Not her sister, who is the love of her life, nor her husband (the second one, the good one), who has loved her his whole life. Martha Friel, the protagonist of Sorrow and Bliss, has been fundamentally blocked from empathising with the private world of another person. Insight and perspective are skills we all have hopefully developed enough that we aren’t so completely and utterly solipsistic as to imagine that our inner life is exactly the same as everyone else’s, or that other people don’t really have an inner life. The perspectives of whomever else was present is only available to you if you have the capacity to show curiosity.
Your recollection of that Christmas, that dinner, that fight, that week, all those recollections are only your side of the story. Meg Mason writes a first-person unreliable narration the way you live a first-person unreliable life, in snippets and stories that make perfect contextual sense at the time but are missing some vital information. It’s a book to read on holiday – not a beach holiday in the summertime, bare legs and mimosas but a winter holiday at a wood-panelled AirBnB in Taupō, lying on a leather sectional under a sculpture made of old gardening implements. Sorrow and Bliss is a book so easy to read and become absorbed in that you’ll probably finish it in a day, unless like me you desperately don’t want it to end so you eke it out to the last syllable of recorded time and now you have to write about it but you just want to keep reading it. Meg Mason and her second, brilliant, novel (Photo: Grant Sparkes-Carroll) It was my dearest wish to be a consumptive child, lying in a hospital bed, because if you’re in hospital everybody has to be nice to you and no one makes you clean your bedroom. I also love to read books about sickly yet beautiful women, brilliant underneath their frailties, the favourite person of all those who try to love them. I love to read stories about mental illness, unhappiness, loneliness, desolation. You will survive the next 200 pages because you know somewhere in your subconscious that she will survive with you. There is hope for Esther, if not for Sylvia. On the first page of Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, the protagonist Esther Greenfield leaves the reader a small breadcrumb, in the shape of a plastic starfish, to let them know that she makes it out alive. Books about depression should carry the content note: “This book is about multiple complex mental illnesses but no one commits suicide.” I’d pick up a book that had that on the cover.
Trigger warning: loneliness, isolation, depression, anxiety, middle-class urban malaise.
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