March 1, 2022
Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason
Meg Mason’s novel Sorrow and Bliss is as wide ranging as its title suggests, ostensibly the story of one woman’s experience over decades with an unspecified mental illness, which is to say that it’s also a novel about family, relationships, work, intergenerational trauma, growing, learning, falling, stopping. It’s about mothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, one particularly loathsome ex-husband, and pregnancy and motherhood, and medicine, and mental health, and about Martha’s marriage, to Patrick who has loved her since she was 14, a solid home that Martha has finally managed to burn down.
I loved this book, even though it was also a series of gut punches, so terrifically heartbreaking, but also wondrously funny, and Martha’s point of view is why we stick around as readers, and why those who love her have persisted for so long, so matter her propensity to be difficult. Except that point of view is so fixed that Martha can’t really see how others see her, and isn’t very perceptive of their situations either, in particularly her husband whom she’s never properly regarded as a fully developed character, but instead just another player in the drama of Martha’s life.
This is a novel that channels Woolf, and Didion, and Where’d You Go Bernadette?, but also manages to be itself in the most refreshingly original way. So breezy (this is Martha’s charm, see) that the reader can almost forget the emotional stakes of it all, which is so much, and therein lies the novel’s power.
