this very newspaper, is both thrilled and
baffled by the book’s success. “Because
I am so far away [from its success in the US
and UK], I haven’t seen a single thing with
my own eyes — I’m just this sad lady in her
shed in Australia who gets reports back
from people in the field,” she laughs. One
of her favourite stories from the field is that
Harry Styles is a fan.
The novel is a visceral exploration of the
decline of a marriage, but also of long-term
mental illness and its reverberations. After
“a bomb” goes off in Martha’s brain when
she is 17, the aftershocks are felt by her
family for decades. “You think all this has
happened to you and only you,” says her
mother grimly, “but this has happened to
all of us. Do you not see that?” When
Martha asks Ingrid, her younger sister,
who has propped her up since teenage-
hood, why she never asks anything of her,
Ingrid replies: “I love you, Martha, but you
can’t help me.” It’s one of the sweetest,
saddest lines in the book.
“I never sat down and thought, ‘I’m going to write a
mental health book,’” Mason muses. Rather she wanted to
write a specific type of love story — of a romance that has
been through the wringer. “Not about those Eiffel Tower
moments, but a love that turns to hatred.” What happens,
asks the novel, when you get to the other side of the
Cinderella story? It was only later, Mason says, that she
decided that the intractable rift in Martha and Patrick’s
marriage would be Martha’s mental illness. “Everything is
broken and messed up and completely fine,” her patient,
pragmatic doctor husband pleads. But Martha’s illness
makes her deeply cruel — and even Patrick, who has loved
her since she was a teenager, is driven away.
It is not a spoiler to say that at the end of the book,
Martha finally gets a diagnosis for her mental illness. But
Mason redacts it with a “--” written over the diagnosis.
“I think labels are really useful,” Mason says, and receiving
a diagnosis proves to be life-changing for Martha — to
know her condition is to be able to know herself. But
Mason doesn’t think that means the reader should get to
know it too. She acknowledges it might irritate some
people, but in choosing not to share Martha’s precise
condition Mason reminds us that women shouldn’t have
to name all their complications and flaws and troubles —
to put them all in a little box and tie it up with a bow. “If
I had named her condition she would be flattened into
that illness, she wouldn’t get to be someone else.” It is so
important, Mason says, that Martha isn’t just mentally
unwell — she is also clever, witty, beautiful. “There are so
many aspirational things about her,” she says emphatically.
Sorrow and Bliss has inevitably been compared to
Fleabag, which is flattering, Mason says, but doesn’t feel
entirely accurate. The book isn’t about millennial chaos
but rather, she has said previously, “a hardcore, over-40,
long-time-married lady book”. The novel was born out of
Mason’s own heartache of sorts, after the failure of a
project with the working title Untitled Christmas Novel,
which she sent to her publisher with a note that read
simply: “Please don’t read this.” She excavated Patrick and
Martha from the pyre — “I had to let go of the novel but I
couldn’t let go of them” — making them
the stars of Sorrow and Bliss.
Mason isn’t Martha, she says, almost
wearily (why are only women asked if they
are their protagonists, she wonders), but
she felt intimately acquainted with “the arc
of failure and the accretion of shame” that
Martha feels. “Where I was — and where
I put Martha — is in this place of ‘every-
thing has failed, I’ve failed’. I’d neglected
my family to write this book and it had
utterly failed.” Mason describes the
writing of Sorrow and Bliss as “a rehabilita-
tion” after Untitled Christmas Novel. “The
learning for me, at 41, was if you apply this
violent tenacity, there will be some reward
at the end. The reward wasn’t people
loving the book so much as me loving
writing again.”
Mason was born in New Zealand and
moved to Sydney aged 16 because of her
father’s job (he works in agritech, her
mother is a retired teacher). She moved to
London in her early twenties with her
husband, where she had her first daughter in 2003, before
moving back to Sydney, where she had her second
daughter in 2006, and the book, which is set in London
and Oxfordshire (where her older brother once lived and
where she slunk to after the failure of Untitled Christmas
Novel to recuperate), has a very British sense of humour.
“Two under f ***ing two,” Ingrid cries when she gets preg-
nant for a second time. “Three under f ***ing five,” Ingrid
howls when it happens again. “Everyone tells me Ingrid is
their favourite character,” Mason laughs.
Martha doesn’t have children, but through Ingrid
Mason has imbued the book with some of her own experi-
ences of early motherhood. (Her daughters are now 15 and
18 and act out scenes from Sorrow and Bliss on TikTok.)
She had her first child at 25, “about ten years before most
of my friends”, and describes herself as “on the fringes” of
motherhood. “I’ve never really understood the ‘bitching
at the school gates’ kind of motherhood that has been
ossified in fiction. I’ve only ever found mothers at the
school gates really nice,” she says. “I’m not really a ‘joiner’.
I like standing back and writing down the funny bits.”
Sorrow and Bliss is Mason’s third book. She says she
can’t even look at her 2012 memoir about motherhood (“I
said to my husband, ‘Was I really this awful ten years ago?’
And he said, ‘Everyone was awful ten years ago but not
many people have written evidence’”), but her 2017 novel,
You Be Mother — deadpan and bittersweet and distinctly
Mason — will be published in the UK next month. She’s
currently dabbling with a few different book ideas and has
“let go” of Sorrow and Bliss. “It doesn’t belong to me any
more. It’s for other people to decide what it’s about.” But
having spent a year with these characters, she says she
probably knows them better than anyone else ever will. So
when people call Martha selfish or cruel, she laughs. “I just
think, ‘Well, she probably wouldn’t like you either.’ ” ■Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason is published in paperback
by W&N on Thursday at £8.99. Pandora Sykes and
Meg Mason will be live in conversation at Amazing Grace,
London SE1, on Tuesday; pandorasbooks.co.ukHer daughters
are now 15
and 18 and act
out scenes
from the book
on TikTok
The Sunday Times Style • 21