Meg Mason’s moving
and funny novel about a
crumbling marriage
became last summer’s
must-read book. As it
comes out in paperback,
she talks to Pandora Sykes
about being the next big
thing – and discovering
that Harry Styles is a fan
It felt like it was everywhere last summer. On every train
I took, and from every sunlounger I sank on to, I’d spy the
distinctive teal book jacket and sunshine yellow page
edges of Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason’s novel about
Martha and Patrick Friel, a couple on the brink of collapse.
“An observer to my marriage would think I have made no
effort to be a good or better wife,” Martha says, heartbreak-
ingly, early in the book. “They could not tell that for most
of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been trying to
become the opposite of myself.” It is a cliché to call a book
“witty and tender” — worse still “funny and sad” — but as
the title suggests, Sorrow and Bliss is exactly that. An
instant bestseller, it is now being adapted for screen by the
production company behind Gone Girl and The Revenant
and has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Speaking to me via Zoom from her writing shed in
Sydney — not a Soho House-style writing caravan, she
stresses, but “a literal hutch” — Mason, 44, a former
journalist who has written for Vogue, The New Yorker andSorrow, bliss and
a runaway success
Photograph Grant Sparkes-Carroll20 • The Sunday Times Style