Sorrow and Bliss

Starred review from December 21, 2020
English writer Mason excels in her heartbreaking U.S. debut, an account of a woman’s self-discovery amid her struggle with mental illness. Martha Russell was raised by volatile artists and as a teenager began to be affected by debilitating bouts of depression, for which she’s prescribed an antidepressant. Told by a physician that it would be disastrous to get pregnant while on her medication, Martha spends the her adulthood telling her romantic partners—and trying to convince herself—that she doesn’t want to be a mother. Martha’s mental health (“Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed,” she narrates) ends her first marriage and jeopardizes the second, to longtime family friend Patrick. After Martha is finally prescribed an effective medication, she’s able to see her family relationships in new light—but is it too late to repair them? Martha’s anecdotes, simultaneously funny and sad, are stacked with observations that alternate between brutally cutting—especially when directed at her mother and at the patient and supportive Patrick—and aching, as when her oblique descriptions of her sister’s growing family increasingly belie her true feelings about motherhood. Witty and stark, Martha’s emotionally affecting story will delight fans of Sally Rooney.

January 1, 2021
Martha hasn't had an easy time with love, or with much of anything, really: a nebulous career, a failed "starter" marriage, and a long history of depressive moods that seem to be getting worse instead of better. Now in a second marriage, to Patrick, a friend of her cousin's that had orbited Martha's life since she was a teenager, she's convinced that with her husband's support, she can make it through her darkest days. Until those days become weeks, causing her to lash out and create a rift in her marriage she's certain can't be fixed. Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt. Much like the narrator of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Martha's voice is acerbic, witty, and raw. Sydney-based author Mason (You Be Mother, 2017) plots Martha's story in a nonlinear fashion, largely working backwards to highlight the highest and lowest points of her life. By refraining from naming Martha's ultimate diagnosis, referring to it only as "--", Mason trusts the reader to imagine the full weight of it. Fans of Marian Keyes should put this on their to-read lists.

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