Sarah Moss
Author of Ghost Wall
About the Author
Sarah Moss is a lecturer in English at the University of Kent.
Works by Sarah Moss
Associated Works
These Our Monsters: The English Heritage Collection of Short Stories (2019) — Contributor — 19 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1975
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland, UK
- Places of residence
- Warwickshire, England, UK
Dublin, Ireland - Occupations
- Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Warwick
senior lecturer at the University of Kent from 2004 – 2009
Senior Lecturer in Literature and Place at Exeter University’s Cornwall Campus - Organizations
- University of Exeter
University of Reykjavik
University of Kent
University of Warwick - Short biography
- Sarah Moss was educated at Oxford University and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. She is the author of two novels; Cold Earth (Granta 2010), and Night Waking (Granta 2012), which was selected for the Fiction Uncovered Award in 2011, and the co-author of Chocolate: A Global History. She spent 2009-10 as a visiting lecturer at the University of Reykjavik, and wrote an account of her time there in Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland (Granta 2012).
Members
Reviews
Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland by Sarah Moss
Personal story of a short residence in Iceland. Plenty of detail about tiny cultural differences to UK (eg bad driving, no locking of doors, no charity shops or 2nd hand goods) plus some poetic descriptions of landscape. And sense of coooolld!
Food and books (Peter Rabbit, Swallows and Amazons, Little House, Little Women, Jane Eyre, The Bell Jar, the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women) are the focal points of Sarah Moss’s engrossing memoir.
Inventing
Starting (chronologically) in childhood and teenage memoir, which dwells on the didactic messages that her parents tried to inculcate in her.
The author rebelled against some of these approaches to life, but recognises that she accepted others without question until much later, as most children emulate their parents in some ways, and resist in others.
Moss also recalls herself becoming anorexic, which was from a mix of middle class parental expectations for slimming and parental neglect, which for me veers toward abuse.
Remembering
The second section moves to Moss’s near contemporary experience during the COVID pandemic of a recurrence of anorexia, which was extremely serious, near life threatening. This section is vivid, depressing in its description of medical care and occasionally hilarious.
No real mention of her husband or boys, which is distorting as there must have been. However Moss has chosen to concentrate on her narrow personal story at this point.
Thinking
Finally, a brief description of motherhood at 25 and the impossible (middle class) demands to be an ideal mother, with reference to Wollstonecraft. And further analysis of white feminist middle class ingrained thinking, which whilst not original, can be understood and appreciated by this older white middle class man.
Some of the quotes are delightfully appropriate to my own upbringing:
You know Greek myths from Romantic revisiting of them. Without Virginia Woolf's justification for the lack, you have the ghost of a classical education.… (more)
Inventing
Starting (chronologically) in childhood and teenage memoir, which dwells on the didactic messages that her parents tried to inculcate in her.
The author rebelled against some of these approaches to life, but recognises that she accepted others without question until much later, as most children emulate their parents in some ways, and resist in others.
Moss also recalls herself becoming anorexic, which was from a mix of middle class parental expectations for slimming and parental neglect, which for me veers toward abuse.
Remembering
The second section moves to Moss’s near contemporary experience during the COVID pandemic of a recurrence of anorexia, which was extremely serious, near life threatening. This section is vivid, depressing in its description of medical care and occasionally hilarious.
No real mention of her husband or boys, which is distorting as there must have been. However Moss has chosen to concentrate on her narrow personal story at this point.
Thinking
Finally, a brief description of motherhood at 25 and the impossible (middle class) demands to be an ideal mother, with reference to Wollstonecraft. And further analysis of white feminist middle class ingrained thinking, which whilst not original, can be understood and appreciated by this older white middle class man.
Some of the quotes are delightfully appropriate to my own upbringing:
You know Greek myths from Romantic revisiting of them. Without Virginia Woolf's justification for the lack, you have the ghost of a classical education.… (more)
I really like how Sarah Moss writes in this book, it reminds me a bit of Jon McGregor - the detail and interrelationships of everyday life. This is a very typical British/Scottish holiday - endless rain, cabin fever. The plot and climax is fairly incidental - its more about the interactions and build up.
Although it is a sequel to [b:Bodies of Light|20329476|Bodies of Light|Sarah Moss|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394318715l/20329476._SY75_.jpg|28179074], 'Signs for Lost Children' stands very well alone. It follows Alethea, now married and working as a doctor, and her husband Tom. Alethea's mother, the other protagonist of the previous book, barely appears. However she continues to haunt Alethea and thus the novel. Once her husband departs on a journey to Japan, the narrative splits to follow both halves of the married couple. This works extremely well, as the two sets of experiences are fascinating both in isolation and in contrast to one another. Alethea works with mentally ill women and has mental health struggles of her own, while Tom explores Japan and is transfixed by what he finds. The depiction of Alethea's anxiety and intrusive thoughts is very vivid and convincing, uncomfortably so in fact. She reflects upon madness in women and how it is treated in Victorian England, while struggling to find purpose amid the legacy of her mother's abusive strictness. Tom's adventures in Japan are pleasanter and more escapist to read, while also shedding light on cultural perceptions of sanity and inappropriate behaviour. His chapters are filled with wonderful visual and sensory details, as he keenly observes beautiful places and objects. After enjoying these wonderful parallel narratives, I was less pleased by the ending. Once they reunite, there is a distance and misunderstanding between Alethea and Tom. Rather than examining how this could be repaired, or whether the two have grown irrevocably apart, there is a brief epilogue which shows that they stay together and have a child. This didn't quite seem to do their relationship justice, given how sensitively characterised they each were as individuals while apart. It's unusual for me to comment that a novel could pay more attention to a marriage, rather than less! While it would inevitably shift the overall focus of the book to dwell further upon their reconciliation at the end, I did find the brevity of the epilogue unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, this is an involving, subtle, and beautifully written historical novel. On balance I preferred it to [b:Bodies of Light|20329476|Bodies of Light|Sarah Moss|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394318715l/20329476._SY75_.jpg|28179074].… (more)
Lists
Overdue Podcast (1)
Netgalley Reads (2)
Winter Books (1)
Library ebooks (1)
Ghosts (1)
Walls (1)
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 16
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 3,545
- Popularity
- #7,163
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 244
- ISBNs
- 142
- Languages
- 8
- Favorited
- 14