Book Review: "Sorrow and Bliss" by Meg Mason

So I'm trying to read books that are funny as well as everything else I'm reading. I've read a couple by Sally Rooney including Beautiful World, Where Are You? and Conversations with Friends. I've read Dolly Alderton's Ghosts and the lesser Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. There are probably more but I can't remember them all off the top of my head right now. Sorrow and Bliss is a book that I have heard about quite a bit even before I started reading what is normally dubbed 'women's writing'. There were some issues with this book but I think on the whole, this probably isn't the best one I've read of the bunch and yet it is definitely not the very worst of it.

First of all, the main character is actually somewhat likeable, perhaps not in all instances but at least she feels like a character a regular person can relate to in some sense of the word even if she is super-duper privileged. She was once in love with men called Patrick and Jonathan, she has super-rich parents who are part of the artsy world she wrongly refers to as 'bohemian'. It's more white-upper-middle-class. She name drops important newspapers and people and comes off as a bit of a try-hard and inauthentic person. But the language of depression is what picks this book up by quite a degree, if the author stuck to this storyline then it would've been a five out of five from me. But unfortunately we get all these little side stories of being at parties with important folk that make no difference to the storyline. I personally even think Jonathan could have been cut out altogether and it would have made little difference. Some of the story definitely feels like filler to get more pages into the book.

We get these back and forth episodes in which Martha (our main character) leaves her love, Patrick, many times because she believes she is broken in some way by this pervasive mental illness. On top of this, she seems to imply that one of the worst things to happen is that she is turning into her mother. When she finally receives a diagnosis for what is wrong, there seems to be a moment of realisation that she isn't broken, she's just sick. This begets more understanding than what would actually happen when you receive a diagnosis for a mental illness. However, there is a moment of relief which seems more realistic. She seeks a kind of stability that her family didn't really have because everyone in her family seems to be self-absorbed for some reason. The stability she finds with Patrick is one that is gentle and loving, but she herself is volatile and unpredictable - just like a mental illness projects. It is understandable of the author to write about her going back and forth in this way, but honestly after a while, it becomes a little tiring to read about.

I understand how it is meant to have an impact on why the book ends the way it does, but one can only think about all the filler that is in the narrative. At times, the main character is someone who is deeply unlikeable like her family members, and at other times we can actually understand her. I think the author was trying to get us to realise what it is like dealing with someone who has mental illness, but I also think there are far too many instances of her being unlikeable to the degree that we don't really want to read on. Also, the sheer amount of privilege the main character has means that the character isn't really relatable at all. It is far more relatable to have a character who has lost everything and then develops a mental illness than to have a woman with a stable job and a rich family, who's only problem is her boyfriend left her to be talking about 'mental illness'. I just found it to have too much of the classic middle class white woman syndrome stuff in it.

All in all, this book was alright in the way in was written but I'm not sure I enjoyed it as much as middle class white women would have. The language and writing was often quite intriguing, there was a bit too much filler-story in the book and the character tipped into being more unlikeable than likeable at times. I'm not sure I'm going to give this author another go.