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

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The reason I’ve given it a harsh 3 stars is that I’m furious that useless piece of shit Stu ended up with a lovely family despite essentially abandoning Abi to raise their child on her own because it was all a bit overwhelming for him. Guess what, Stu, getting pregnant was overwhelming for her too, but she had to become a mother immediately because she had no other choice; she didn’t get to delay parenthood until she felt ready. (Hmm, wonder why this is a sore spot for me?) Meg Mason writes about the slow bleed of life-long depression with candour, humour and stark precision. SORROW AND BLISS is about what happens when your illness pushes everyone away - leaving you with only the sorest parts of yourself for company. It will, as the title suggests, shatter your heart, before mending it with infinite love. I've never read anything like it and will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know.” PANDORA SYKES 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”.

Mason says she has a complicated relationship with Say It Again in a Nice Voice, the memoir she published in 2012: “They say, never drive angry. I think never write angry is probably a good life lesson as well.” She had moved from New Zealand to Australia at 16, and on to London at 22, where she stayed until the birth of her first child. She and her husband now live in Sydney with their two daughters, now teenagers. For years after her memoir came out, she had to parry questions about her family life, and particularly whether or not she had regretted having children young. I ask whether she feels prepared for people to ask how much her own life is reflected in Sorrow and Bliss? Imagine the warmth of Monica McInerney, the excruciating awkwardness of Offspring and the wit of Liane Moriarty, all rolled into one delightful, warm, funny and totally endearing novel about families - the ones we have, and the ones we want - and the stories we tell ourselves about them. A truly comic novel about love and the despair of depression. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when an author can break your heart with humour; it’s also the quality I admire most in a writer.” THE NEW YORK TIMESIt] 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 Sharp yet humane, andjaw-droppingly funny, this isthe kind of novel you will want to press into the hands of everyone you know. Mason has an extraordinary talent for dialogue and character, and her understanding of how much poignancy a reader can take is profound.A masterclasson family,damage and the bonds of love:as soon as I finishedit, Istarted again.” JESSIE BURTON, author of THE MINIATURIST

It is 10.37pm. I’ve been sitting at my desk for, let’s see, coming on four hours since the dinner dishes were washed and put away, the laundry folded and the children encouraged up to their bedrooms. A full day’s work of the paid kind has been done. This is the night shift. You know that book that only comes along every so often, that seems to unite everyone who has read it in a sort of delirious fervour? SORROW AND BLISS is that book. It’s utterly compelling and darkly funny: the book you have to read this summer.” EVENING STANDARD 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” BOOKTOPIAThere was a lot I liked about this book (although it didn’t compare to her spectacular follow-up, Sorrow and Bliss, which is in a whole different league). 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. 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”. If, when I first sat down to it, I made the mistake of reading over what I wrote last shift, I’m worn out already by the job of quieting the voice that says “Look how horrible it is! You thought it was good yesterday, but all those clunky metaphors, the mangled phrases! Give up! Give up, you are awful.” This is a story of mental illness reflected through the prism of an uproarious, big-hearted family comedy. It is fiercely intelligent and absolutely sublime. Like Julian Barnes, sublime.” THE IRISH INDEPENDENT