting connection to make.
Katherine May: And, but I, I think we're really similar on that front. I consider myself to be an incredibly rebellious person and the word that always chased me around at school was defiant. Yeah. And yeah. And yet, like, that defiance in retrospect was so surface, actually. Oh yes. Because I wanted to please the world with making my body thin.
Katherine May: Um, and you know, I [00:29:00] never read women's magazines. I never subscribed to mainstream fashion. You know, I never admired that kind of night, you know, like early nineties pop star, which was that, you know, the very thin, but also sexy. No, I thought they
Sarah Moss: should have been doing their A Levels and writing their books and flouncing around like that.
Katherine May: None of it made any sense, but as you said before, I found it very easy to trot out the right lines about body image and weight and diet culture without ever applying it to my own body. Yes. And never, never, never truly feeling and integrating that sense that, that it genuinely wasn't right rather than it was.
Katherine May: It was a kind of political statement that I, I knew I ought to make.
Sarah Moss: Yes, you make the political statement and meanwhile you stay hungry.
Katherine May: So in your book, you conjure a wolf, um, who first of all, I thought, Oh no, the wolf is going to be terrible. But the wolf [00:30:00] is your, your savior and your protector and becomes another, another voice in this.
Katherine May: Tell me when the wolf emerged in real life and when the wolf came into your narrative.
Sarah Moss: Well, The Real Life Wolf came first, of course. Um, I was, you mean the story about running in Italy?
Katherine May: Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah Moss: I, I have an occasional gig as a travel writer, which I absolutely love. Which is nice, yeah. It's amazing, yes.
Sarah Moss: It's one of those things where you just sort of sit there, Blinking in gratitude and wondering how this could possibly have come to you. It's, it's glorious. And I had a commission to go write about an eco resorts in the mountains in Italy, which was lovely. Um, but I was, well, I still, I'm still a compulsive runner.
Sarah Moss: I have in no way addressed that one. Um, so I was getting up very early to run every morning and I knew that there were wolves in these mountains. And I talked to a wildlife guide who said, well, if you're ever going to see them, it's going to be very early in the morning or. Last thing [00:31:00] at night. Um, and I'm terrified of dogs.
Sarah Moss: So she, she wanted, she was quite concerned that if I saw a wolf, I would be terrified. And she kept saying it almost certainly won't hurt you and it will run away if it sees you. And I wasn't remotely worried about seeing a wolf. I'm not, I'm not scared. I'm no more scared than anybody else of actually scary animals.
Sarah Moss: It's just that to me, all dogs are wolves and I don't understand why other people can't see that. So it was, I wasn't scared of the wolf at all. And I was running. It was very early, I mean it was still really dark when I set off and I didn't have a head torch so it was all quite, I like that sort of running where it's very sensory, I mean if you can't really see you're absolutely feeling with your feet, um, and just as it got light I came over the over the side of the hill and there was a wolf on the horizon watching some cows behind a wolf proof fence in the field below.
Sarah Moss: Um, which was funny because I'd had a text conversation with my husband the other day when I was hiking there and I'd said I was staying firmly on the wolf side of the fence because I'm much more scared of cows than I am of wolves. [00:32:00]
Katherine May: That's rational, they kill many more people than wolves do every year.
Katherine May: Exactly,
Sarah Moss: yes. They're far too big, cows. Um, so that was where I saw the wolf and there was this lovely kind of bodily standoff where I didn't want it to run away so I stopped running because I knew if I got closer. I mean, I think of it as she, though of course I have absolutely no idea. I knew if I got closer she'd run away.
Sarah Moss: And she'd seen me and she was waiting to see if I was going to approach to see if she should run away. And there was just this moment of pause on this hillside in Italy with the sun coming up, where we were looking at each other and thinking about who was going to move first. Um, and it lasted, I mean, it can't really have been very long, and then she went.
Sarah Moss: Um, and I was absolutely delighted. I was just. So overwhelmed by having seen her and then thinking, don't anthropomorphise. This is just another animal going about its animal business in its animal world. You know, I don't get to turn her into Romulus and Remus or whatever it is. [00:33:00] She's not here. She was doing her thing, I was doing my thing.
Sarah Moss: We overlapped for a few seconds, that's all.
Katherine May: Um,
Sarah Moss: but it was a very good few seconds.
Katherine May: Oh, incredible. I, I remember having a really similar, not quite similar, because maybe not as a fiercer animal, but um, the first time I ever went on a writer's retreat, there's a, there's a writer's retreat in your book as well.
Katherine May: And I, I thought Similarly about my writer's retreat to the way that you did, which is kind of me, didn't, didn't love it actually. And I, I couldn't write, I just couldn't write on this writer's retreat. And I, I felt like, I felt that there was this kind of desperation in the air that I just couldn't write.
Katherine May: It wasn't conducive to creation. It felt competitive and yeah, again, there was like this sort of necessary, necessary discipline and suffering involved. Anyway, that's by the by. I went for a walk every day instead. And I got deep into the woods one day and I found myself face to face with a stag. And I felt like I'd gone.
Katherine May: I'd conjured [00:34:00] it almost, you know, it was like, if I put it in a film, in fact, a few weeks later, I watched the film The Queen, and she comes face to face with a stag in the same way, and it seemed cheesy then, and it seemed sort of almost cheesy to me. They are
Sarah Moss: cheesy experiences, particularly if you go for these kind of emblematic animals.
Sarah Moss: I mean, yeah, starling or something would be fine, but stag would also, you know, come off it, would never fly in fiction, I tell you.
Katherine May: Couldn't it be a rat? Exactly. And yeah, in memoir we get to say, no, no, no, there really was a wolf. But actually, it really, it felt really significant to me in that moment. And since actually, there was this meeting with kind of, we're going to go cheesy again, like wild majesty.
Katherine May: And there it was. I felt so, I know I'm going with it. I'm really, I'm just burrowing into it. Um, I came back feeling better, honestly.
Sarah Moss: That's because the natural world is sent to dry the tears of white women.
Katherine May: I mean, thank goodness for it because what would we do otherwise, honestly? [00:35:00] Um, but you're, but the wolf as a metaphor in your book that is, is this, is this fierce creature that comes to your aid and kind of counters the, the negative voice in your head.
Sarah Moss: Yes. Yeah, she's also quite complex and intergenerational because I had terrible nightmares as a child. Um, and my father used to come and when I screamed in the middle of the night, it was always him who came and he would sit with me and let me tell him these stories, which he later said ruined his own sleep because they were so awful.
Sarah Moss: Um, and he'd sit with me until I was calm. And He told me that he'd had nightmares about wolves under his bed as a child. I mean, this is all in the book. And he'd made friends with them, but we, we could both see that the things I was imagining were not friend material. But this idea of making friends with the, the [00:36:00] emblem of terror seemed important.
Sarah Moss: And given my ongoing terror of dogs, which of course I keep encountering because you can't live in Europe and not keep encountering, you know, I have to negotiate that fear every day and often several times a day. And I have not been able to make friends with this. I mean, I'm nearly 50 and nothing in this world will ever convince me that I want to go anywhere near a dog.
Katherine May: It's like me and spiders. I have to tell you, my dog is sleeping behind me at the moment. That's alright. I'm worried she's going to woof in
Sarah Moss: a bit or something. No, no, I mean, I, we, we have a Siamese cat and I have a couple of friends who don't want to be in the same room and I totally get it. I mean, I'm fond of the cat, but I also absolutely understand that irrational, deep animal fear.
Sarah Moss: Yeah, it's,
Katherine May: it's not, it's not, There's nothing that you can access about it that would make it rational or reasonable.
Sarah Moss: No, and people say she's very friendly and I think the disposition of your, you know, incarnate rage makes no difference to me. For me, it's incarnate rage and I don't want it near me. [00:37:00]
Katherine May: So that
Sarah Moss: was really where the wolf was coming from.
Sarah Moss: She's sort of the, the mirror or the ghost or the kind of uncanny double of the
Katherine May: dog. But she also, um, I think she represents kind of, uh, like rational hunger in some ways. She often urges you towards eating and says that that food is is good in a really kind of straightforward animal way that that if you're a mammal you eat when you're hungry.
Sarah Moss: Yes. Yes, and it's also coming from the Mae Swenson poem that gave me the origins of the title is also about the body as dog, body my house, my horse, my hound.
Katherine May: Gorgeous poem. It's
Sarah Moss: lovely. Yeah. And I mean, I still sometimes say that to myself, body my house, my horse, my hound. But for me then, well, neither the horse nor the hound are particularly welcome.
Katherine May: Yeah, that's fair enough. And then there's this kind of moment in Italy where you you make [00:38:00] cheese and you and you it sort of activates your connection with that. Yes with food and you you sort of call that moment the opposite of anorexia. Yeah.
Sarah Moss: Yeah, it was. It was a surprisingly peaceful moment. I wasn't finding it particularly easy being in Italy, but I do love to cook.
Sarah Moss: And a couple of people have said since the book came out, but that's so strange that you would have an eating disorder and love cooking. And I don't think it's at all strange or unusual. I think it's extremely common. Um, and I think it's about the intensity of the relationship with food. I suspect that those people whom I never believe who say that they really don't like food and they're not very interested in it and they only eat because they have to to stay alive, they're probably not big on eating disorders because if you were really neutral about it.
Katherine May: Yeah. You
Sarah Moss: wouldn't. I absolutely love food. I really love eating. I really like cooking. That's kind of, you know, that, that's part of this very intense relationship of pleasure and [00:39:00] denial and fear of appetite. I mean, if I didn't have a big appetite, I wouldn't be scared of it. So, yeah. And I also, I was always hungry.
Sarah Moss: I mean, some people with eating disorders Stop experiencing hunger. And that never happened to me. I was always very hungry. So the, I mean, the cheese is an example of it, but the processes of food have always been interesting and important to me and the cheesemaking was on a farm where they made cheese from the milk from their own cows.
Sarah Moss: This is lovely. So the cows were grazing on the hillside and the cheese was Cheese maker was in her dairy and it was, it was the original dairy in the farm. It was cold because it was made of big stones and it had high North facing windows. And I was a bit scared of the cows, but they were really the, you know, the, the, the.
Sarah Moss: the friendly end of cows and they were there cropping the grass and I could see them through the window where we were using their milk to make cheese and then we walked across the field and were [00:40:00] served some of the cheese and it was just the whole cycle I mean there was the grass and there were the cows and there was the milk and there was the cheese and there were we eating it and then not very much later in first draft there was I writing about it so it just seemed that that whole cycle from from grass to words was laid out in front of me that afternoon, the process by which, and of course this is not, this is not a vegan approach, um, but the process by, by which photosynthesis makes grass, makes cows, makes milk, makes people, makes thinking, makes writing, was just so neatly encapsulated for me there over a couple of hours.
Sarah Moss: In idyllic circumstances. I mean, of course, most cheese is not made like that. Um, and I do have vegan leanings for that reason. But it would have done as well with fruit or vegetables or, you know, the cows weren't necessary. But that process from [00:41:00] earth to words, through several bodies, just seemed so utterly sane and reasonable and necessary.
Katherine May: Yeah, just making food and eating it because it, because you're hungry and it tastes delicious. Yeah.
Sarah Moss: And then you can think and then you can write. And if you don't eat food when you're hungry, then you can't think and write.
Katherine May: That has, funnily enough, that's been one of the ways that I've staved off other assaults of this disease that, you know, I will carry for the rest of my life and you probably will too, that will always come back to me at various points, is to remind myself how stupid I am when I'm hungry.
Katherine May: Yes. Yeah. I work by my brain and I've got to have it. I've got to fuel it. Yeah, exactly. It's sometimes the thing that picks me up out of it, actually.
Sarah Moss: Yeah, me too. But then there are all these stupid podcasts by men saying that, Oh no, when they're hungry, they're much more focused. And actually, you know, fasting focuses the brain, which just makes me feel completely inadequate [00:42:00] because fasting doesn't focus my brain at all.
Sarah Moss: No.
Katherine May: And also it makes them say endlessly stupid, aggressive things. So I'm not sure if they're really giving me any evidence of that, but sure. Like, you carry on telling yourself that, my friends. And, you know, actually, they're doing a load of harm as they, as they do it. Yes. Um, which is, is, is really bad. not often picked out, unfortunately.
Katherine May: Did you, just to close really, I want to go back to this, this sense of craft in the book, because that's, that's what we deserve to have visible when we write things like this, not that we live through a life experience, which is unfortunately pretty ordinary these days. And, and which unfortunately, you know, we'll not stop after we've written books about it.
Katherine May: But did you feel narrative pressure to find a kind of neat conclusion or an uplift at the end? Because that can be really complex when you're writing memoirs. It
Sarah Moss: is, isn't it? Yeah. [00:43:00] Yeah, I probably did a bit. Um, but also I wanted the point of the book to be about, you know, thinking. And
Katherine May: yeah,
Sarah Moss: my therapist said to me, it's in the book quite early on, you can't think your way out of trouble.
Sarah Moss: And I thought, well, how the hell else are we going to do this? Thinking's what I've
Katherine May: got. That's what I do. No one taught me anything else though.
Sarah Moss: So that was what I really wanted. That kind of intellectual cognitive wrestling. And of course, you don't solve an eating disorder by thinking, but if you're a thinking person, you won't solve it without thinking.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Sarah Moss: And here is the thinking on the page. So it was that work of really recognizing the embodiment of writing that we were just talking about, that writing is a thing that you do with your body, thinking is a thing that you do with your body. Yeah. And like that, you know, with a background in, in writing.
Sarah Moss: romanticism and 18th, 19th century lit. I never really understood this idea that nature was [00:44:00] separate from humans because what is your body if not nature? And people talk about going out into nature and I think you don't have to go anywhere. You're not going to get away from nature, not till you're dead.
Sarah Moss: That's, that's where we are. That's what
Katherine May: we are. Unfortunately, we're pretty natural, which, um, we find it very hard to accept.
Sarah Moss: Yes. So then what is it like to write? with and through and of nature. Not, not to, not to go for this Cartesian kind of, I wander out into the landscape and then I come back to my study and write about it.
Sarah Moss: But to recognize The lone
Katherine May: enraptured male. Exactly, yes.
Sarah Moss: But to recognize that the thing doing the writing is, is natural, is nature, is, is physical.
Katherine May: Yeah. And I think, um, what you do in the book so beautifully is you, you kind of externalise this thought process that's going on which draws on like every book that you read as a child, probably not, but every major book that you read as a child and your relationship to them.
Katherine May: on the [00:45:00] intellectual tradition that you fall into as an adult, like all of that is crucial to the way that you think about it. And it can manifest as your madness when you're in a phase of madness and it can manifest as your sanity when you're in a phase of sanity.
Sarah Moss: Exactly. Yeah. Books make bodies and bodies make books.
Katherine May: And podcasts make bodies too, unfortunately.
Sarah Moss: Yep. But we'll make safe, healthy, happy bodies.
Katherine May: Yeah, yeah, it's a mission. Sarah, thank you so much. It's been amazing to talk to you and I hope everyone will read the book because I, for me, it was, it felt the closest that I've ever read to my experience of, of being in that, that mind state that happens when you, when you stop eating.
Katherine May: So
Sarah Moss: Thank you very much.
Katherine May: Hey, welcome back. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that. [00:46:00] I thought it was a wonderful conversation personally and I really enjoyed it, but I also was really grateful to talk about those issues that have affected me so deeply and to think about how we should begin to frame these in our own mind.
Katherine May: I wish I'd been able to listen to that conversation years ago, but there we go. Anyway, take lots of care and I think we'll be back. Relatively soon.
Show Notes
Recently, Katherine 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?
Links from the episode:
Sarah Moss' book, My Good Bright Wolf
Katherine's book, Enchantment, is available now: US/CAN and UK
To keep up to date with How We Live Now, follow Katherine on Instagram and Substack
———
Enchantment - Available Now
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
