de Meg Mason
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction!
"Brilliantly faceted and extremely funny. . . . While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know." — Ann Patchett
The internationally bestselling sensation, a compulsively readable novel—spiky, sharp, intriguingly dark, and tender—that Emma Straub has named one of her favorite books of the year
Martha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick—the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever wanted her to be happy—has just moved out.
Because there's something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen, a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. But countless doctors, endless therapy, every kind of drug later, she still doesn't know what's wrong, why she spends days unable to get out of bed or alienates both strangers and her loved ones with casually cruel remarks.
And she has nowhere to go except her childhood home: a bohemian (dilapidated) townhouse in a romantic (rundown) part of London—to live with her mother, a minorly important sculptor (and major drinker) and her father, a famous poet (though unpublished) and try to survive without the devoted, potty-mouthed sister who made all the chaos bearable back then, and is now too busy or too fed up to deal with her.
But maybe, by starting over, Martha will get to write a better ending for herself—and she'll find out that she's not quite finished after all.
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction!
"Brilliantly faceted and extremely funny. . . . While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know." — Ann Patchett
The internationally bestselling sensation, a compulsively readable novel—spiky, sharp, intriguingly dark, and tender—that Emma Straub has named one of her favorite books of the year
Martha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick—the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever wanted her to be happy—has just moved out.
Because there's something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen, a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. But countless doctors, endless therapy, every kind of drug later, she still doesn't know what's wrong, why she spends days unable to get out of bed or alienates both strangers and her loved ones with casually cruel remarks.
And she has nowhere to go except her childhood home: a bohemian (dilapidated) townhouse in a romantic (rundown) part of London—to live with her mother, a minorly important sculptor (and major drinker) and her father, a famous poet (though unpublished) and try to survive without the devoted, potty-mouthed sister who made all the chaos bearable back then, and is now too busy or too fed up to deal with her.
But maybe, by starting over, Martha will get to write a better ending for herself—and she'll find out that she's not quite finished after all.
Critiques-
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Starred review from December 21, 2020
English writer Mason excels in her heartbreaking U.S. debut, an account of a woman’s self-discovery amid her struggle with mental illness. Martha Russell was raised by volatile artists and as a teenager began to be affected by debilitating bouts of depression, for which she’s prescribed an antidepressant. Told by a physician that it would be disastrous to get pregnant while on her medication, Martha spends the her adulthood telling her romantic partners—and trying to convince herself—that she doesn’t want to be a mother. Martha’s mental health (“Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed,” she narrates) ends her first marriage and jeopardizes the second, to longtime family friend Patrick. After Martha is finally prescribed an effective medication, she’s able to see her family relationships in new light—but is it too late to repair them? Martha’s anecdotes, simultaneously funny and sad, are stacked with observations that alternate between brutally cutting—especially when directed at her mother and at the patient and supportive Patrick—and aching, as when her oblique descriptions of her sister’s growing family increasingly belie her true feelings about motherhood. Witty and stark, Martha’s emotionally affecting story will delight fans of Sally Rooney. -
January 1, 2021
Martha hasn't had an easy time with love, or with much of anything, really: a nebulous career, a failed "starter" marriage, and a long history of depressive moods that seem to be getting worse instead of better. Now in a second marriage, to Patrick, a friend of her cousin's that had orbited Martha's life since she was a teenager, she's convinced that with her husband's support, she can make it through her darkest days. Until those days become weeks, causing her to lash out and create a rift in her marriage she's certain can't be fixed. Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt. Much like the narrator of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Martha's voice is acerbic, witty, and raw. Sydney-based author Mason (You Be Mother, 2017) plots Martha's story in a nonlinear fashion, largely working backwards to highlight the highest and lowest points of her life. By refraining from naming Martha's ultimate diagnosis, referring to it only as "--", Mason trusts the reader to imagine the full weight of it. Fans of Marian Keyes should put this on their to-read lists.COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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June 24, 2020
Martha is sick. She’s been sick since she was 17 years old, and a cocktail of pills in varying doses has never made a difference to the lows that leave her bedridden for weeks. Her husband, Patrick, has loved her since he was 14. Martha is not a good wife, but Patrick is devoted to her nonetheless. But by the time Martha finally finds out what’s wrong with her, it’s no use. Patrick has gone. Sorrow and Bliss, from Sydney-based writer and journalist Meg Mason, charts the course of their relationship from two awkward teenagers hiding out from family Christmas in London to two adults trying to make it work in the cul-de-sac from hell in Oxford. This is a romance, true, but a real one. It’s modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness, with all its highs, lows, humour and misery. Comparisons to Sally Rooney will be made, but Mason’s writing is less self-conscious than Rooney’s, and perhaps more mature. Her character work is outstanding, and poignant—the hairline fractures, contradictions and nuances of the middle-class family dynamic are painstakingly rendered with moving familiarity and black humour, resulting in a combination as devastating and sharply witty as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Georgia Brough is a writer based in Melbourne. -
Ann Patchett
"Sorrow and Bliss is a brilliantly faceted and extremely funny book about depression that engulfed me in the way I'm always hoping to be engulfed by novels. While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know." — Ann Patchett
"Completely brilliant, I loved it. I think every girl and woman should read it." — Gillian Anderson
"An incredibly funny and devastating debut. . . . enlivened, often, by a madcap energy. Yet it still manages to be sensitive and heartfelt, and to offer a nuanced portrayal of what it means to try to make amends and change, even when that involves 'start[ing] again from nothing.'" — The Guardian
"Mason excels in her heartbreaking U.S. debut, an account of a woman's self-discovery amid her struggle with mental illness. . . . Witty and stark, Martha's emotionally affecting story will delight fans of Sally Rooney." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt . . . Martha's voice is acerbic, witty, and raw." — Booklist (starred review)
"Meg Mason's unflagging comic impulses drive this novel about the havoc a woman's mental illness wreaks on her marriage." — Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"Brutal, tender, funny, this novel—a portrait of love in all of its many incarnations—came alive for me from the very first page. I saw myself here. I saw the people I love. I am changed by this book." — Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
"A truly comic novel about love and the despair of depression. It's a rare and beautiful thing when an author can break your heart with humor; it's also the quality I admire most in a writer." — Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company
"A quiet and achingly beautiful love story. . . . LOVED it. Masterfully written. And powerful." — Elin Hilderbrand
"Sorrow and Bliss is hilarious, haunting, and utterly captivating. Meg Mason has created a heroine as prickly as Bernadette in Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Her humor is as arch and wise as the best work of Joan Didion and Rachel Cusk, yet completely original. What a thrilling new voice!" — Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters
"Funny and tragic." — Jojo Moyes
"I really loved Meg Mason's SORROW AND BLISS, which is sometimes very sad and often very funny and ultimately hopeful." — Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over, via Twitter
"So dark, so funny, so true. You will see your sad, struggling, triumphant self in this deeply affecting novel. What a debut." — Laura Zigman, author of Separation Anxiety
"A gorgeous, heart-rending book." — Flynn Berry, New York Times bestselling author of Northern Spy
"SORROW AND BLISS is brilliant. A comic gem that will also break your heart." — Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me and Better Luck Next Time
"Evocative and hopeful." — Book Riot, "5 Contemporary Literary Fiction Books That Are Game-Changers"
"Sorrow and Bliss is a thing of beauty. Astute...
