Review: ‘Sorrow and Bliss’ by Meg Mason
Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets.
So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?
Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.
Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix - or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.
REVIEWED BY FREYA DAWSON (@FREYDAWREVIEWS)
Every once in a while, you are fortunate enough to read a book that changes you. In three hundred or so pages, it takes you on a journey that challenges and changes your way of thinking. For me, ‘Sorrow and Bliss’ is that book. Meg Mason’s writing has had such a profound, lasting effect on me that I feel implored to ask anyone and everyone to take the time to read this novel.
The ways in which this book explores the complex nuances of mental health are both delicate and astounding. As a reader, you experience such a complex relationship with Martha, both loving and disliking her in equal measure. Her narration is jarringly separate from her actions, she sees the illogicality of her decision-making and the subsequent impact on her husband and family, and yet, you are acutely aware that it is out of her hands - she is at the mercy of her illness. The reader is left to watch on as this ricochets through her life with devastating effect, however, the reason this book is such a stand out is that amongst the devastation, there is beauty. Pure, unadulterated beauty.
Meg Mason’s novel provides such a real, tangible insight into mental illness. She makes sense of the nonsensical, puts words to the indescribable. I was struck on such a personal level by the struggle that Patrick faces in trying to show love and patience, when it feels futile to try and comprehend the joys and heartbreaks of mental illness - the so aptly coined ‘sorrow’ and ‘bliss’.
And yet somehow, Meg Mason does just that. A true master at work.