‘I didn’t know what to do next’: the story behind the book of the moment

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‘I didn’t know what to do next’: the story behind the book of the moment

By Melanie Kembrey

There was a time when Meg Mason visited the Art Gallery of NSW’s cafe so often the waiters assumed she worked at the institution and implored her to take advantage of the employee discount.

But enough time has passed from the long days Mason spent in the gallery’s research library writing her novel Sorrow and Bliss, that it’s a lingering ibis who seems most familiar with her when we meet for lunch in the cafe’s sunny courtyard.

Sorrow and Bliss author Meg Mason at the Art Gallery of NSW cafe.

Sorrow and Bliss author Meg Mason at the Art Gallery of NSW cafe.Credit: James Alcock

If you haven’t already been handed a dog-eared, tear-stained copy of Sorrow and Bliss, you’ve probably seen it on lists of best summer reads, or noticed its cover – a woman, head in hands, lying on a couch, in a billowy tangerine-coloured dress – on the staff recommendation shelves of bookstores, or read the rave reviews shared on social media.

When the chief executive of a publishing house recommended the novel to me last year, I passed it onto my mum, she gave it to her friend who passed it onto hers – and just like that my copy of Sorrow and Bliss was lost to the pass-the-parcel that publishers dream of for their books.

Sorrow and Bliss has been a sleeper hit, selling slowly and steadily. No huge splash when it was published in September but sales have now reached about 15,000 across all formats, a significant figure in Australian fiction particularly in comparison to Mason’s 2017 debut novel, You Be Mother, where the first print edition sold under 4000 copies.

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HarperCollins head of fiction publisher Catherine Milne talks about the “bookish women” who have helped drive the novel’s success - endorsements from Marieke Hardy, Emily Maguire, Caroline Overington, Anna Spargo-Ryan, Annabel Crabb - not to mention a blurb from American literary darling Ann Patchett about wanting to send the novel to everyone she knows.

And the momentum is gathering. There was a hotly contested auction for international rights for the novel, which was released in the US and Canada this month and will be published in the United Kingdom in June. There’s also a screen adaptation on the horizon after the production company behind 12 Years a Slave, Gone Girl and Bohemian Rhapsody bought the film and TV rights earlier this month. And awards season has kicked off with Sorrow and Bliss longlisted this week for the Australian Book Industry Association’s Literary Fiction Book of the Year award.

Part of the success of Sorrow and Bliss is the way it straddles the line between literary and commercial. It is readable yet recommendable; heart-rending but hilarious. Narrator Martha’s distinct world view is what sets the book apart: her blunt, wry and insightful assessments of herself, others and the world have drawn comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

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Roasted Cauliflower with Spinach and Lentil Salad from the Art Gallery of NSW cafe.

Roasted Cauliflower with Spinach and Lentil Salad from the Art Gallery of NSW cafe.Credit: James Alcock

Martha, a 40-something food writer who lives in England, was a teenager when she first “went upstairs and got into the space under [her] desk and sat still like a small animal that instinctively knows it’s dying”. The novel is about trying to carve a life and love - particularly with her doctor husband Patrick and her droll sister Ingrid - in, and in between, the spaces shaped by mental illness.

There are numerous doctors visits, psychologists and prescriptions; there’s the assumption that maybe Martha is simply too sensitive and difficult; and the entreaties that she ought to “just try”. But through it all Martha’s sardonic voice: describing Patrick as looking like he is “enduring a minor medical procedure without anaesthetic” the first time they have sex; communicating with her sister exclusively by texting pictures of Kate Moss drunk; deliberately failing an eye test because she felt so bad for her optometrist after he fell off a stool.

Meg Mason’s first attempt at Sorrow and Bliss caused her far more sorrow than bliss.

Meg Mason’s first attempt at Sorrow and Bliss caused her far more sorrow than bliss.Credit: James Alcock

And if the reading experience lives up to the name of the novel, so too did the writing of Sorrow and Bliss.

Mason, 43, has spent most of her working life as a freelance writer, a profession that makes itself evident during the course of our lunch as she moves aside a peace lily that sits on the table between us; shelters my recorder from background noise; opts for a photograph-friendly roast cauliflower, spinach and lentil salad and, every so often, edits her own quotes with a “that’s boring for your readers”. Mason’s got the journalist’s skill for lulling those around her into conversation, a natural charisma and charm but a cautiousness about the comments that slip out of her control.

Born in New Zealand, she moved to Australia with her parents, who worked in education and agriculture (there we are again, “not especially thrilling for readers”), when she was 16. She studied English and History at the University of Sydney, before moving to the United Kingdom with her husband in 2000, where she lived on the outskirts of London and worked as a journalist, before returning to Australia.

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After publishing a memoir about becoming a young mother, Say It Again In A Nice Voice, in 2012 and her first novel You Be Mother in 2017, Mason had a deal and a deadline for a second novel. She wrote it. She hated it. It featured vignettes of Martha and Patrick - whose relationship is at the heart of Sorrow and Bliss - on different Christmas Days during the course of their lives. In economics they call it the sunk-costs fallacy; Mason thought she was too far into the novel to stop.

She sent the finished manuscript to her publisher, Catherine Milne, who, according to Mason’s recollection, responded: “I’m sure there’s something in here that can be salvaged”.

“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.”

‘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.’

Publisher Catherine Milne

There’s no doubt about that last part. She wept. And then wept some more. Mason can confidently say she ruined Christmas 2018 for her husband, and their two daughters, aged 14 and 17. She thought her writing days were done. She avoided bookstores because she couldn’t endure looking at the new releases.

“I was just so depressed, and I didn’t know what to do next. Writing was all I’ve ever really wanted to do as a full-time thing, and then to discover that you can’t do it, that you’ve reached the end after not that long...” Mason says.

But with no expectation comes a form of liberation. Mason was hanging up laundry when the first scene of Sorrow and Bliss - Patrick and Martha encountering a woman awkwardly struggling to eat a canape in one mouthful at a wedding - came to her.

“I think the definition of a writer is someone who just can’t help themselves. As much as you want to quit, and you tell everyone you’re never doing it again, one day, you just need to write this one little thing down. That’s what I did, but it was never to be a novel, and it was never to see the light of day,” Mason says.

Verdura Salad Bowl with Vegan Roasted Pumpkin.

Verdura Salad Bowl with Vegan Roasted Pumpkin.Credit: James Alcock

“I think I wrote it for about six months before I showed it to my publisher and even let her know that I was doing it. I was just beavering away in secret, which I think is what the key was, because it was just this complete abandon. That’s why it’s turned out so differently to the other two, because I just put in everything that I wanted to put in,” Mason says.

This time round Mason banned the use of a thesaurus, something she found herself doing out of desperation while writing her other books. There was no need to be novelistic, she told herself, as what she was writing would never be a novel. Martha doesn’t slump, collapse or sink onto sofas, she sits down. The result is a pared-back style that packs an emotional punch because of what is left unsaid far more than what is said.

“I would’ve thought I’d have to convey it with lots of fancy, heavy, novelly language,” Mason says. “But it turns out, I guess, just by saying it, it seems to have made it more powerful. Because I think people hear it as more realistic, or they feel like it’s true. It’s hard to see how it works. And that was just no fun because it was so easy compared to what I was doing before.”

The Art Gallery of NSW provided not only a quiet space to write, but affirmation that although a solitary pursuit, the artist’s creative struggle is a shared one. Mason would take breaks from her desk (she won’t reveal precisely where it is as she says there are only three in the research library) to wander around the collections.

The receipt.

The receipt.Credit: Fairfax

“There must be so much collective struggle. Do you know what I mean? In all the paintings, and all the art that’s been created. I think it just made me feel better when I was looking at it, thinking, everybody who tries to make something is going to have an awful time of it, at some point.”

One of the features of the novel that will have book clubs reaching for more wine is Mason’s decision not to reveal Martha’s eventual diagnosis but to refer to it, obliquely, as two dashes. Mason had reasons: she was worried about naming a real condition and fictionalising some of the symptoms; she didn’t want her book to be shoe-horned as being based on a specific mental illness; and mainly she was concerned about misrepresenting others’ real-life experience.

“So in the end, it was no [naming of the] condition. And I think that means that people have been able to transfer whatever they think it is into that little space. And to me, again, the overall thing of the book is the not knowing. That’s what’s defined everything. It’s not the condition. It’s the sense that Martha didn’t know. And she knew, but she didn’t know what it was.”

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”.

“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”.

But for Mason, the novel would not have been a failure even if it hadn’t sold as well. She sees its writing as leading to her rehabilitation as a writer. Journalism has been put aside for the time being, and researchis underway for her next novel. When it comes to writing it, Mason’s plan is to get up early, before the sun rises, when it’s quiet and dark, in a bid to recapture that feeling of having her own little secret.

As we say goodbye, Mason lets out a sigh of relief. Writing a novel may be hard but at least she doesn’t have to do any more transcribing of lengthy interviews for the time being.

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