This is an absolute stunner of a book. It's only just March and I know already that this will be high up in my top ten reads of 2021. It's dark and funny and beautifully written. I am obsessed by Martha and Ingrid and I'd like there to be a sequel or a prequel or Ingrid's story or anything to carry this on it was so good. It's incredibly well written and really reminded me of Fleabag in the absolute best way as I was reading it. Martha, the protagonist is complicated, difficult and at times disturbing but you find yourself rooting for her anyway. All the characters are beautifully drawn. I love that none of them feel like bit parts, wheeled on to make the plot work. Any one of them could have a book of their own. I love that the family dynamics were so real and relatable in so many ways. Just wonderful. I can't find enough good things to say about it to be honest.

I absolutely LOVED this book. Witty , heartbreaking and hopeful. The characters are so beautifully written that we are captivated from page one and drawn in to Martha’s world with all of its sorrow and bliss.
It’s the kind of book you just want everybody to read because it deserves the widest possible audience. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

This book has floored me. It is the story of Martha and the impact that her mental health has on her life, family relationships, career and marriage. It is witty, droll, honest, full of sharp observations and heartbreaking. I absolutely loved it and will be thinking about it for quite some time.

When rereading her diary she says “I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties. Patrick’s goodness. My striking unlikeability and attention-seeking punctuation.“ This sums up this book better than I could. I think anyone who loved Fleishman is in Trouble will also love this. I know already that this will be one of my favourite reads of 2021.

As I was reading this I kept asking myself how can a book essentially about mental and marital breakdown be so consistently funny. That said, it also moved me to tears on at least one occasion (no hyperbole). It takes a gamble by starting with the breakup then going back to Martha's childhood as she looks back on her life trying to understand how things reached this point – this structure is neatly encapsulated in the quotation from Ralph Ellison highlighted for her by her father, "The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead". There is a lovely surrounding cast beginning with her sister Ingrid (who believes in oversharing - never have I enjoyed quite so many mentions of mucus plugs in just a few paragraphs) and Martha's adorable mentor/friend Peregrine. The only character who didn't ring true (but maybe I've just been lucky enough never to meet any art brokers) was her narcissistic borderline sociopath first husband Jonathan.
The unrelenting bleakness of large swathes of the narrative is relieved both by Martha's scathing humour and by moving moments of tenderness - I'm thinking in particular of her interactions with her nephews, the scene in which she observes a woman breastfeeding in a café – "she would drop her face enough to kiss the baby's hand that had a tiny grip on the edge of her shirt" – but also the way in which her mother - whom I loathed for about three-quarters of the book then admired open-mouthed for the rest - steps up when Martha finally receives her diagnosis, supporting her with daily telephone calls. Very often we show our love through little gestures, meaningless to the casual observer, and this is something described on numerous occasions in the book (the sisters reaching for each other's hands under the table as their mother misbehaves at a dinner, Martha's aunt deliberately knocking over her glass of wine as her drunken mother is about to embark upon some embarrassing anecdote or the "entire Christmas lunch in miniature" prepared for Martha by her aunt). Like another reviewer, I felt echoes of Fleabag - in its emotional honesty, in the close yet conflicted relationship between the sisters, and much more. I especially loved Ingrid's rants about being unseen after having children ("Why can't it [hypothetical newspaper article about her getting hit by a car] say a human who incidentally has a baby was killed at a notorious intersection?"). It also has one of the most convincing bad sex scenes I've ever read followed by the perfect description of the feeling after good sex. The writing is extremely taut, Meg makes every word count as in this scene describing Patrick shaving off his beard, which he did "in humorous increments – Charles Darwin to suspected attacker via Mr Bennet, BBC adaptation". In fact, I wasn't surprised to read that she started out as a "writer of newspapers". After coming full circle, the book thankfully leaves us with a glimmer of hope: "how two people who have ruined each other's lives can be together again"

A heartbreaking but wonderful book. Martha grows up knowing that there is something wrong with her, which is never spelt out but is like a bomb going off in her head. Her relationship with her mother breaks down, which was what drew me to Martha, how she felt misunderstood by everyone around her. I felt nothing but compassion for Martha and her family. Although the diagnosis Martha finally receives is not explicitly stated, and the author takes great care in this I think, the suffering and distress will be familiar to anyone who has had mental health issues.
I don’t want to paint this as a bleak book however, as there are many humorous moments in the book, mainly between Martha and her sister, who is perhaps the person who she is closest to and understands her the best. A poignant meditation on mental health, motherhood and relationships.

This debut blew me away! Meg Mason has produced a tender and delicate novel about female mental health and self sabotage, whilst also being about love and all it’s intricacies.
This novel is incredibly sharp, funny and captivating. A must read!

It can be difficult to review a book like this without coming across as the absolute worst - using phrases like "it was so beautiful and so raw and so painful and exquisite and modern and undefinable and dark and bright all at once" but here we are. If fiction is the thing that lets us live in other peoples heads for a little while, then this is the best version of that. And, as someone who struggles with recurring and varied bouts of madness, I found so many things in these pages that perfectly articulated things previously indefinable.
In short, it is the story of a woman with mental health issues and the people who love her and her growing sabotage of that love. Not in short, it is an acute retelling of the internal sorrow and bliss of life using mental illness as a way to explore the way we treat ourselves and each other when we think we might be the best or worst person alive and actually, we're all just somewhere in the middle, extraordinarily ordinary and not at the same time, doing our best, whilst navigating our own internal universes and trying not to mess everything up.

Glorious. Martha Russell Friel sees herself as fundamentally unlikeable, but I couldn't put this book down. After winding up a forty-three day marriage to a cokehead art dealer, Martha now lives with her husband Patrick in an 'Executive Home' in an Oxford cul-de-sac, where she writes a funny food column for Waitrose magazine and does very little else. Martha keeps returning to the bohemian house she grew up in on Goldhawk Road, trying to unravel why her mind works differently to everyone else's and why it has been trying to kill her since her teens. A crisis around her fortieth birthday and finding a doctor who diagnoses her correctly helps Martha to pick up the threads of her life and move on. I loved Martha's family, particularly Patrick - who loves her from first meeting her as a teenager visiting for Christmas - and her sister Ingrid, incorrigible and usually pregnant, who communicates mainly in Drunk Kate Moss and Sad Will Ferrell memes. Despite the sorrowful subject matter, the reading is bliss.

Never has a title been more Apt. This is a beautiful story of a woman and the men throughout her adulthood that have caused both to make her feel sorrow and bliss. An interesting depiction of someone dealing and how others react to mental health difficulties. I loved the relationship between the two sisters.

I started this a while ago,and almost put it down as a DNF.
then I picked it up to read in a spare half hour.
That half hour turned into a lot longer,as I finished the whole thing.
Theres a lot of love in this book,the romantic type,sibling love,and just family relationships.
The bond between the two sisters is particularly lovely.
It also reads like a very good description of what I imagine mental health issues might feel like. As if you're just wrong. Something broken.
An absolute star of the book for me is Patrick,a charater who I'll remember for a long time.
This books going to be very talked about.

My heart was broken by this beautiful book and I am bereft now i have finished it. I loved Martha, I loved Patrick, I love Winnie - I just wanted to stay with them all forever.
Meg Mason is an incredible writer who made her characters so alive I felt I could touch them. Five of the biggest glowing stars for this AMAZING debut.

I think Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason will be one of my books of the year. It's everything I like in a novel - sad, funny, honest. I especially fell in love with Martha's father and her sister.

I actually ended up reading this in physical copy - as was lucky enough to receive from the publisher. This was a really special book . You know when a title absolutely nails it - this one certainly does. There is indeed much sorrow. At the heart of the novel is Martha, a woman with a slightly dysfunctional family, a troubled marriage and some major mental health issues. But there is also deep joy in the pages of this book - the relationship with her sister is perfectly portrayed. Her friendship with her old boss is perfect, and there is real humour and laughter throughout. Perfectly balanced sorrow and bliss.
I didn't want this to end. And there was a real learning for me in this book. It is not about how a story ends. It is not about a book ending. We shouldn't think of needing to rush to the end of a book to see how it ends as being the pinnacle of book reading. There doesn't have to be a wish to get to the end. This was the opposite - I never wanted it to end. And actually should that be book perfection - a story you do never want to end - because that way there is always hope, there is always life and love continuing.
I will be recommending this far and wide. Perfectly flawed characters who will stay with me a long long time.

Took me a little while to get into this story of the horrors of mental illness and the dysfunctional relationships that can be a consequence of it because at first the characters, especially Martha the narrator, were all pretty unpleasant one way or another. It’s very well written though and is a quick read written in short bursts rather than distinct chapters so all of a sudden it clicked with me and I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished it. Seeing the development of Martha from childhood to middle age as she tries to cope with a recurring mental illness that doctors fail to properly treat was a joy if a chilling indictment of our attitude to the problem.

This is a very easy story to read, as you go through the story you will find gut wrenching problems that are dealt with. The torment is there for everyone to see but is written in well. There are many laughs in this book, which seems weird when there is so much pain but Meg has written it brilliantly so that they both work well alongside each other. The characters all felt real and I didn't want the story to end. It is a little different but it is a really good story.