“A bomb went off in her brain” at eighteen

Mental illness is a difficult topic around which to center a novel. It would be all too easy to end up with a one-note portrayal of the sufferer which simply evokes sympathy, or leaves the reader relieved that they themselves are not the sufferer. “Sorrow and Bliss” avoids such obvious pitfalls, and is a sharp, clever, if not always sympathetic picture of an unusual person who just happens to suffer from a serious mental illness.

Martha, the detached, troubled, and bitingly mean protagonist of this book, is one of two very close sisters.

My sister’s name is Ingrid. She is fifteen months younger than me. [..] She is pregnant with her fourth child; when she texted to say it was another boy, she sent the eggplant emoji, the cherries and the open scissors. She said “Hamish is non-figuratively getting the snip.”

Growing up, people thought we were twins.

Despite apparent similarities, at the start of this novel, their lives have gone in two very different directions. Martha is forty, married to Patrick who ‘left two days after the party. Ingrid, just as edgy and sardonic, is settled into suburban life. Martha and Ingrid have had an unusual childhood with a mother who is a ‘minorly important’ sculptor :

She makes birds, the menacing, oversized variety, out of repurposed materials. [..]Patrick said, “I honestly think your mother has never met extant physical matter she couldn’t repurpose.” He was not being unkind. Very little in my parents’ home functions according to its original remit.

and a father who is an unsuccessful poet:

His first poem was published in The New Yorker when he was nineteen. […] It was also the last poem he ever published.

The family functions financially because of their Aunt Winsome, who “married money instead of a male Sylvia Plath”. Martha has had a tumultuous childhood, with periodic separation of her parents, a detached mother who drank increasing amounts, and wild parties involving vaguely artistic people. Christmases were spent with Winsome and family. At sixteen, Martha first met Patrick, a friend of Winsome’s son Oliver.

That was the last Christmas before a little bomb went off in my brain. The end, hidden in the beginning.

On the morning of my French A level I woke up with no feeling in my hands and arms. I was lying on my back and there were already tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. […] I could not stop shaking.

I stayed there for days, coming down for food or the bathroom, and eventually just the bathroom. I could not sleep at night or stay awake during the day.

This is the first of many such episodes for Martha. At first her mother is sympathetic, but later annoyed. Her father is quietly supportive, taking her to doctors. The parties stopped. Years pass, with ups and downs, marriage, divorce and brief jobs, all described with the same dark sardonic, wry tone.

I should state upfront that this is a searingly honest portrayal of an often unsympathetic character. Martha is apparently self-absorbed, sharp and mean, even to her devoted husband Patrick (whose devotion always remains somewhat mystifying, given the way he is treated). She has a father and sister who are intensely supportive. She has a good friend who lends her an apartment in Paris where she stays for years. She takes all this, quite for granted, and resents it bitterly when one or the other person fails to live up to her expectations of support.

The author very nicely lays out the effect of a mental illness on the family and friends of the sufferer. Certainly everyone around Martha feels the shock of the exploding bomb. As with her mother, everyone is sympathetic at first, Ingrid most of all. No one, including Martha, knows why she is like this, and eventually person pulls back, perhaps for their own sanity.

This is the worst thing Patrick has ever said to me. “Sometimes I wonder if you actually like being like this.”

The author chose to leave unidentified the specific mental illness that Martha suffer from, and uses a long dash when it is named by the doctor.

“Has anyone ever mentioned ____ to you, Martha? […] As a condition, ____ is not well understood.

This choice I think, detracted significantly from the latter half of the novel, and felt like a letdown. While it’s certainly conceivable that Martha could be mis-diagnosed for years and treated with an unsuccessful variety of medication, it seems much less likely in the complex world of mental illness that one doctor could magically diagnose her on a single visit, and give her a prescription that largely solves all her problems. I found myself thinking that if it were that easy, a single cause with a single treatment, surely one of the previous doctors would have identified the illness. The author elides these problems by stating, at the end of the novel:

The medical symptoms described in the novel are not consistent with any actual mental illness.

The mental illness portrayed in this novel is more serious, leaving the protagonist unable to function much of the time, and thus this novel is necessarily dark, with only a mildly encouraging uptick at the end. This puts it in a different realm from, say, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine, both novels in which the protagonist finds a way to function with their unusual personality in a world that is not always accommodating. Here, Martha’s life is such that the word ‘Bliss’ in the title seems out of place. And yet it is described with an honesty and dry sarcasm that is memorable, and makes me want to look out for Meg Mason’s next novel.