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

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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 Abi has landed in Sydney with her three-week old son in tow and no idea what the future holds. Behind her in London is all that’s left of her family: her self-destructive mother and the depressing former council flat they shared. Her baby’s father, Stu – an Aussie architecture student who swept into her life during his few months as an exchange student – is woefully unprepared for fatherhood. His officious mother Elaine is terrifyingly judgemental. And although Stu’s father, Roger, is shaping up to be a quiet ally, it’s not until Abi meets the well-to-do, charming and high-handed Phyllida that things improve. As Phil and Abi grow closer, it seems like the older woman is the mother figure Abi longs for. 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! Ever since I read "Sorrow and Bliss" I understood that not only Meg Mason was one of my new favorite authors but also that she was one of the greatest, brightest and sharpest writers of this day and age.

SORROW AND BLISS is a thing of beauty. Astute observations on marriage, motherhood, family, and mental illness are threaded through a story that is by turns devastating and restorative. Every sentence rings true. I will be telling everyone I love to read this book.” SARA COLLINS, author of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON Thank you to Netgalley and HaperCollins Australia for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review. Mason’s refusal to put a name to what ails Martha becomes a defining feature of the novel. Why did she do it? In the aftermath of her disastrous first start, she explains, she had started writing again with no expectations: “It was a post-hope project. It wasn’t for my publisher, I didn’t tell her I was doing it. And I was truly and utterly convinced that no one would ever see it.” She describes feeling “a bit drunk with it, because I didn’t care. It was like making this enormous meal from everything you have in the fridge, with no recipe, just throwing it all in. It just doesn’t matter. And it was the last hurrah.” At the time, she didn’t even conceive of it as a novel about mental health; that material, and the striking and turbulent relationship between Martha and her sister Ingrid entered, she says, almost “without conscious thought”.It] belongs to a lineage of intelligent, witty and inventive novels that interrogate the problem of whether selfhood can survive motherhood, including Jenny Offill’s DEPT. OF SPECULATION and Sheila Heti’s MOTHERHOOD.This all sounds incredibly bleak, but Martha’s sharpness is acerbically funny and compellingly direct and worthy of the frequent comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s FLEABAGand Ottessa Moshfegh’s works.” MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL

At its core, this book transcends class by exposing the often-times lonely, under sung role of mothers. Mason’s book, is, all told, a love letter to motherhood in all its complexity. An impressive debut novel that finds the biggest drama in the smallest of actions.

This was a great book. The whole time I was thinking, Jesus, Abi cannot catch a break! It goes to show how impactful social determinants of health really are. Abi was set up for failure...her sister died, her dad died, and she was barely parented and raised by her mother who was as good as dead. This all contributed to really poor decision making and falling for to the world's shittiest boyfriend (not kidding) and getting pregnant accidentally. Because of this, Abi makes the decision to move from England to Australia to be closer to him. When I spoke to her for Say It Again in a Nice Voice she talked about one of the hardest things about being a new mother was being the "mistress of my own time". It is, she says, a work of imagination; she has not experienced the same issues as Martha. But she is adamant that she wanted to explore the territory, arguing that the estimates of the proportion of people impacted by mental illness – she mentions one in four – seem “ridiculously” low: “When I look around my group of friends and my family, I can’t see a person who hasn’t been touched by it in some way.” Rarely have the excoriating effects of mental illness been articulated quite so beautifully – as heartbreaking as it’s funny.” RED MAGAZINE In Meg Mason’s almost eerily accomplished SORROW AND BLISS, the narrator Martha has suffered from mental illness since her teens. Yet, without ever playing down her pain, the result is often disconcertingly funny.” THE SPECTATOR

Mason's bleakly comic [US] debut examines with pitiless clarity the impact of the narrator's mental illness on her closest relationships…Mason brings the reader into a deep understanding of Martha's experience without either condescending to her or letting her off too easily. While we as readers have the luxury of finding her observations funnier than she does, we're not so far distanced from her that we can't appreciate both her strengths and her weaknesses. An astute depiction of life on the psychic edge.” KIRKUS 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.’ Publisher Catherine Milne SORROW AND BLISS is a brilliantly faceted and extremely funny book about depression that engulfed me in the way I'm always hoping to be to be engulfed by novels. While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realised that I wanted to send it to everyone I know." ANN PATCHETT What do you do, when you find the perfect family, and it's not yours? A charming, funny and irresistible novel about families, friendship and tiny little white lies.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Abi is a Social Work undergraduate, working part-time in Student Services to help out with the stretched family finances, when she falls pregnant to larger-than-life Australian architecture student Stu. They decide to make a go of it and Abi travels to Sydney with newborn Jude, where the small family is set up in Stu's parents' tiny investment property flat in Cremorne Point, next door to the Woolnough house. Meeting at the local swimming pool, recently widowed Phil (Phyllida) Woolnough is charmed by the lonely, jittery young British mum, and decides to take her under her capable wing. At first the need seems to come almost entirely from Abi's side - alone with her baby more than she should be, while Stu works at the local pub and continues his studies - but after a minor fall Phil comes to rely more and more on Abi for help and company. The relationship between the two women grows stronger and more equal, until a transgression threatens to destroy it.

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.” Every character is extremely flawed yet very loveable. There are characters of every age and stage of life. Some have their shit sorted (mostly) and others are clutching at straws and just hanging in there. As we get to know the characters we become invested in many stories and are seeing everyone’s perspectives without an inch of confusion of who is who or what was going on.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. 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. Abi embodies a new generation moving beyond these outdated cultural norms, while still nodding towards the struggles faced by those born into disadvantage – and the millennial gentrification of once working class urban areas. Does every writer find writing as difficult as this? Does producing effortless prose always require the most blistering grunt work and bloodyminded endurance? Surely, Ian McEwan doesn’t sit in front of his screen all day and end up with nothing? Do Barbara Trapido or Nina Stibbe produce such hilarious novels despite the fits weeping brought on by the sheer overwhelmingness of it all? One of the many triumphs of the journalist Meg Mason’s second novel is that it is both fantastically dark and almost unbearably funny, so funny that you often have to put it down for a bit and laugh, out loud, sometimes to the point of tears. Then just as you’re laughing the hardest, Mason breezily fires off another little arrow that hits its target with such accuracy that you’re left reeling.” INDIA KNIGHT, THE SUNDAY TIMES