![]() Martha’s voice owes something to Plath herself – she is a successor to The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood, electric yet disassociated. Compulsively readable, Sorrow and Bliss is one of the funniest books I’ve read, in part because Martha turns the biting humour that is at once her survival mechanism and downfall on herself and everyone she meets. If this sounds depressing, it really isn’t. There is the tardy love of an inadequate mother.Īnd then there is Martha, the 40-year-old narrator, whose lack of love for herself is central to this sharp, comic, desperate tale about mental health, about where it begins and ends and who we are with and without it. There is the acerbic love of a sister, Ingrid, who communicates largely via GIFs of a drunken Kate Moss. ![]() There is the love of a perplexed husband, Patrick, a gentle doctor who lives “on the middle setting” while his beloved, maddening wife swings between extremes. There is the achingly tender love of a father, a “male Sylvia Plath”, who sits with his daughter all night after a “little bomb” goes off in her brain at the age of 17 and she no longer wants to be alive. ![]() There are many love stories in Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason’s third book to be published in Australia, but her first to be published in the UK. ![]()
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