A Night In with Meg Mason and Pandora Sykes
Join Meg Mason in conversation with Pandora Sykes to mark the publication of Sorrow and Bliss
This event is now available to watch on demand until 22nd July.
If you have any questions, please email [email protected]
Spiky, sharp and told with heart breaking tenderness, Meg Mason’s dazzling novel about modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness with all its highs, lows, humour and misery.
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 in West London to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, potty-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.
In conversation with journalist and broadcaster Pandora Sykes, Meg will explore the inspiration behind the novel that she has been wanting to write all her life. She’ll also touch on the themes of the book: marriage, mental illness, sisters, stubborn, persistent love and starting again.
‘Meg Mason writes about the slow bleed of life-long depression with candour, humour and stark precision. Sorrow and Bliss is about what happens when your illness pushes everyone away - leaving you with only the sorest parts of yourself for company. It will, as the title suggests, shatter your heart, before mending it with infinite love. I've never read anything like it and will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know.’ - PANDORA SYKES