The book opens with Martha's husband Patrick leaving her two days after her fortieth birthday. A sweet, tender, rips-your-heart-out-of-your-chest love story. I really do know how it feels to feel like you're just failing at being human and how wonderful and liberating it is to find answers.īut also, this book is a love story. 'But the thing about labels is, they're useful when they're right because,' I carried on through her attempt at interruption, 'because then you don't give yourself the wrong ones, like difficult or insane, or psychotic or a bad wife.' From now on, I may just refer commenters to this book instead of trying to explain my problem with the neurotypical Theo's anti-label, anti-diagnosis stance for his clearly neurodivergent son. It felt like a healing balm after I had such a negative reaction to the widely-loved Bewilderment. Sorrow and Bliss is, essentially, about mental illness, the debilitating and relationship-destroying effect it can have on a person's life, and the importance of a correct diagnosis and treatment plan.

I admit this list needs a catchier title. Sorrow and Bliss is the latest addition to the short list of 'books that make me feel like laughing and crying in equal measure'. Eleanor Oliphant is one that did it for me. It's not often that books this charming and irreverently funny are also as sad, moving and hard-hitting. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. Maybe there is a different story to be written, if Martha can work out where to begin. It feels like the end but maybe, by going back, Martha will get to start again. With Patrick gone, the only place Martha has left to go is her childhood home, to live with her chaotic parents, to survive without Ingrid, the sister who made their growing-up bearable, who said she would never give up on Martha, and who finally has. There has been since a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, leaving her changed in a way no doctor or drug could fix then and no one, even now, can explain-why can say she is so often sad, cruel to everyone she loves, why she finds it harder to be alive than other people. But she must now that her loving husband Patrick has just left.īecause there's something wrong with Martha. Now, she lives in a gated community in Oxford that she hates and can't bear to leave. Now, she creates internet content for no one. She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel.

Sorrow and bliss by meg mason