Bio:
Celebrated as a bold new voice in Australian literature, Meg Mason is a Sydney based author, journalist who has written for The Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, GQ, Vogue, ELLE, Marie Claire and The New Yorker. Her first book, a memoir of motherhood, Say it Again in a Nice Voice was published in 2012. Her second book, a novel, You Be Mother was published in 2017. Sorrow and Bliss is Meg’s third book published by HarperCollins, out in store September.
Describe Sorrow and Bliss in one sentence.
A love story about the end of love, and a coming of age about a woman who does not come of age until she is forty, which is – I hope – sad and funny and harrowing and ultimately hopeful. So many clauses, but technically still one sentence...
Much has been said about authors feeling the debilitating ‘the second novel blues’, did you find writing this novel difficult?
Sorrow and Bliss was the loveliest, least painful writing experience I have ever had but only because I spent all of the previous year on something else, which was the worse and most torturous writing experience of my life, and ended with my throwing away the 85,000 word manuscript a few days before it was due. The failure of it left me so bereft because, apart from the waste of all those hours and all the time away from my family, I felt like I had come to the end of my ability after only one novel. And even if I had the wherewithal to try again, I didn’t feel as though I could put my family through it, so I emailed my publisher a sort of resignation letter and wept quite solidly for the next month.
What eventually became Sorrow and Bliss was just a page that I wrote one day when I had run out of weeping, I can’t really remember what possessed me to sit down to it. But because it was just for me, definitely not a second draft or the start of something else and because, as I kept going, I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing – and it was never going to be seen or published anyway – I had this sort of euphoric feeling of abandon, so I just wrote whatever and however I wanted to. So absolutely, yes, I did experience second novel blues, or second novel paralysing despair really, but thank goodness my actual second novel isn’t that second novel.
How do you want people to feel after reading Sorrow and Bliss?
I am not a hopeful person by nature and can find the sadness in any situation – Virginia Woolf once described herself as ‘a wedge-shaped core of darkness,’ which would be my Instagram bio if I was on it. And I began Sorrow and Bliss at a time in my life that I remember describing to someone as post-hope, so I am not sure how hope found its way into the book or how, when Martha’s story can be so black at times, it ends hopefully.
If Sorrow and Bliss finds its way into the hands of readers who are in their own post-hope period and if it is smallest comfort to them, or if they see themselves in parts of Martha’s story and feel the tiniest bit of hope for themselves at the end, gosh, that is all I want.
What surprised or delighted you whilst writing this novel?
That it was all just there, the story and characters, and their particular ways of speaking. The year of writing the book which failed was all striving to think of things, to manufacture events and characters, and just having to labour over it all, so I was amazed that this time, I didn’t have to consciously come up with things. It felt more like reporting on something that actually happened and transcribing what everyone said.
And it is shaming to say so, I found bits of it so funny and even though I’ve written a lot of – I can’t even bear to say it – but a lot of humour for magazines, once I’d finished a piece and read it once, it was just absolutely dead to me, whereas things in Sorrow and Bliss I still find secretly hilarious and I must have read them five hundred times.
Martha is a character that readers grow to love and want to comfort, or hold her hand. Was Martha’s story based on anyone you know or is she purely created from your imagination?
When someone asked F. Scott Fitzgerald how long it took him to write The Great Gatsby, he said ‘to write it, three months. To conceive it, three minutes. To collect data on it, all my life.’
Martha isn’t based on anyone I know and she isn’t me, but I feel like I have been collecting for her all my life, the small details of her character, her observations, the way she speaks, the books she reads and the things she believes - some are taken from friends’ lives, some are autobiographical or inventions based on bits of my own experience. And although I haven’t lived Martha’s actual experience, in terms of her marriage or her mental health, I have lived all the same emotions that arise from them, and I have learned, or been forced to learn, the same lessons she has by the end.
Do you have a favourite passage, chapter or section of Sorrow and Bliss?
As a rule, anything that issues from the mouth of Ingrid, Martha’s sister. Someone else in the book describes novels as wish-fulfilment for the author - I don’t have a sister but longed for one growing up, and one as devoted and foul-mouthed as her is definitely wish-fulfilment for me.
Were you reading anything whilst writing Sorrow and Bliss? If not, what was the last thing you read or what are you reading now?
My gravest fear, or one of them, while writing is that I’ll be influenced by whichever author I am reading at the time and going back over my manuscript months later, I’ll absolutely be able to tell who it was, because I’ve inadvertently produced some very poor man’s version of their work - terrible, imitation McEwan or Mantel. And I think when you’re in the thick of trying to write fiction yourself, you can’t help reading other people’s from a technical perspective, how are they advancing time or getting in and out of flashbacks, so you end up wasting a novel you’ll enjoy so much if you can bear to save it for when you’ve finished.
Non-fiction on the other hand is such an escape, and I remember reading and being utterly astonished by Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, about Northern Ireland during The Troubles. For the content of it, and the talent required to write something like it. Now, I am very slowly reading The Mirror and the Light, however many pages I can manage per night before my wrist tendons give out.
Why do you tell stories?
Because everything is a story, all of life and it’s so glorious and sad and achingly beautiful and terrible, and telling stories is a way to capture it all and preserve it and find or show its value. Tiny, pointless, funny stories about daily things, the kind that can be told in single text message, the kind that Martha and Ingrid tell each other in the completely unnecessary vignettes scattered through the book, I prize like actual possessions.
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you are writing?
Silence, and being alone, and not knowing where I put my phone.
Do you listen to music whilst writing? If so, what was playing whilst writing Sorrow and Bliss?
Janet Frame lived in a brick house in the same New Zealand town as my grandmother when I was growing up. The town is very small and deathly quiet, but Frame was so sensitive to noise she put a second layer of bricks around her house to really keep the noise out, as in laid the bricks herself, which is my dream scenario as someone who is obsessed with quiet.
My actual scenario was every single resident in my street deciding to renovate all at the same time, just as I started Sorrow and Bliss, so I had to find something to block out all the angle-grinding and jackhammering of sandstone. Music can be a bit addling so it was usually some kind of YouTube Ten Hours of Continuous Bird Song or Relaxing Rain Sounds, which wasn’t relaxing at all, but it was better than Ten Hours of Continuous Nail Gunning.