Sorrow and Bliss

I actually ended up reading this in physical copy - as was lucky enough to receive from the publisher. This was a really special book . You know when a title absolutely nails it - this one certainly does. There is indeed much sorrow. At the heart of the novel is Martha, a woman with a slightly dysfunctional family, a troubled marriage and some major mental health issues. But there is also deep joy in the pages of this book - the relationship with her sister is perfectly portrayed. Her friendship with her old boss is perfect, and there is real humour and laughter throughout. Perfectly balanced sorrow and bliss.
I didn't want this to end. And there was a real learning for me in this book. It is not about how a story ends. It is not about a book ending. We shouldn't think of needing to rush to the end of a book to see how it ends as being the pinnacle of book reading. There doesn't have to be a wish to get to the end. This was the opposite - I never wanted it to end. And actually should that be book perfection - a story you do never want to end - because that way there is always hope, there is always life and love continuing.
I will be recommending this far and wide. Perfectly flawed characters who will stay with me a long long time.

Glorious. Martha Russell Friel sees herself as fundamentally unlikeable, but I couldn't put this book down. After winding up a forty-three day marriage to a cokehead art dealer, Martha now lives with her husband Patrick in an 'Executive Home' in an Oxford cul-de-sac, where she writes a funny food column for Waitrose magazine and does very little else. Martha keeps returning to the bohemian house she grew up in on Goldhawk Road, trying to unravel why her mind works differently to everyone else's and why it has been trying to kill her since her teens. A crisis around her fortieth birthday and finding a doctor who diagnoses her correctly helps Martha to pick up the threads of her life and move on. I loved Martha's family, particularly Patrick - who loves her from first meeting her as a teenager visiting for Christmas - and her sister Ingrid, incorrigible and usually pregnant, who communicates mainly in Drunk Kate Moss and Sad Will Ferrell memes. Despite the sorrowful subject matter, the reading is bliss.

My heart was broken by this beautiful book and I am bereft now i have finished it. I loved Martha, I loved Patrick, I love Winnie - I just wanted to stay with them all forever.
Meg Mason is an incredible writer who made her characters so alive I felt I could touch them. Five of the biggest glowing stars for this AMAZING debut.

It can be difficult to review a book like this without coming across as the absolute worst - using phrases like "it was so beautiful and so raw and so painful and exquisite and modern and undefinable and dark and bright all at once" but here we are. If fiction is the thing that lets us live in other peoples heads for a little while, then this is the best version of that. And, as someone who struggles with recurring and varied bouts of madness, I found so many things in these pages that perfectly articulated things previously indefinable.
In short, it is the story of a woman with mental health issues and the people who love her and her growing sabotage of that love. Not in short, it is an acute retelling of the internal sorrow and bliss of life using mental illness as a way to explore the way we treat ourselves and each other when we think we might be the best or worst person alive and actually, we're all just somewhere in the middle, extraordinarily ordinary and not at the same time, doing our best, whilst navigating our own internal universes and trying not to mess everything up.

This is an absolute stunner of a book. It's only just March and I know already that this will be high up in my top ten reads of 2021. It's dark and funny and beautifully written. I am obsessed by Martha and Ingrid and I'd like there to be a sequel or a prequel or Ingrid's story or anything to carry this on it was so good. It's incredibly well written and really reminded me of Fleabag in the absolute best way as I was reading it. Martha, the protagonist is complicated, difficult and at times disturbing but you find yourself rooting for her anyway. All the characters are beautifully drawn. I love that none of them feel like bit parts, wheeled on to make the plot work. Any one of them could have a book of their own. I love that the family dynamics were so real and relatable in so many ways. Just wonderful. I can't find enough good things to say about it to be honest.

I absolutely LOVED this book. Witty , heartbreaking and hopeful. The characters are so beautifully written that we are captivated from page one and drawn in to Martha’s world with all of its sorrow and bliss.
It’s the kind of book you just want everybody to read because it deserves the widest possible audience. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

This book has floored me. It is the story of Martha and the impact that her mental health has on her life, family relationships, career and marriage. It is witty, droll, honest, full of sharp observations and heartbreaking. I absolutely loved it and will be thinking about it for quite some time.

When rereading her diary she says “I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties. Patrick’s goodness. My striking unlikeability and attention-seeking punctuation.“ This sums up this book better than I could. I think anyone who loved Fleishman is in Trouble will also love this. I know already that this will be one of my favourite reads of 2021.

As I was reading this I kept asking myself how can a book essentially about mental and marital breakdown be so consistently funny. That said, it also moved me to tears on at least one occasion (no hyperbole). It takes a gamble by starting with the breakup then going back to Martha's childhood as she looks back on her life trying to understand how things reached this point – this structure is neatly encapsulated in the quotation from Ralph Ellison highlighted for her by her father, "The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead". There is a lovely surrounding cast beginning with her sister Ingrid (who believes in oversharing - never have I enjoyed quite so many mentions of mucus plugs in just a few paragraphs) and Martha's adorable mentor/friend Peregrine. The only character who didn't ring true (but maybe I've just been lucky enough never to meet any art brokers) was her narcissistic borderline sociopath first husband Jonathan.
The unrelenting bleakness of large swathes of the narrative is relieved both by Martha's scathing humour and by moving moments of tenderness - I'm thinking in particular of her interactions with her nephews, the scene in which she observes a woman breastfeeding in a café – "she would drop her face enough to kiss the baby's hand that had a tiny grip on the edge of her shirt" – but also the way in which her mother - whom I loathed for about three-quarters of the book then admired open-mouthed for the rest - steps up when Martha finally receives her diagnosis, supporting her with daily telephone calls. Very often we show our love through little gestures, meaningless to the casual observer, and this is something described on numerous occasions in the book (the sisters reaching for each other's hands under the table as their mother misbehaves at a dinner, Martha's aunt deliberately knocking over her glass of wine as her drunken mother is about to embark upon some embarrassing anecdote or the "entire Christmas lunch in miniature" prepared for Martha by her aunt). Like another reviewer, I felt echoes of Fleabag - in its emotional honesty, in the close yet conflicted relationship between the sisters, and much more. I especially loved Ingrid's rants about being unseen after having children ("Why can't it [hypothetical newspaper article about her getting hit by a car] say a human who incidentally has a baby was killed at a notorious intersection?"). It also has one of the most convincing bad sex scenes I've ever read followed by the perfect description of the feeling after good sex. The writing is extremely taut, Meg makes every word count as in this scene describing Patrick shaving off his beard, which he did "in humorous increments – Charles Darwin to suspected attacker via Mr Bennet, BBC adaptation". In fact, I wasn't surprised to read that she started out as a "writer of newspapers". After coming full circle, the book thankfully leaves us with a glimmer of hope: "how two people who have ruined each other's lives can be together again"

This debut blew me away! Meg Mason has produced a tender and delicate novel about female mental health and self sabotage, whilst also being about love and all it’s intricacies.
This novel is incredibly sharp, funny and captivating. A must read!

This book IS sorrow and bliss. It’s pathos and wit and humanity and joy and so much more. The writing is beautiful. Not a word is wasted or ill-chosen. The descriptions of mental illness are hard-hitting and vivid, and I the fact that the diagnosis is never revealed highlights the universality of mental struggles and the assumptions that arise from labels. A stunning book.

Some books are so good you count down the hours until you can go back to them and Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss is one of them. This is a novel about a woman's life with mental illness and how this impacts upon her relationships with her family and her own hopes and desires. Even though this is told in first-person, in a raw and sometimes devastating way, Martha's story doesn't feel bleak or depressing in itself and at times it's actually scattered with humour. I think the reason this novel is so successful is that her experience feels authentic. It doesn't make her illness cartoonish or cliche and the characters who colour her life are well-rounded and entertaining that spending time with Martha doesn't feel claustrophobic or draining. We learn very early on that her and Patrick's marriage is doomed but the structure of the book allows us to watch that relationship grow so that by the end of their relationship we're invested and emotionally frustrated to follow how their love has shattered. This novel has incredible characterisation and is one I'll be recommending to people who love books that explore one character, or one family, with depth and authenticity.

Thank you to NetGalley and W&N for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this wonderful novel. It chronicles one woman's struggle with her mental health from her teenage years through to the breakdown of her marriage many years later in a way I've not read before. It's beautifully written, at times completely heart-breaking but also genuinely funny. The dark humour absolutely makes this book and I will definitely seek out more of Meg Mason's writing on the strength of this alone. The relationship between Martha and her sister was perfectly done - tender, warm, irreverent all at the same time. The honesty and rawness of this book took me by surprise - it's totally brilliant.

Sensational! This is now one of my favourite books. It’s a fraught and moving novel about a woman with an improperly diagnosed mental illness, the complexities of her suffering, and the effects on her family and partner. The characters are so clever and well constructed, and I absolutely loved that this book was filled with romantic tropes (and it’s set in London, with a lot of references to Shepherd’s Bush, where I first lived when I moved there). 'Sorrow' and 'Bliss’ perfectly describes how I felt throughout the book, it was a rollercoaster of emotions. I particularly enjoyed the part when Patrick and Martha were courting each other, and Ingrid’s witty comments.

This was not at all what I expected when I read the blurb. I was expecting to read a book about a woman having martial issues and a possible mid-life crisis but it's so much more than that.

Sorrow and Bliss is a story about whip smart and sharp tongued Martha, dealing with her mental health and the impact it's had on her relationships but it is surprisingly funny, moving and heart-breaking - and sometimes all three on the same page.

I loved the story but what gripped me was Meg Mason's writing. The short and sharp paragraphs felt like standalone short stories, each telling you about a character, place in time or event in a way that was pitch perfect. There were paragraphs which were so funny I was laughing out loud and just a few sentences later I was a sobbing mess.

I finished it a few weeks ago and wanted to sit with it before writing a review but I thoroughly enjoyed it and can honestly say this is the best book I've read in a very long time. I can't stop thinking about it and wish I could read it all over again and I'm totally envious of anyone who has yet to read it.

I have visceral response to this book. I feel like the author wrote the most incredible book. It was funny and tragic and absolutely perfect. I adored it. I now need it to already come out in some sort of special hardback edition, it is a classic.

A beautiful, sensitive and even, on occasion funny look at the impact of her mental health issues on Martha. She is a likeable and relatable woman who struggles to understand why her life is so difficult. The large cast of characters are all so well written, and I loved how the author showed insights into all of their worlds, while concentrating on Martha.
I want to give a shout out to the portrayal of the sister relationships, both Martha and Ingrid’s and her Mother and aunt’s - absolutely spot on.
Don’t expect this to be a laugh a minute, it isn’t but the use of humour when it comes is perfectly timed and intelligent.
I wasn’t entirely sure about requesting this book to read and review on @Netgalley, but I am so glad that I did. It is going to stay with me and I intend to recommend it to the world.

I received an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review

How could a book be so honest yet funny yet gut wrenching at the same time? An amazing writerly feat – I devoured it while feeling all kinds of feelings while also ugly laughing on the train. I did not want to separate from this protagonist after the last page. A gem.

This was a gripping read of family, marriage and mental health. At times hilarious, at others distressing, and very insightful about the one sided nature of all relationships. Taking place in West London and Oxford, I enjoyed plotting Martha’s journeys in my mind, and was gripped to find out the fates of Martha, Patrick and Ingrid. Recommended.