You Be Mother: The debut novel from the author of Sorrow and Bliss

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SORROW AND BLISS is a thing of beauty. Astute observations on marriage, motherhood, family, and mental illness are threaded through a story that is by turns devastating and restorative. Every sentence rings true. I will be telling everyone I love to read this book.” SARA COLLINS, author of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, to whose work this book will inevitably (but fairly) be compared, Meg Mason has an innate understanding of the comic power of sadness and how humour can be used to mask one’s reality….SORROW AND BLISS shines as a piece of fiction that makes explicit all the joys and afflictions of 21st-century life” BOOKTOPIA And maybe, maybe, it gets easier. Keep up the disciplines – the sitting, the making and guarding time, the stubborn refusal to quit – and the words will surely follow. With time, the writing voice get stronger than the voice that says stop. Whilst Stu finds it difficult to accept his fatherly responsibilities & quite frankly, acts like a total prat (easily aided by his doting mother, Elaine), Abi takes herself off to the local pool with her now born son, Jude. There she meets Phil, a widow whose adult children have all moved away. Together, they fill the holes in each other’s lives. Mason’s refusal to put a name to what ails Martha becomes a defining feature of the novel. Why did she do it? In the aftermath of her disastrous first start, she explains, she had started writing again with no expectations: “It was a post-hope project. It wasn’t for my publisher, I didn’t tell her I was doing it. And I was truly and utterly convinced that no one would ever see it.” She describes feeling “a bit drunk with it, because I didn’t care. It was like making this enormous meal from everything you have in the fridge, with no recipe, just throwing it all in. It just doesn’t matter. And it was the last hurrah.” At the time, she didn’t even conceive of it as a novel about mental health; that material, and the striking and turbulent relationship between Martha and her sister Ingrid entered, she says, almost “without conscious thought”.

This is one of the best novels about marriage that I have read, and that is a large field…This is also one of the best novels about mental illness I have read…I am adding it to my list of the best novels of 2020, alongside Andrew O’Hagan’s MAYFLIES, Sofie Laguna’s INFINITE SPLENDOURS and Douglas Stuart’s SHUGGIE BAIN, which won the Booker Prize.” THE AUSTRALIAN The story is told primarily in short, sharp chapters with names! (I love chapters that have names – these are titled from a quote from a character each time and can be quite funny). It’s definitely worth persevering through the early stages as the second half is wonderfully complex and dramatic with a pinch of fun. In Meg Mason’s almost eerily accomplished SORROW AND BLISS, the narrator Martha has suffered from mental illness since her teens. Yet, without ever playing down her pain, the result is often disconcertingly funny.” THE SPECTATOR We had a long champagne-fuelled come-to-jesus conversation where we said it’s not working,” Milne tells me before my lunch with Mason. “I said, you know it’s not good, it’s not working. I think you should put it away and give yourself a break and decide what you want to do, either junk it or start again from scratch. Meg just went away, went very quiet, and I think wept.” It] belongs to a lineage of intelligent, witty and inventive novels that interrogate the problem of whether selfhood can survive motherhood, including Jenny Offill’s DEPT. OF SPECULATION and Sheila Heti’s MOTHERHOOD.This all sounds incredibly bleak, but Martha’s sharpness is acerbically funny and compellingly direct and worthy of the frequent comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s FLEABAGand Ottessa Moshfegh’s works.” MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL

It’s interesting, I felt at half way the tone of the book changed and became a lot more serious. Exploring ideas of family, expectations and friendships, I loved how Abi grew in this book but my heart did ache for her at times, as she always tried to do her best for herself and Jude. I think, in terms of the mental health thing, all I would really say is that I think if you haven’t either been a carer for someone with mental health issues or experienced it at some point in your life, then you’re a bit of an anomaly,” Mason says. When Mason did eventually show Sorrow and Bliss version 2.0 to Milne it was with a caveat: “I don’t know if you can publish this one either”. Because we have to. We can’t-not. For all writers (paid or voluntary, there’s no distinction), the need to capture and observe and put down is so strong, it can only be put off for so long. Avoidance eventually becomes more painful than the pain of actually doing it. Mason is brilliant on family, its eye-rolling absurdities and its deep hurts. Martha’s drunken, bohemian mother is a sculptor who ignores her husband and her two daughters; when the girls were young, she would throw parties where she could be extraordinary in front of extraordinary strangers, because it was “not enough to be extraordinary to the three of us”. Her kind, self-effacing father is a failed poet “whose desire to help me had always exceeded his ability”. Rarely have the excoriating effects of mental illness been articulated quite so beautifully – as heartbreaking as it’s funny.” RED MAGAZINE

It is, she says, a work of imagination; she has not experienced the same issues as Martha. But she is adamant that she wanted to explore the territory, arguing that the estimates of the proportion of people impacted by mental illness – she mentions one in four – seem “ridiculously” low: “When I look around my group of friends and my family, I can’t see a person who hasn’t been touched by it in some way.” Mason pulls off something extraordinary in this huge-hearted novel, alchemising an unbearable anguish into something tender and hilarious and redemptive and wise, without ever undermining its gravity or diminishing its pain…It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud.” THE GUARDIAN Readers have shared their own experiences of mental illness with Mason since Sorrow and Bliss was published. She’s reluctant to discuss any personal experiences that contributed to her complex and nuanced representation of mental health and its effects on others, saying she even asked her publishers not to include her biography and author photo so the novel could “exist completely outside of me”. SORROW AND BLISS is a modern love story that’s funny and dark, sharp and tender, hopeful and hard to put down. It has a brooding Sally Rooney vibe (but explores a slightly older and more mature slice of life) with exceptional inner monologue and palpable chemistry among the characters.” GOOP

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Befriended by newly widowed next door neighbour Phyllida (or Phil, as she likes to be called), her days have some meaning. Especially when Stu has trouble coming to terms with being a responsible adult and a father. This story line is interspersed with Phil’s own children and their troubles. Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, SORROW AND BLISS is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt. Much like the narrator of ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE Martha's voice is acerbic, witty, and raw. Fans of Marian Keyes should put this on their to-read lists.” BOOKLIST