You Be Mother: The debut novel from the author of Sorrow and Bliss

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This is one of the best novels about marriage that I have read, and that is a large field…This is also one of the best novels about mental illness I have read…I am adding it to my list of the best novels of 2020, alongside Andrew O’Hagan’s MAYFLIES, Sofie Laguna’s INFINITE SPLENDOURS and Douglas Stuart’s SHUGGIE BAIN, which won the Booker Prize.” THE AUSTRALIAN I think, in terms of the mental health thing, all I would really say is that I think if you haven’t either been a carer for someone with mental health issues or experienced it at some point in your life, then you’re a bit of an anomaly,” Mason says. When Mason did eventually show Sorrow and Bliss version 2.0 to Milne it was with a caveat: “I don’t know if you can publish this one either”. That is, until she meets Phyllida, her wealthy, charming, imperious older neighbour, and they become almost like mother and daughter.

Abi, the main character, has had a tough upbringing. Enduring tragic loss in her childhood, and her mother’s spiral into a catatonic, depressive state, all Abi has ever wanted is a family. So when Abi meets Stu and falls in love, and a surprise pregnancy results in her moving to his native Australia, she dives headfirst. There, as a lonely young mother, she meets Phil, an older lady who has raised her own family but is mired in grief following the death of her husband. The two embark on an unlikely friendship that takes unexpected twists and turns.Imagine the warmth of Monica McInerney, the excruciating awkwardness of Offspring and the wit of Liane Moriarty, all rolled into one delightful, warm, funny and totally endearing novel about families – the ones we have, and the ones we want – and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Do you know, I suspect they do. Writing is hard. Not laboring-in-the-salt-mines hard, but as something we choose, it can be the purest agony. Far less a form of therapy, as people sometimes say, than something that sends you into therapy.

Mason pulls off something extraordinary in this huge-hearted novel, alchemising an unbearable anguish into something tender and hilarious and redemptive and wise, without ever undermining its gravity or diminishing its pain…It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud.” THE GUARDIANMason is brilliant on family, its eye-rolling absurdities and its deep hurts. Martha’s drunken, bohemian mother is a sculptor who ignores her husband and her two daughters; when the girls were young, she would throw parties where she could be extraordinary in front of extraordinary strangers, because it was “not enough to be extraordinary to the three of us”. Her kind, self-effacing father is a failed poet “whose desire to help me had always exceeded his ability”.

I loved You Be Mother and found it to be a delightful read that took me off to another world and made me look forward to the hours I could spend reading. Sometime laugh-out-loud funny, other times sad, this was a warm, insightful, bittersweet and very poignant book about families that I cannot recommend highly enough. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it!It is 10.37pm. I’ve been sitting at my desk for, let’s see, coming on four hours since the dinner dishes were washed and put away, the laundry folded and the children encouraged up to their bedrooms. A full day’s work of the paid kind has been done. This is the night shift. Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, to whose work this book will inevitably (but fairly) be compared, Meg Mason has an innate understanding of the comic power of sadness and how humour can be used to mask one’s reality….SORROW AND BLISS shines as a piece of fiction that makes explicit all the joys and afflictions of 21st-century life” BOOKTOPIA Rare and delightful . . . A beautifully crafted novel about female relationships. I couldn't put this book down' All the stars for this affectionate study on mothers and their children (mostly daughters). Abi, of a troubled upbringing, falls pregnant to Stu, Aussie uni student, so they decide to make a go of it in Sydney. New to parenting (weren’t we all), Abi’s only experience is with her hoarder mother; until she meets Stu’s mum - the intimidating and disapproving Elaine ‘She emphasised the E, as though sadly accustomed to people making too short of that improtant first syllable. E-laine. She had a narrow frame, neat bosom, and a coarse, ferociously brushed plume of hair. Its short sides and rounded top put Abi in mind of a toilet brush.’ Sharp yet humane, andjaw-droppingly funny, this isthe kind of novel you will want to press into the hands of everyone you know. Mason has an extraordinary talent for dialogue and character, and her understanding of how much poignancy a reader can take is profound.A masterclasson family,damage and the bonds of love:as soon as I finishedit, Istarted again.” JESSIE BURTON, author of THE MINIATURIST

If this makes the novel sound grim or self-absorbed, nothing could be further from the truth. Sorrow and Bliss has been justly compared to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag: both perform that peculiar miracle of making us care deeply, desperately even, for a character who does unforgivable things. It is also very funny. Like Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows, another masterclass in the fierce, exasperating, overwhelming force of sisterly love, it finds humour in the darkest of situations. It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud.One of the features of the novel that will have book clubs reaching for more wine is Mason’s decision not to reveal Martha’s eventual diagnosis but to refer to it, obliquely, as two dashes. Mason had reasons: she was worried about naming a real condition and fictionalising some of the symptoms; she didn’t want her book to be shoe-horned as being based on a specific mental illness; and mainly she was concerned about misrepresenting others’ real-life experience. There must be so much collective struggle. Do you know what I mean? In all the paintings, and all the art that’s been created. I think it just made me feel better when I was looking at it, thinking, everybody who tries to make something is going to have an awful time of it, at some point.” We had a long champagne-fuelled come-to-jesus conversation where we said it’s not working,” Milne tells me before my lunch with Mason. “I said, you know it’s not good, it’s not working. I think you should put it away and give yourself a break and decide what you want to do, either junk it or start again from scratch. Meg just went away, went very quiet, and I think wept.” The loneliness, isolation and grief throughout is heartbreaking but the moments of belonging and healing make up for this. The difference between those characters who have family vs those who desire family creates a real contrast which also tugs on the heart strings quite a bit.