Sarah Moss’s memoir, the story of how her upbringing developed in her a lifelong, destructive relationship to food, is full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom.
The author, an academic, is best known for her novels (most recently The Fell), in which she variously dissects the climate emergency and Britishness after Brexit. Here she continues to write with wit about humans’ relationship to the natural world. Unlike Moss, who was raised to climb mountains, her husband “had never experienced the need to scramble at the top of a stony or muddy summit for ideologically questionable reasons regrettably related to colonialism, imperialism and the need to look down on everything”, she teases.
