Sorrow and Bliss traces Martha’s journey through this unnamed mental illness (Mason uses dashes - instead of naming it, and a nurse in my book club said it sounded like schizophrenia), but Mason herself says that the book is not really about mental illness. She pretended not to notice, but made a point of vacuuming around feet.” Her father “stayed up with in the night, sitting on the floor, leaning against bed.” Ingrid tells her “You’ve basically turned into Mum.” Her mother “no longer came into room, except one with the vacuum cleaner. No one seems able to diagnose the problem, and her family reacts with varying degrees of sympathy.
It is around the same time that Martha meets Patrick that she wakes up with “no feeling in hands and arms.” It is the beginning of a long period of ill (mental) health for Martha. Patrick was childhood friends with Winsome’s son, Oliver, and Martha has known him since she was sixteen. Fergus and Celia still live in the family home in Shepherd’s Bush (a district in West London), but they can only afford their lives because of Celia’s sister, Winsome, who at first seems like a rich snob, but in the end turns out to be the rock in the lives of these fragile, broken people. Her father, Fergus Russell, is a failed poet her mother, Celia Barry, a sculptor. She and her younger sister, Ingrid, comes from a relatively dysfunctional family.
Happiness, as it turns out, is a rare commodity for Martha. Once upon a time, they were each other’s most favourite person and Martha felt as though “we had been melted down and made into another thing. Things weren’t always so vitriolic between the pair. Things have gotten so bad that, on their way home from the last party they attend as husband and wife, she says to him “When you do that pointing thing it makes me want to shoot you with an actual gun.” Patrick’s response? “How about we don’t talk until we get home.” Martha Friel, the protagonist of Meg Mason’s widely praised novel Sorrow and Bliss, is in the middle of a crisis: her marriage is imploding.
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