Picador acquires new memoir from Moss

Picador has acquired My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss, author of nine novels including Summer Water and Ghost Wall (Picador).

Sophie Jonathan, publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth print, digital and audio rights from Anna Webber at United Agents. Jenna Johnson, editor in chief at FSG, bought North American rights from Jennifer Carlson at the Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

Picador will publish My Good Bright Wolf in August 2024, with a cover reveal to follow soon. FSG will publish in October 2024.

My Good Bright Wolf is described as “a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood".

The publisher added: “Sarah confronts all of this in a book that pushes at the boundaries of memoir writing. Opening in the second person, it narrates contested memories of girlhood at the hands of embattled, distracted parents, loving grandparents, and teachers who said she would never learn to read.

“By the time she was a teenager, Sarah had developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, and that illness returned in her adult life. Now the mother and teacher of young adults, in My Good Bright Wolf, she explores a childhood caught in the trap of her parents’ post-war puritanism and second-wave feminism, she interrogates what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did – and still does – with her hard-working body and her furiously turning mind."

Jonathan said: “My Good Bright Wolf is a stunning work of art. The boldness and courage of this book is truly awe-inspiring, and as dark and shocking as much of it is, you cannot help but be thrilled by the experience of reading it. Sarah’s writing is beautiful, audacious, moving and so very funny. This memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself, and then offers a way out, because most of all My Good Bright Wolf is an experiment in and celebration of what a creative brain can do.

“Here is a writer at the peak of her powers, writing her way out of trouble and paying homage to the other authors who have – over the years – provided her relief and companionship and empathy. I’m certain this book will do the same for many others.”

Moss said: “In Summerwater and The Fell, I was experimenting with the choral possibilities of narrative prose. My Good Bright Wolf explores a multiplicity of voices in the same mind at the same time, playing in the borderland between fiction and contested memory. Working in the light of women’s writing about madness and incarceration, I’m interested in relationships between the body, the institution and the state, in the writing of care and in the care of writing.”