A haunting exploration of a life shaped by literature and anorexia, The Fell author Sarah Moss’s memoir is told in the second person, as if the present-day Moss is directly addressing her past self. During her 1970s childhood, when every adult woman she knows is on a diet, Moss absorbs the message that she must be smart but quiet and amenable; she must be pretty and sylph-like but should never appear vain.
Threaded through the narrative are the books of her formative years, by Arthur Ransome, Louisa May Alcott, Sylvia Plath and the Brontës, in which Moss is alert to depictions of women and femininity (her reading was done in secret, since her parents regarded it as a sign of indolence). Moss begins to see her body as a battleground, something over which she must exert control and power. This leads her to obsessively count calories, decline cake at birthday parties (for which she is often congratulated) and, eventually, stop eating altogether.
The Scottish actor Morven Christie is the narrator: her reading is measured and reflective, drawing out the forlorn beauty of Moss’s prose. She also inhabits the brutality of the author’s inner voices, which berate her when they suspect her of disingenuousness or self-pity and hiss at her: “Shut up, no one cares.” An eventual diagnosis of anorexia is followed by the prescribed treatment: an instruction to eat more and drink four glasses of milk a day. Little wonder Moss’s illness follows her into adulthood, coming to a head during the pandemic where she becomes severely malnourished and a doctor warns her: “If we do not feed you now, you will die.”
• Available via Picador, 8hr 28min
Further listening
A Death in the Parish
The Rev Richard Coles, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 8hr 25min
The kindly sleuth Canon Daniel Clement investigates another murder in the not-so-sleepy village of Champton. Read by the author.
A Woman Like Me
Diane Abbott, Penguin Audio, 13hr 27min
Westminster’s mother of the House reads her memoir charting her path to becoming Britain’s first Black female MP, and the personal and political struggles that followed.
