Chiefly, it allowed her to feel her way into the character of Martha who, we learn at the beginning of Sorrow and Bliss, has just turned 40 and just split up with Patrick, her husband of eight years. It was the going wrong, Mason explains to me via Zoom from Christchurch, New Zealand, where she’s visiting family for the first time since the start of the pandemic, that started her on the road to things going right. To adapt the well-worn anecdote of the waiter delivering champagne to George Best, where did it all go wrong? Her feeling at the end of that year was overwhelmingly one of failure, of not “being equal” to the thing that she most wanted to do.Īnd yet here she is, ready to tell me about Sorrow and Bliss, the novel that emerged from the wreckage the novel that has amassed “must read” pre-publication quotes from Gillian Anderson and Ann Patchett, whose protagonist, Martha, has been compared to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, and which looks set to be filmed by the company behind the Oscar winners Birdman and 12 Years a Slave. It probably still exists somewhere in Gmail, she says now, but “I couldn’t open it with a gun to my head”. And it wasn’t just that “untitled Christmas novel” wasn’t coming together as she’d hoped, it was that “it was dreadful, it was awful, and I knew it, and I didn’t stop”. It did not, not even when there were 85,000 words of it. If she sat there for a year, she figured, something “at least as good” as her previous work would emerge. The New Zealander, now 43, had built up a career in journalism in the UK and Australia, where she lives, writing for outlets such as the Times, Vogue and the New Yorker, and felt comfortable with discipline and deadlines. After all, she knew she could do it: there on her shelves were her memoir of having children in her 20s, Say It Again in a Nice Voice, and her 2017 novel You Be Mother. W hen Meg Mason took herself off to her shed to write her third book, a certain pragmatic confidence accompanied her.

Sorrow and bliss book