Diagnosis and Sisterhood: A Conversation with Meg Mason
Photo Credit: Grant Sparkes-Carroll
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December’s Book:The Coast Road by Alan Murrin
“Because I had failed, I was free and could write without inhibition. But it wasn’t that the inhibition I’d know before as a writer, the regular kind that from over-imagining your audience. It was more an emotional inhibition which came from the fact I wasn’t over that failure.”
I was so interested to find out that you essentially wrote Sorrow and Bliss in secret – so much so that you were convinced nobody would ever read it. Do you think writing with no expectations or inhibitions contributed to the book’s success?
I wrote Sorrow and Bliss in 2019, and the reason I was convinced that no one would ever read is I’d spent all of 2018 writing a novel that no one has ever seen. Because, just before that one was due, I realised or really just finally accepted that it was terrible from start to finish, and beyond rescue. And so much worse than the book had been that year-long experience of writing it. It was just relentlessly miserable, and I didn’t think I had it in me to try again. So, I told my editor I had to quit, and I truly believed it was all over for me as an author. But then - and I think whether you’ve been published yet or not, this is the proof you are a writer - I couldn’t help myself from returning to it - not the novel, or different one, but just to writing as a practise.
And as you say, because I had failed, I was free and could write without inhibition. But it wasn’t that the inhibition I’d know before as a writer, the regular kind that from over-imagining your audience. It was more an emotional inhibition which came from the fact I wasn’t over that failure. I was still devastated by it, and angry and full of shame. I felt like I didn’t care about anything anymore and when I sat down, all that feeling poured out onto the page. I can’t really say if that strange freedom contributed to the novel’s actual success, but if Sorrow and Bliss has a certain visceral quality to it, which readers have connected with, that is absolutely why.
Where did that initial inspiration and motivation come from when you first put pen to paper, and you weren’t sure how the book would develop?
I write in a little shed in the garden or, that is where I had always written up until I quit and put a figurative/literal padlock on the door. Very close to the shed is the clothesline, and one morning, maybe six weeks later, I was hanging out washing and a scene came into my mind - of a couple at a wedding having an awkward conversation with a stranger who is struggling to eat a canape, which eventually became the first scene in Sorrow and Bliss - and I thought it was quite funny and I just felt like writing it down. So, I unlocked the shed, which sounds/is deeply metaphorical. Another scene followed, and another and I just kept going. Still, it was months before I realised I might actually be writing a book. And even longer before I told anyone.
The sibling relationship between Martha and Ingrid is incredibly relatable for so many people – is their dynamic rooted in real relationships you have observed?
I don’t have a sister and desperately wanted one when I was younger. Ingrid, I’m sure, is the product of all the time I spent imagining what it would be like, and who the perfect sister would be. But her relationship with Martha, their closeness and loyalty to each other and that kind of intimate shorthand they share jokes, is definitely something I’ve experienced in friendship, and it was the loveliest part of the novel to write.
One of the talking points about your novel is the fact that you don’t disclose the mental health issue the main character Martha is dealing with, even though she receives a diagnosis. Could you tell us a little bit about this decision and what you think the effect of not specifying her diagnosis has been?
I don’t remember the day that mental illness entered the story and became the sort of axis around which it all turns. I didn’t set out to explore it since, again, I hadn’t set out to do anything. And that meant I hadn’t been careful in the way I wrote about her illness, for all that time before I showed the book to anyone. I think I began with a condition in mind, but I never researched it or interviewed on it, and quite quickly, I started bending what I vaguely knew about it to fit narrative, amplifying symptoms, emitting others, making some up entirely. And it didn’t matter at all since it would never be read. But then, after I showed it to my publisher and she said it was going to be published, it mattered incredibly. There was no way, as an author, I was willing to Martha’s condition as anything real and named, because I would be saying ‘this is what it is like’ and it absolutely wasn’t.
Even if then, I had have chosen to go back and ‘correct it’, Martha is the one telling the story and it is her story and she has to be able to say whatever she likes about herself and her illness. But again, if it was a true condition, her unsanitised and often vicious descriptions of what it is like and what she thinks she is like – that, for example, there is ‘something wrong’ with her - would cause real pain to real suffers and, as a human being, I couldn’t bear that. So, I decided to leave it out.
But in narrative terms, it doesn’t matter what it is. The entire story is the absence of knowing and Martha’s lifelong attempt to find out, and what it means when she does. In which case, it matters that we don’t know either. If her mystery was never a mystery to us because the condition was right there in the blurb, we would view everything she does through our greater understanding and, I also worried, she might be reduced to just that. Just an illness and not a whole person.
I know it has made some readers cross, not getting to know after 350 pages of trying to find out. But they tend to be the same readers who say Martha is unlikeable and they want to shake her, so I suppose I would just say, maybe those two things are not unrelated? That not getting to know what her illness was for 25 years wasn’t brilliant for her either?
How does it feel to be compared to influential cultural figures such as Fleabag and Sally Rooney? Have you been compared to any figures who inspired your writing?
Oh! Like the most enormous compliment since they are both indescribably talented and have made things that just didn’t exist before. But I also feel old enough to be, if not their mother, then at least their dad’s girlfriend and since I gave Martha my age, I don’t think anyone would confuse her for a millennial icon, of the kind they’ve both created.
The most glorious comparison I have/will ever receive was Ann Patchett saying Sorrow and Bliss reminded her of Brother of The More Famous Jack, since that is one of my absolute favourite books of all time, and she is Ann Patchett.
Could you share with our readers a few authors you’re enjoying reading at the moment? What are you hoping will be your Next Big Read?
Nina Stibbe’s new novel One Day I Shall Astonish the World is utterly glorious. Before that, I was on an absolute Tessa Hadley jag, and am counting sleeps now until publication of India Knight’s Darling, her adaptation of The Pursuit of Love.
Finally, be honest – do you judge a book by its cover?!
Oh, my goodness, of course. How else are you supposed to judge it?
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