For a book about serious things, this book sure was funny. That’s the first impression I had of the book, and the tone instantly had me hooked. This is the story of Martha Friel, who is flailing. She suffers from mental health issues, and has a life that leaves her generally feeling unsatisfied and blank. When we first meet her, her husband has just left her, and the book then takes us into the past and draws us through her life and their history to show us how we got here.
I loved so many things about this book. As mentioned above, it’s full of funny lines, even in the midst of difficult events. Martha and her sister have a great banter that continues right through, and provides some important comic relief. I felt like this was what I wanted from Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, but didn’t quite get. The humour breaks up the dark stuff and creates a sense of push and pull, of balance. I didn’t feel bogged down in it, and that’s why.
That said though, this book is definitely dark. Mason spares no details in delving into Martha’s mental illness, and we see the nitty gritty of how it has affected her, what it has done to her relationships, and how hard she has to struggle just to be. I liked that the characters all have both negative and positive attributes, and that her relationships with them change throughout the book. I found that realistic, especially given her particular challenges.
I did find that the second half of the book was slower for me. I still wanted to find out what was going to happen, but it didn’t have that same pull that the earlier pages did. There’s also a narrative choice made by the author that bugged the shit out of me. She chooses to do this __________ rather than naming the mental illness Martha is eventually diagnosed with. I read an interview in which she said that she did that because the symptoms Martha experiences aren’t associated with just one mental illness, and that she didn’t want to seem like she was speaking for a group of people with one mental illness. So she chose to leave it open. I get all of that, and logically it makes complete sense. But holy fuck was it annoying to read!!!!! Every time I came across another ___________ it took me right out of the story and distracted me so much that it started to really impact my enjoyment of the book. It’s a tricky one, because I do understand her reasoning, and I’m not sure what she could have done instead – but it really didn’t work for me.
So wrapping up my feelings on this book is a bit complicated. The things about it that were good were brilliant. I loved the way Martha’s mental health issues were discussed and how raw some of that is. I loved her relationship with her sister – and even her relationship with her husband to a point. I liked how much character development there was and the layers she wove into even some of the less involved characters. But at times I didn’t like Martha much, even allowing for her mental illness. I didn’t like how she reacted to some of the events, and I had a hard time getting along with her at times. And then the blanks towards the end of the novel further alienated me. I’m left feeling like the first half of the book was amazing, and the second half was good, but with a few things that marred it for me.
I’d love to hear from anyone else who read this. How did you feel about the mental illness representation? Did you also enjoy the humour, and did you feel as engaged for the whole book? Did anyone else get really annoyed with the blanks, or was that just a me thing???
Martha Friel just turned forty. She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content for no one. She used to live in Paris. Now, she lives in a gated community in Oxford that she hates and can’t bear to leave. But she must now that her loving husband Patrick has just left.
Because there’s something wrong with Martha. There has been since a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, leaving her changed in a way no doctor or drug could fix then and no one, even now, can explain–why can say she is so often sad, cruel to everyone she loves, why she finds it harder to be alive than other people.
With Patrick gone, the only place Martha has left to go is her childhood home, to live with her chaotic parents, to survive without Ingrid, the sister who made their growing-up bearable, who said she would never give up on Martha, and who finally has.
It feels like the end but maybe, by going back, Martha will get to start again. Maybe there is a different story to be written, if Martha can work out where to begin. – Goodreads
Book Title: Sorrow and Bliss
Author: Meg Mason
Series: No
Edition: Paperback
Published By: Harper Perennial
Released: September 2, 2020
Genre: Fiction, Literary, Mental Health, Family
Pages: 352
Date Read: July 17-28, 2022
Rating: 8/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.17/5 (45,564 ratings)