In her column “Rage on the Page,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books about anger in women’s literature.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

One line can sum up Meg Mason’s “Sorrow and Bliss”: “It’s a bit sad and a bit funny. Like life.”

“Sorrow and Bliss” is the story of  a woman who has everything she needs to be okay — a supportive husband, a job that vaguely resembles creative fulfillment, a family that loves her in their own strange, prickly ways — and still, she cannot get out of bed. It’s a story of mental illness so deeply worn into the grooves of a woman’s life that when you meet her, you aren’t meeting someone in the midst of a crisis. You’re meeting someone who has built an entire identity on top of a crisis.

The woman in question is Martha Friel. She is 40, whip-smart, semi-employed and unraveling. Her husband Patrick leaves her in the first few pages, and we go backward from there. Or sideways. Time isn’t entirely linear in “Sorrow and Bliss,” because neither is the experience of living with mental illness that — like a party crasher — just never quite leaves. 

“It was not a good year for me,” Martha says dryly, “but I’m beginning to understand that no one had a good year.” 

It’s important to note that Mason never names Martha’s diagnosis, referring to it only as “—.” It’s not just a literary device but an existential point: for Martha, diagnosis is never the answer. It’s a placeholder, a word that doesn’t heal the people around her or explain why she says devastating things even when she doesn’t mean to. In “Sorrow and Bliss,” mental illness is not a monologue or a crisis. It’s something threaded through every laugh, every ruined dinner, every interaction that should have gone better.

 “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine,” Martha thinks. “That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change.” 

This is the novel’s engine: contradiction. Martha’s voice is what makes it run. Sardonic, brittle and unexpectedly warm, she narrates her own collapse and its aftermath with a style that’s both darkly hilarious and quietly heartbreaking. Her relationship with Patrick — the childhood friend she marries after a series of poor decisions and worse lovers — is rendered with particular devastation. There is no grand betrayal, no explosive argument. He simply reaches the end of what he can give.

“[Patrick] said, ‘No, Martha, I mean I can’t do this anymore,’” Martha narrates. “I said, ‘Do what?’ And he said, ‘This.’ I said, ‘Be more specific.’ He said, ‘Be with you.’”

That line lands like a punch, and then the story keeps walking. This is “Sorrow and Bliss” at its finest: refusal to wallow, refusal to offer easy catharsis, but also refusal to look away from the fact that things are very, very wrong.

The sadness is cumulative, not dramatic. It accrues like mold in the corners of a beautiful room.

And “Sorrow and Bliss” is funny, yes, but not in a casual, quirky way. It’s funny in the way real people are when they’ve learned to use self-deprecation as a shield. Martha weaponizes humor with surgical precision. She cuts herself with it — and the reader, too.

Among her quips: “I have never understood why people think of champagne as celebratory rants rather than medicinal.” 

Moreover, the novel’s family dynamics are masterful — Mason writes the kind of emotionally constipated British family that communicates love through cruelty and neglect through politeness. Martha’s mother is a failed sculptor who swings between cruel sarcasm and quiet despair. Her father, a poet, is so gently absent he almost disappears from the page. The one constant in Martha’s life is her sister Ingrid, whose fierce loyalty and deadpan delivery is one of the book’s great pleasures.

 “You can’t leave someone just because they’re difficult,” Ingrid says. 

 “You can,” Martha says. “They do.”

Unlike most books that chronicle mental illness, “Sorrow and Bliss” is not a redemption tale. It doesn’t offer neat lessons or inspirational monologues. It lets Martha be cruel and selfish and brutally honest; allows her pain to exist without being sanitized. But what it does offer — subtly, generously — is possibility. 

 “I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved,” Martha narrates. “I have felt alone but I have never been alone.”

And that’s what makes “Sorrow and Bliss” remarkable: not its depiction of breakdown, but the quiet, almost imperceptible suggestion that a life doesn’t have to be healed to be worth living. That sorrow can sit beside bliss. That Martha — sharp-tongued, self-defeating, unbearably human — deserves the dignity of continuing anyway. Not because she’s fixed, not because she’s better, but because she’s still here. 

And sometimes, that’s the whole point.