Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Hello and welcome back to Book Chat with Gloucester Book Club. I'm Christina Young and in tonight's podcast I'm going to be talking with my friends James and Liz about the wonderful book. In fact, it was the winner of the British Book Awards 2022 Fiction Book of the Year and It's Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. We hope you enjoy, everyone, tells Martha Friel. She is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick, a gift her mother once said.

Not everybody gets so why is everything broken? Why is Martha, on the edge of 40, friendless, practically jobless, and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave? Maybe she's just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe, as she has long believed, there is something wrong with her, something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain at 17 and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain. Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional bohemian parents, Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix, or whether maybe by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.

So thanks, James, and thanks, Liz, for joining me again on the book chat sofa tonight. We're going to be talking about Sorrow and Bliss, which we read with Book Club a couple of months ago now. So James, can I start with you? Yeah. What did you think about the book and what's it about? Well, I thought it was a marvelous book, really. Not because it's a wonderful story or anything. It's just so nicely written, so beautifully written, that you just get carried along like in a beautiful dream. It's about principal character is is a girl called Martha at the beginning of the book.

She's an adolescent and it follows her life at the age of 40 and about the time she goes to university. She suddenly has a terrible, um, a terrible incident where she becomes incredibly depressed and cries and doesn't want to see anybody and wants to hide herself in a in a under a bed all day long. And so that becomes what the book's about really. She goes to see a doctor, gets a diagnosis, gets given some drugs, doesn't seem to make her any better, She gets married. Then she she gets depressed.

Gets divorced, she gets depressed again, and in the end the whole thing works itself out quite nicely really. But it's definitely a book about having a mental illness. Partly about how the doctors can be completely useless and you need to get loads of diagnoses, partly about how the people close to you react to you. And then most of the characters are are very entertaining and so it's all about all the characters as well as well. But it's it's a book about mental illness. They don't name the mental illness that she eventually gets diagnosed with.

It's very deliberately called X. Well, in the audio book it's called X. So that I suppose you don't spend waste a whole load of time comparing experiences with this mental illness. If if they'd named it. I loved it. I thought it was a great book. I think I I might qualify some of the things that James said. I think it's possible to have a main character who is sadly suffering from quite a severe mental illness, but it's possible to be mentally ill and not a nice person at the same time. I think, and I think that Martha, at times, I didn't like her.

I found her selfish. I found herself absorbed, egocentric, with very little idea of the effect that her behavior was having on people who loved her, her sister, and Patrick. I agree, the story flowed beautifully. There were a couple of times when I didn't actually believe that a whole series of doctors could have missed this illness, misdiagnosed it. And I found that her mother had a rather miraculous recovery half 2/3 of the way through the book, which again rang a little untrue, but the characters were strongly drawn.

So only I think I gave it an A out of 10 when we talked about it at the our book club meetings. And I'd really like the because well, yeah, you're right. You're both right. It's essentially about mental illness and the debilitating effect that that have has. Not just on the person. Herself, but on the relationship she has with the people. Around her and the relationship destroying effects really that that it has because she does fall out quite seriously with her husband Patrick. I think without naming the illness, it did highlight the importance of the correct treatment plan.

Really. Because once she got onto the correct drugs, things seemed to improve for her. I don't think she became particularly nice at that point either. She didn't miraculously make her personality suddenly change from being this pretty. Awkward, not, but terribly pleasant. Woman to being this wonderful, lovely woman. It's not not a funny book, but there are lots of funny bits. I mean, it is a work of fiction and the nature and combination of medical symptoms described were not consistent with any actual mental illness.

That's the disclaimer that comes at the end of the book. If you've read the book, you wouldn't got it if you listen to the audio. So did it frustrate you both? That the diagnosis is not in the book, and it's referred to as just blank. Blank. Did that, did that frustrate you both? Did you want to know a name for what was going on? No, I think that the book quite simply wasn't about that. You know, I mean there is, there are a plethora of novels about mental illness at the moment and I think that the book was about how other people.

Deal with someone who doesn't actually realize they've got mental illness. You know, I mean, and and particularly a woman, women are supposed to conform to being caring, loving and think of other people and and always be nice all the time. You know. That's a kind of societal image that that women are supposed to be. And she simply wasn't, you know, But I mean, if you. And the book was told through the first person. And so she would say that she was getting really angry and she would say that she was really annoyed and she really hated her husband at that moment or whatever.

If you look between the lines and you say, and you look at how the other people were treating her, then it turns out that her husband wasn't actually thinking, there must be something wrong with you. We're going to try and get this sorted out. He was just saying things like, you seem like you're depressed or are you OK? Which kind of made her even more angry. And um, as things went wrong, she she she lost her temper far more easily than than other people would. And so the book, it really does put you in this rather depressing landscape of what it's like to have a mental illness in in proving that point, I think.

It would have spoilt it a little bit if they'd actually given the given the illness a name. So I I I was, I was very happy with it. The way it was handled. Of course. I like the book. I have a different take on it. Um good. But I agree the the the non naming of the illness was immaterial. In fact I think it was a good thing not to name it um so that people couldn't get caught up in the minute to eye of different symptoms. Where I differ with James Few is that. She didn't know from a teenager that there was something wrong with her.

She just didn't know what it was. I think your version of that, you know, little girls with sugar and spice, little things nice, is rather outdated. I think that that perception of women has changed in the last generation. We're we're not supposed to be sort of angels by the heart. Or even if men might like to think we were, they wouldn't articulate it anymore. I think she was. Desperately unkind to Patrick, Patrick gave up everything for her. He gave up the chance of fatherhood. He sat by her bedside for the untold hours where she just sobbed.

She wouldn't do anything to help herself in any way. She wouldn't let him build her. And when she finally gets the diagnosis and she's given the right treatment, what does she do? She turns around and blames Patrick. You should have known you're a doctor, not a psychiatrist. Well, we have missed out the fact he's a doctor, haven't we? And. Yes, but he's he's not a he's not a psychiatrist. No, no, he has no. No training in that. She lashes out at him. She mess he he makes a comment sometime where I did nothing but clean up your messes.

Physical messes and emotion mess messes she. She relied on him so much, but she never gave him any thanks or any gratitude. Did you? Want to come back in there? James seems like he did. Well, only only to say, yes, everything Liz said is completely correct. But I still I think the very fact that she, the novelist, made the character married to a doctor is, is is just another challenge to our societal ideas. You know, as because doctors are such great people. And they're so wonderful. Generally, I love doctors myself.

I think they're intelligent. You know, I'd like to know a few more doctors. But. And their wives are supposed to be supportive of them because they're doing such an amazing thing. And so, I don't know, I think that she did a good job with Patrick. I think that you've got to look quite closely at the book to see how Patrick might have let her down. But that's my opinion. You know, I, I, I, I don't think that at any point he marched her off to a psychiatrist. I think it was her father who did that which he might have done, you know, And if she was throwing things around and smashing irons into the bedroom wall and and leaving, leaving rubbish bins upended all over the hallway when she went out, I would have thought that he might have thought there was something else wrong with her apart from she was just in a bad mood.

But you know, I mean it's that's my take. That's my take on it. I didn't. It's funny. I didn't get the sense at all throughout the book that she didn't think there was anything wrong with her. All the other people didn't think there was anything wrong with her. I think they all knew what was wrong with her because it was a genetic thing. It was in her family and she was displaying all the signs that her mother had experienced, that her grandmother had experienced. I think they all knew actually that she had a serious mental illness, but they, you know, she wasn't getting the correct treatment for it.

And possibly wasn't very nice person as well alongside of all of that. And I do think, you know, obviously there are lots of women doctors out there as well as men doctors. And I think she did go to several doctors that you know, she didn't get the right diagnosis. And I think if she had maybe got treatment earlier on, it might have made a difference to her relationships with people, I think. Did Patrick take it with them? I don't remember that he did, no. But I mean, he didn't need to take her to adopt.

I mean, she kind of knew that she was struggling, I think as well. And there was a bomb that went off in her head, an explosion that went off in her head when she was 17, and she didn't understand what was going on. It's from that moment onwards, wasn't it, that she started having problems with her mental health? So I I felt that it was known in the family that there was something very wrong and everyone was tolerating it. Actually, yeah. Uh, yes. And I. I would agree with that because it was on both sides of her family, her paternal her mother and her paternal grandmother and then her father's 2 aunts.

So it was on both paternal and paternal side that she inherited whatever the problem was. Um. She had been prescribed medication on many occasions. She just stopped taking it. Probably because she felt it to be ineffective, but I think the whole family and lovely Winsome who was one of my favorite characters, her aunt, everybody was tiptoeing around her and she does say at one point I never felt that I wasn't loved. When they moved, they moved out of London to Oxford, didn't they? To UM, what they called an executive development or something like that.

And at that point, um, Patrick, as you both said? Should have been aware that she had something wrong with her because he'd already known her for years. Um, And he was just saying let's go to Oxford, please, can you make some friends? And this is what his response was. He wanted her to go and meet the woman opposite. He wanted her to start a book club. He wanted her to do all this kind of thing, which to me doesn't really show that he had an understanding of how severe her mental illness was. Um, but you know, I mean, obviously we can't tell what the the author meant to to say.

By not naming the illness, you could say that Meg Mason's refusing to to expose women to the scrutiny that that Martha was experiencing, being pushed to explain to the world your illnesses and your body and the cruelties that she's experienced. It could also be said that this is a novel. It's not a medical handbook and not medical textbook about, you know, mental illness. And so it was fine for her not to name it. I actually saw an interview with Meg Mason where she explained that she didn't name it because she doesn't, she doesn't have a lived experience of of mental illness.

And she didn't think it was fair to, you know, portray it to, to name it in the book because other people would come back and say, you know, would would say, well, actually, you know, my sister's got that and she doesn't. You know, have these experiences, so it's best to leave it vague, but to concentrate more on what it feels like when you're mentally ill. It doesn't matter what it's called really, you know that you are experiencing a really difficult time. I I think that was fair enough. My whole instinct was to take the focus off Martha because there were other very, very strong themes running through it.

Failed parentage in about half a dozen different examples. Love between friends. Sister Love Patrick at one point, and her mother and her sister all accuse her. It's always been all about you. You don't think of anyone but yourself, and as I was reading it I wanted to get away from Martha, rather like Ingrid, her sister says at one point. I just can't. Do your mess ups anymore. I need to look and concentrate on something else. Honestly, I think if you've got a severe mental illness, it does force you into thinking about yourself.

And I think that is what the author was trying to depict. Really. And I mean, if Patrick. Did everything he could. I can't. There must have been some reason why she blamed Patrick after this final diagnosis. And no matter what you say about her history of mental illness, the final diagnosis was a revelation because she had once before been diagnosed with this this mental illness, which they didn't name, But everyone had completely dismissed that as being a possibility, including her. So it was a revelation when she finally got diagnosed with what she had and she was angry with Patrick.

And with her parents for not having been more on the ball with it, really. And I mean, you could say yes, they were on the ball with it, they were all doing as well as they could. But I don't know. I think that this is must be one of the worst things about when you have mental illness. If other people aren't as sympathetic as they could be about the mental illness, and they. They look at you and they say, well, you're just in a bad mood or something, you know, I mean, this is, this is what she's getting at, I think, which is great.

I think though she was misdiagnosed for many years and the end diagnosis, she went to see a private psychiatrist, didn't she? And he said, this is what I think you've got. Little diagnosis when she was 18, her mother dismissed, didn't she? And a doctor had already told her that she had this X, whatever it was, and they all said. No, no, no, no, no. Don't be ridiculous. And so no one picked that up. But yeah, it doesn't. But if there's any probability, surely it's Celia and Fergus, her parents, both of whom knew without a shadow of a doubt what it was that was wrong with her.

And yet the full force of her anger is against Patrick, who's done nothing but support her. I know, her mother says. Well, I chose not to tell you or not to have the diagnosis because I didn't want to label put on you. Yeah, yeah. And I can understand that too. You know, I don't think it's always very helpful to label people. And maybe that's why Meg Mason hasn't labeled her with a particular illness in the book as well. Because you know, labels don't always help, I don't think. One of the bits where I thought.

The the storyline was a little bit flawed that if her mother had exactly the same illness and knew what it was and being diagnosed, then for most of the book she obviously wasn't taking her medication because she acted in extremely strange manners. So yeah, we are led to suppose that 2/3 of the way through the book she must start taking her medication again because she becomes lucid with no problem. Have the same thing. It was the mother's mother that had it and the the aunt as well, I think, but it wasn't.

No, her mother had it. No, Celia, I don't. But obviously we just bring. But my memory is that Celia had it as well. Because Celia, Celia was actually behaving very bizarrely throughout the book. Wasn't she as well, Very eccentric, very bohemian, you could argue. But she went through periods of time where she was very difficult to live with and, you know, her husband had to leave. No, it was alcohol, wasn't it? She gave up the alcohol in that conversation with her and immediately she changed that day.

But it wasn't just alcohol. I mean the the series of they called them the leavings when he obviously had enough and moved out to a hotel fairly regularly. She was fairly money in the way that her behavior was portrayed. Patrick's This is a quote from the book. Patrick's sort of like the sofa that was in your house when you're growing up, the thing that was always there, so much so that no one gives it any conscious thought. And that's a quote from Martha herself and she's talking about her husband Patrick.

So, I mean, what was your? What was your thoughts about Patrick for the entirety of the book? To me, he seemed like this very kind of passive guy. Really, he was putting up with a lot. Did that, Did that annoy you, though? Did you feel that he could have been a bit more, you know, kind of vigorous in his look, You know, I'm not putting up with this kind of stuff. He did at the end. Obviously towards the end he said I've had enough and we're going to separate. But you know, did he, did he also get under your skin a bit?

Did he annoy you being a bit weak? No, because I think Patrick himself came from a very damaged family background. He had a quite appalling father with a series of stepmothers. His own mother had died when he was young and he's asked a question once about, well, why were you so well behaved that all these gatherings she were invited to? We weren't. And he says yes, but you didn't have to hope to be invited back is one thing was to be accepted and welcomed into this family because. He'd never had it at all and Martha herself says, well, Patrick, he was just always there.

She does also say something which I think is quite pertinent, she said. Patrick, as a 14 year old schoolboy, fell in love with a certain image of me, not the real me, but what he thought the image of me would be. And I actually think that Patrick and Martha there was love there, but it was all. In reality, more like a brother, sister, love. They should have remained as friends or as cousins. They should never have become husband and wife. Yeah, but did you think of Patrick James? Well, he was, as Liz just said, he he had a very difficult childhood in that he loved his mother, but she died when he was 7 and his father then completely ignored him, just took him off to a boarding school and waved goodbye.

And forgot to buy him tickets to come and see him at Christmas. So he had to end up staying with this family, who are the main family in the book at Christmas. And that's how he entered the scene. Meg Mason doesn't actually tell us very much about Patrick at all. We do know that he hardly ever says anything. We know that if someone says something to him, he doesn't react at all. He doesn't. He's not the kind of person who, if you said I think you're an absolute fool, he would just. Keep looking you in the face and not say anything at all, one imagines.

But we didn't actually get those kind of situations depicted to us. That kind of person can be incredibly frustrating, although I admit that I'm a bit like it myself. I think you know, but I mean, I don't know. He was he was a frustrating person. If you live, if you, if you get close to him, I think because you couldn't ever tell what he was thinking and he hid everything under a stone. And they did have some marvelous days that were depicted in the book. But he was exactly as Liz said. He was a pretty damaged person himself.

Yes, I think he was. I think he was in the building school. I think he probably was bullied quite a lot there. He was clearly bright. He became a doctor, but I think he'd learnt to keep his head down and just accept what was going on around him. And he didn't feel that he had any much power in situations. I think so. And as you say, he was completely, you know, in love with Martha from the get go. Really. She was a little bit older than him. I think when he met her, he was 14 and she was 17. So you're seeing this beautiful.

She's described as a beautiful girl in the book, as somebody that would light up a room when she came into it. I struggled with that description of her, to be frank, because throughout the book she didn't appear to me. At all. Like a personality who would light up a room. She could have been very beautiful, I guess, but I just didn't feel that she was. She wasn't particularly sociable. She wasn't very nice when she was in, you know, in gatherings with people. So I did struggle a little bit to to to believe that.

But that's what he saw. He saw that, you know, he thought, you know, her mother saw that. In fact, that was the mother who said that she lit up a room when she came into it. Their marriage was, I I guess, you know, he tolerated an awful lot in that marriage. And her mother says to her one day, no marriage makes sense, especially not to the outside world. And the marriage is its own world. I mean, would you agree with that or disagree with that? Because there were other marriages that were also in the book, like Ingrid and Hamish's marriage that was her sister and and her husband's marriage that compared to Martha and Patrick were very different.

Would you agree that with the mother that says no marriage makes sense? I think it's virtually impossible for an outsider to really understand someone else to other people's marriage, because they view it as an outsider. They can never really get closer within it. Winsome and Rufus, they seem to be quite happy together. They were comfortable, fond of each other. Ingrid and Hamish had a few ups and downs. Why? Well, he was asked by Martha why her father stayed with her mother, because her mother acted absolutely atrociously for most of the book, he said.

Problem was, I happen to love that. That's why he kept leaving and coming back. Leaving and coming back, Yeah. So I think not only failed parentage but flawed marriage is also a theme of the book. And would you argue, James, that that is the very common think to have a flawed marriage that everyone probably does? I don't think they had a particularly bad marriage. And I think at the end of the book, they look like they're getting back together again. You know, I think it's, you know, the scenes that we hear of are when she's in a in a bad depression and she's doing bad stuff and she's talk, you know, talking to other people.

But I don't know. I think that if you compare the marriage of the main characters to the other marriages in the book, they're fine, you know, I mean. Her sister's married, and she tries to leave her husband. At one point, Her mother's married and she kicks her husband out on a regular basis, apparently. You know, and yeah, I mean, all marriages are different. You're quite right. So I thought that the marriage of Martha and Patrick was particularly flawed, partly because he had a 14 year old boy's infatuation with her that never really went away.

Personally, I don't think they were getting back together at the end. Patrick is the one whose offers her to return to the flat that says I won't leave there, I won't live there, I'm I'm going somewhere else. We cannot live together. Do you think Martha is a privileged character? I mean, how might Martha's mental health experience compare with someone from a lower socioeconomic background, maybe? Or a woman of color, for instance? Do you think that she had quite a privileged situation to be in where there was quite a lot of money so they could afford for her to go to see private and psychiatrists and maybe that shielded her quite a bit?

How? What do you think put the put the book on a kind of white privilege scale? There's no question about it. It's that it's ridiculous, you know, I mean, the number of books and movies that we have in in our society where where they're they're all white people and they're all living in some house in London, as they were. Uh, they one of the people had a house in Belgravia and here we are reading about it as if they're just ordinary people like Paddington, the movie where there for some reason this family lives in a house that must be worth about £10 million, you know, and.

I think she was fortunate to be privileged in other ways. She had both an aunt and a sister who adored her. Who were her closest allies? Aunt Winston and her sister Ingrid. Who posts either side of her holding her up? She had a great deal of love and support from both of those women. She had. Patrick, who hung on when most men would have walked out the door. Her father. He wasn't practically very good at doing things, but she'd always had his emotional support. So I don't think we need to think of privilege just in terms of big houses and money.

She was privileged in the sense that she had a close family around her. She had cousins who were there for her. She did have a lot of family support. I agree. I agree that the whole, you know, the whole setup and in terms of the fact that she had this kind of godfather figure who was Peregrine in the book, who we haven't mentioned. But he was a good character who allowed her to go and live in his flat in Paris for two years sort of rent free. And that was all lovely. And she seemed to be better in in Paris, didn't she?

For a while. But it came about that she had to return to London, so and then things went wrong again. So yeah, she seemed better, Sort of better, but not truly better because she was trying to work in a bookshop, wasn't she? At one point where she got sacked? I think because she just spent all her time sitting reading all the books and not actually helping any customers at all. Apart from the. Overriding theme of mental illness, the one that we haven't really touched on at all, is the obsessive desire to have a baby.

The obsessive need of motherhood. the IT it dominated her whole life since the age of 1718, when she was first found out. You know, she's jealous of Ingrid's children. She sometimes always looks on them as her own. She has this fantasy of. Flora, the baby that never was, never once stopped to think. Well, Patrick's given up having children as well as me. She denied, didn't she? All the way through the book, denied, deny, deny, deny that she wanted to have children. And in fact, that was a complete, you know, show actually, because she desperately wanted them, as you said, Liz, you know, But she was terrified that she wouldn't be able to have them.

And she was worried that the drugs would have some effect that she was taking on on children. She was kind of told that, you know, when she was quite young that, you know, you're not going to have any children, are you? Because these drugs might affect the development of the fetus. So I think she was terrified about that, but she was desperate to have them. Do you think till at the end of the book, it leaves it open, doesn't it, for the reader to decide, is the marriage going to work? Is she actually going to have a child?

She's now sort of 40. Is she going to be able to have one? What did you think about the ending of the book, James? Did you feel it was a optimistic or not sure? Yeah, you know, she. She'd finally diagnosed what her mental illness was. She had the right drugs, Um, and little bit you missed out there about the the baby thing was that, um, these doctors that told her she shouldn't have a baby because of the the drugs, it turned out that the drugs that they were talking about had no effect on a fetus at all.

And uh, her realization about that was one of the worst moments later on in the book. That she could have had children all along and the drugs would have been fine. But yeah, I think it was all looking good. I mean, obviously it doesn't really matter if she and Patrick got back together again. But they're still there's even though they've split up, they're still going to the same social functions. And you know, that's not something I do with my ex-wife. It suggests to me that they could have got back together again.

And the 40, as everybody knows, is nothing like an age where you you're too old to have children, so. Quite rightly she doesn't say anything and we don't find out anything, but I thought it was a a pretty upbeat ending. I quite liked it actually. Oh, I was desperately hoping freedom for Patrick. I mean, it would be wrong. Patrick, get, get, get, get away from her. I don't think they will get back together. I think she will rebuild her relationship with her parents. She's always had Aunt Winsome on her side.

She's always had Ingrid on her side. Whether she just goes out somewhere and gets herself pregnant because she's so obsessive about having a baby, I don't know, but I don't see her and Patrick making a future together. In a way I don't trust her. She could stop taking her medication anytime she wanted to. She stopped medication in the past. A mother obviously stopped taking it for years and years and years, so I don't see a particularly. Even future for her. Let's put it that way. The other medications didn't, actually.

They weren't the correct ones though, were they? No, no. And she did have that moment of realization. I don't know if you remember where, um, her. She'd started taking the latest kind of medications, the one that worked. And her her employer, who she writes these columns for, got in touch with her and said that last column was terrible. You're going to have to rewrite it. And she didn't lose her temper. And she looked up at the wall above her desk and saw these triangular marks in the wall and thought, who was that person who used to completely lose their temper and smash the iron into the wall?

And at that moment she realized I'm cured. I'm actually not in a problem anymore. I don't lose my temper, I don't cry. And I think it was. This is definitely the right diagnosis at the end though, isn't it? There's no question she has spent her whole life. Being given the wrong drugs and the wrong advice by not that many doctors, I think it was only four or five that came up in the book, which is which really is the happy ending, isn't it? Well, no matter what happens to Patrick or whether she has children, that's just happy ending.

Well, she's not actually cured because there isn't a cure. She will be all right so long as she continues to take the medication, and her mother obviously didn't. No, you're quite right. But there are a lot of medical conditions where people are given some kind of medication which completely takes the pain away. And society's idea is that they're better, you know, But you're right. They have to keep taking the drugs. It's management, isn't it? Yes, with a lot of conditions. It's, it's management of the condition.

And you can fluctuate in and out of things. And I think there's always going to be the potential for Martha to do that, and particularly if she doesn't stick to the drug, you know, treatment that she's on. So that brings us very neatly tonight to the end of tonight's episode, and thanks to Liz and James and of course, to all our listeners. So we'll be back in September with another podcast. For now, goodbye. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please follow us, share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review.

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