![]() ![]() Her intelligence is vividly rendered in her observations. At the centre of this bricolage is a difficult relationship with her ‘minorly important’ sculptor mother, Celia, a fierce closeness with her sister, Ingrid, and a tested bond with her husband, Patrick. Moving between London and Oxford, Martha – in first-person and with genuine hilarity – narrates a combination of well-paced scenes and vignettes that have led to the present events in her early forties. The novel solidifies Mason’s thematic preoccupations by revisiting those of her previous works: as in her memoir Say It Again in a Nice Voice (2012) and her first novel, You Be Mother (2017), the power of female relationships, loneliness, and the bleak humour of motherhood are apparent.Īt seventeen, ‘a little bomb went off’ in Martha’s brain, and for two decades no one has been quite being able to tell her what is wrong. In Meg Mason’s tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, Martha navigates living with an undiagnosed mental illness. For a protagonist that is self-professedly unlikeable, Martha commands attention – and is likeable. ![]()
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