Meg Mason
What does a day in the life of Meg Mason look like?
Oh my goodness, to an outside observer, like I am on a prison timetable. I get up at the same time, eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch, if I’m writing, I wear variations of the same thing every day so I don’t have to do choosing; an hour of yard time, which is walking the dog, and terrible dinners, although I make them, and lights out weirdly early.
It’s just that if you’re a writer, no one cares if you write or not, so you have to care very much and when you work alone, you have to be your own warden. Whenever I … parole myself, just to extend the metaphor beyond what it can take, agreeing to lunch or something, I am so anxious in anticipation of the lost time, and agitated all the way through, and riven with guilt afterwards, it’s best if I just stay in and do the work.
Your website is a cabinet of curiosities, mainly the Pinboard - what does something / someone have to do / be to make it up there?
It has to be funny, beautiful or sad. I think those might be my only values as a person. All of it slowly and randomly accreted over the writing of Sorrow and Bliss, but I could see at the end that, collectively, it’s the essence of the book. As soon as I had finished though, I took it all down because it felt like it was just of that time.
I’m starting another book, or edging up to the starting of one, and I hope the same thing will happen but so far the only thing on there is a line from a Victoria Wood monologue that says, ‘did I not offer you a fork, Clint?’ It means nothing but makes me die of joy every time I read it.
What do you think it is about Sorrow and Bliss that’s given you international acclaim?
I have absolutely no idea because it was started and mostly written in secret, after I failed at a previous manuscript and gave up fiction forever, in my mind, feeling I’d come to the end of my ability. So everything in it was just for me, whatever I found funny, beautiful and sad. Maybe that is why. Or, maybe because I felt that sort of ecstatic anger and abandon that comes with the end of everything and not caring about anything anymore, it seems more urgent and real to readers than previous work, that was written very carefully and earnestly and consciously and a bit with a market in mind, which is apparently death to art.
The best thing is, the fact that it was always just for me meant I wasn’t anxious about how it might be received, or worried if people liked it or not, because even if it had sold three copies, I wouldn’t be able to consider it a failure - the writing of it was such a joyful and rehabilitative experience, it had already served its purpose.
What books do you currently have on your TBR pile?
Four of my absolutely favourite writers have new books out all in the first half of this year. I am so excited, Max Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon and George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain are both out already, then Rachel Cusk’s Second Place in May and Edward St. Aubyn’s Double Blind is June.
Before I’m allowed to start the Porter I am making myself finish The Short History of Europe by Simon Jenkins. His previous two, a short history of London, and of England, basically read themselves, but this one is much more uphill – so much Byzantine/Ottoman Empire to be got through – but my completist mentality won’t let me read 2.5 books of a trilogy.
What books have you read in the past that may have influenced your writing?
I first read Owls Do Cry in university and remember being obliterated by its beauty and brilliance. Because I was so late to the party, as a reader – I didn’t read books voluntarily until I was 18 or so – I’ve never felt like I have time to reread things, there’s too much still to catch up on. But I got it out again, for some reason, just after I finished Sorrow and Bliss and I could see how much it must have soaked in.
Everything I’m preoccupied with as a writer - home and madness, sisters and water – are in it. And her punctuation system, or not-system, is amazing, like she is just not having it where rules are concerned. And I wonder if, maybe, some subconscious memory of that made me feel like I could invent my methods for conveying dialogue, and that is the thing that gives Sorrow and Bliss its particular tone – the way people just say things, half in, half out of quotations or not in them at all.
Can you tell us about the research you did for Sorrow and Bliss to be able to capture Martha’s illness so vividly?
I don’t think it was research so much as remembering, hauling up everything I’d ever read from the canon of, as it were, female lunacy – as well as Frame, so much Woolf and Plath during university, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore. Although I did labour through journal articles, it’s how mental illness feels and how other people feel towards someone with mental illness that I wanted to understand and describe, rather than causes and cures and things, and that is all to be found in fiction.
What parts of Sorrow and Bliss did you find the easiest to write and, while we’re here, the most challenging and why?
I am so sorry, I can’t bear authors who say this and make it sound so effortless, but it did sort of just come out, especially Ingrid and Martha’s talking. Although it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t spent that preceding year at my desk with nothing coming out except tears so please don’t hate me.
The hardest part was being as selfish as I needed to be to do it and the relentless guilt that went with it. That sounds completely ridiculous – as though, I’m just such a naturally selfless, giving person, it’s torture to put myself first. It isn’t that, but saying no to everything and everyone, and only doing the bare minimum and putting your work ahead of your friends and often your family, letting the burden fall on other people, isn’t generally encouraged of women or considered a virtue by women. But it was the only way I could do this thing that did mean so much to me. And truthfully it was the only thing I wanted to be doing as soon as I started.
What do you do to get in the mood to write?
Fear. Or maybe a combination of fear, obligation and financial imperative? I would love it if I only had to write when I felt like it, but it’s my job and if I don’t do it, they will make me get a real job in an office. So I’ve learned how to write even when I feel like I would genuinely rather be sitting in the back row of an Intercity Bus going through the Manawatu Gorge, eating a suspicious kebab, wearing slightly damp jeans and a too-hot turtleneck, next to a smoker who wants to chat.
You’re allowed to invite five people to your dinner table, who are you inviting?
Victoria Wood. Mary Queen of Scots. Caitlin Moran. The historian Antonia Fraser who I was briefly obsessed with over summer. And Nancy Mitford, because obviously it would be lovely if she could come, but as exciting if she didn’t want to because she had cards made up, for the purpose of declining things, which said Miss NANCY MITFORD is unable to do as you ask.
She is my inspiration, in writing as in life, I literally want to order 50,000 cards from Vistaprint that say Miss Meg Mason one hundred per cent would, be she is super-super-tired.
What music do you have on in the background at this soirée?
Gosh, a Spotify playlist called Acoustic Friday Night Dinner Party Chill with Living/Dead Female Legends. I just don’t know what would be on it, apart from all of Dolly Parton.