After all, she knew she could do it: there on her shelves were her memoir of having children in her 20s, Say It Again in a Nice Voice, and her 2017 novel You Be Mother. The name itself is not important, Mason is arguing what’s important is that Martha’s ability to know herself, and see herself for who she really is, has been compromised by false information and advice from doctors, by loved ones who have turned the other way, and by her own fear of what besets her.W hen Meg Mason took herself off to her shed to write her third book, a certain pragmatic confidence accompanied her. There’s something wonderfully liberating about this, for the way in which it avoids the medicalisation that Martha has suffered her entire life, while still allowing her the clarity and understanding (and anger) that the diagnosis brings her. Mason never names Martha’s illness, and even chooses, once Martha receives a diagnosis, to refer to it simply as ‘-’. Because of this, Martha tells all of her lovers – including Patrick – that she doesn’t want children, even convincing herself that this is true, despite her adoration for them. Even when Martha is well, she fears the recurrence of her illness and, more importantly, she lives with something a doctor told her in her teenage years: that falling pregnant while on her medication would not be safe for a developing baby. Patrick is sweet-natured, self-effacing, shy and very much drawn in by Martha’s self-possession and fierce intelligence.īy what’s really at the heart of the novel is the illness that has been with Martha since her childhood: a cyclical, crushing depression that has left her, at times, unable to do anything but lie in small, dark spaces (“like a small animal that instinctively knows it’s dying”) for weeks or months at a time.

Patrick has indeed been in Martha’s life for as long as an old sofa – first coming to her family’s Christmas lunch when he was 13, accompanying a cousin from the boarding school they both attended because Patrick’s absent father has forgotten to book him a flight home.įrom this beginning, he very much becomes a part of Martha’s extended family, taken under the wing of her wealthy and exacting aunt Winsome, who hosts these Christmas lunches each year in her central London home. Sorrow and Bliss – Meg Mason’s debut novel – is narrated in the aftermath of Martha and Patrick’s separation, when Martha is thinking back over her life and trying to understand it, and herself.

The sorrow and the bliss