Review: Sorrow & Bliss, Meg Mason

The ultimate example of why you should never turn your nose up at the best-sellers list. I am SO glad I picked this up on a whim after looking for some holiday reads. My instinct told me this would be a rewarding experience; heavy but somehow cathartic. Don't you just love it when your instincts are right? This book will resonate with many people for so many individual reasons. It is the story of Martha: a woman with some unnamed but crippling mental health condition which leaves her bed-ridden with chronic depression for unpredictable lengths of time; sometimes days, though it can span to weeks and, when it first hit and she was young, months. She is constantly at variance with an uncaring world. Most are perplexed by her, though none more than she. The few who she really vibes with tend to be equally outcast and misunderstood. Her parents are hippie Londoners: her dad a slightly detached poet who loves reciting passages to her, and giving her writing challenges; her mum a sculptor who regularly drinks herself to oblivion and seems to care only for herself. And then there's Patrick. The novel begins with a breakup between Patrick and Martha after her 40th birthday party, then takes us back in time to show how they first met as teenagers and Martha's journey of pain and discovery, sorrow and bliss. This is not for the faint of heart: Meg Mason captures the feeling of doom which floods Martha's head throughout with quiet brilliance. Her disjointed style of prose, made up of punchy little sentences and stark images, beautifully illustrate a fractured mind. The first half shows a young woman doing what she is told, graduating from university despite studying from home, then marrying young and trying to please her nauseating egotist of a first husband before soon divorcing as soon as he catches a glimpse of the real her. Martha makes clearly impulsive and bad decisions, but in describing everything from her point of view Mason does not condemn, and doesn't even judge. There is an older, wiser voice reverberating from out of the pages of this wonderful book which asks the reader to consider always the bigger picture: life is messy, and nothing ever goes quite according to any plan. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It's only the ratios that change. usually on their own.” There were several moments in reading this book when I stopped and just cried, not because it's punishingly sad but because it's so honest. The way Martha's relationship to her mother evolves over the course of her life, particularly when things get hard, is testament to what a great writer Mason is. She has you gripped by raw emotional truths. Martha's complete and uninhibited destruction of self and marriage to Patrick is something I think many will relate to: the inability to show love or to receive it. In the interests of keeping this review spoiler-free I won't divulge the ending, only to say it is quite unconventional. On a personal note: having suffered from depression in the past, the main takeaway personally was the mature, empathetic view on mental health; a much needed approach in a culture which has come to venerate victimhood. Late in the story, Martha's mum writes her a letter where she explains that she will one day be a great writer not in spite of her condition, but because of it. Because, as Mason writes, she has been "...refined by fire." What an empowering view.