I got my copy of Sorrow and Bliss from the surprise book exchange at my book club. I found my book club bliss and it is with great sorrow that I’ve had to withdraw my subscription this week and won’t be attending again.
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
Language : English
Paperback : 368 pages
ISBN-10 : 1474622992
ISBN-13 : 978-1474622998
Dimensions : 19.8 x 3 x 12.8 cm
The Blurb
Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets.
So why is everything broken? Why is Martha – on the edge of 40 – friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?
Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe – as she has long believed – there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.
Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix – or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.
My Review of Sorrow and Bliss
I found this book to be a page turner. I particularly liked that it was written in short extracts, so if you had to put it down it was never in the middle of a long rhetoric or storyline. Over all the book is muddled and all over the place but it also gives you the story straight. That sounds contradictory but that’s exactly what Martha (the main character) was.
It’s quite obvious from the start that she suffers from some mental illness and goes through her life struggling with it. Her first husband backs out on her first meltdown and annuls the marriage.
Her relationships with her family are described in detail. It’s obvious that despite her illness she is surrounded by love but she finds it so difficult to see it.
It seems like her second husband Patrick is the one for her, but it’s obvious that he finds it all overwhelming too.
I think the book is good because it gives an insight to mental illness and how it can affect not on the life of the person with it but those who love them too. If you have never met or known anyone with a mental illness you may not understand the book so well. However, it also has a lot of emotion, family drama and even humour. So, a good book for everyone, which is why it has won so many awards. It’s going on my book challenge for a book that’s won a literally award.
If there was one thing that bugged me it was when she finally gets a diagnosis and it’s literally written in the book as _ _ I found that a tad annoying. At the back there is a disclaimer
“The medical symptoms described in the novel are not consistent with a genuine mental illness. The portrayal of treatment, medication and doctors’ advice is wholly fictional.”
As I was reading I filled in the blanks with a mental illness that I am familiar with, but I guess it would have been unethical for the author to state this in a fictional story.
Overall, I enjoyed reading about Martha and her family and how they deal with everything.
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