Back in October 2020 a lovely email popped into my inbox via my websites enquiry form complementing me on the bookstore with the name ‘Meg Mason’ attached. I immediately lost my cool and then straight away responded to confirm she was THE Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss. I had just finished, and unoriginally, LOVED Sorrow and Bliss so I politely asked Meg if she wouldn’t mind doing an author Q+A for the website. I sadly never got around to posting this at the time, Bookety was just a couple of months old and I was busy working full time (elsewhere) while learning how to juggle the various complexities of how to run a bookstore in a pandemic where obtaining stock was becoming more and more of a nightmare by the week. It is fair to say Sorrow and Bliss has only grown in popularity since it’s release in 2020 and that this short but fun Q+A still stands as something we are thrilled to be able to share with you.
This book left me with a hangover, and no, not the usual Sunday morning kind, but the kind that only a truly magnificent story can leave you with. The kind where you become so utterly engrossed with the characters, that they become real people, and you start to think of them as friends (I’m not the only one who does this right?). And we all know only a writer oozing with talent can achieve such a feat, and in that case, Meg Mason most definitely qualifies. So please, if you still haven’t read Sorrow & Bliss, do yourself a favour and read this book immediately.drw
Tell us about yourself in two sentences.
Since SORROW AND BLISS came out, I’ve been described all the time as an Australian author and I have lived here for 20 years but I’m actually I’m a very homesick New Zealand one. You can take a writer out of Foxton but….
What influenced you to write SORROW AND BLISS?
Sort of … hysterical despair? Insofar as I had spent all of 2018 writing a novel which I finished and, a few days before it was due, dragged into the trash because it was utterly and irredeemably dreadful - I had known it for months but I just couldn’t bear to admit it. Afterwards, I called my publisher and told her I had tried, so hard, but failed and I didn’t have the wherewithal to try again, even though being a novelist is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. But after two months and so many fits of weeping, I just sat down one day and started writing something, a little picture that had come into my head, which eventually become the first scene of SORROW AND BLISS. Because I really did believe my career was over and no one was ever going to see it, I could write with a sort of mad abandon and it was so, so much fun I couldn’t stop.
Describe your writing spot for us.
A tiny shed that we built in the back yard. As in, so tiny that when I am sitting at my desk, I can touch the walls on either side at the same time. But I don’t think Virginia Woolf said how big the room of one’s own must be to serve its purpose, and I am intensely grateful for a space that is just mine.
Books you've recently read and loved?
I’ve been on a non-fiction spree this year, because I was working on SORROW AND BLISS for the first half of it and when I’m trying to write fiction, reading it can become a sort of technical exercise instead of a form relaxation – rather than sinking blissfully into another author’s work, you’re constantly trying to figure out how they’ve done it, how they’ve progressed time or managed a flashback. I’m catching up on all the glorious novels of 2020 now (DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT by Lucy Ellman, WHO THEY WAS by Gabriel Krauze, and that giant third Mantel) but SAY NOTHING by the New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe was the most astonishing non-fiction book I’ve read this year, or maybe any year. It is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland but told through the life of a single mother of nine who was ‘disappeared’ by the IRA and has never been found. I kept having to remind myself all the way through that it actually is a true story because the details of her life and the circumstances of that time are so unbelievable.
Tell us what reading means to you…
If I think about it for too long, the fact that we only get to live one life seems like such a terrible tragedy. Reading is the only way I get to be a Victorian consumptive, a Tudor monarch and a 1930s London socialite, as well as contemporary working mother who is constantly trying remember if there’s meat in the freezer.
Who are the three people you would love to have dinner with?
If they don’t have to be living, then Nancy Mitford, the comedian Victoria Wood and Elizabeth 1, as long as they all brought something. Or I could make ahead - I don’t want to be in the kitchen the whole time.
