It’s a very keenly observed novel, particularly when it shows the impact of mental illness on the sufferer as well as their friends and family. They could not tell that for most of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been trying to become the opposite of myself. Or, seeing me that night, that I must have set out to be this way and achieved it after years of concentrated effort. She moves back to her parent’s house in London to reflect on a life of battles with mental illness, her problematic relationship with her mother and what ultimately made her marriage disintegrate.Īn observer to my marriage would think I have made no effort to be a good or better wife. He’s left after all the years of coping with Martha’s need for constant support, her rages, depression and suicidal impulses. Now in her 40s her life has reached a crisis.ĭevoted husband Patrick, who has only ever wanted her to be happy, has just moved out.
Since then, she’s consulted doctor after doctor, the diagnosis different each time but always with the same outcome: take these tablets and don’t get pregnant. I stayed there for days, coming down for food and the bathroom, and eventually just the bathroom. She’s been on antidepressants ever since, struggling through episodes which leave her seeking refuge in dark spaces for many weeks.Īs soon as I got home, I went upstairs and got into the space under my desk and sat still like a small animal that instinctively knows it’s dying. It began at the age of 17 when “ a little bomb went off in my brain”. Sorrow and Bliss is a tale of Martha Friel and the illness that defined her life. “An incredibly funny and devastating debut,” said The Guardian “… fantastically dark and almost unbearably funny,” said The Times reviewer while The Sunday Times described the book as a “heart-thuddingly moving portrait of family, marriage and chronic illness.”īut other readers found the humour irritating and were frustrated by the author’s radio silence on the precise nature of her narrator’s medical condition. Widely praised for its sensitive handling of a woman’s mental health issues, Sorrow and Bliss is also a novel that has sharply divided opinions among its readers.įans of Meg Mason’s novel thought it was funny, tender and original.
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