How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S12, Ep8 How to Fail: Meg Mason

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

For the final episode of this season of How To Fail, I bring you the author of one of my favourite books of recent years. She is Meg Mason and her novel, Sorrow & Bliss, was the novel of the summer, lauded by everyone from Ann Patchett to Gillian Anderson via Olivia Wilde who was pictured reading it while on a yacht on holiday with Harry Styles. True facts. Meg, a New Zealander who lives in Sydney, wrote a quintessentially British book that was at once utterly tender and riotously funny, about sisterly love, mental illness, the complexities of marriage, family pain and what it means to be human (complete with references to slag-heaps and a dishevelled Kate Moss). It is STUNNING and if you haven't read it yet, you must.In the meantime, have a listen to this episode which - like Meg's writing - is poignant, humane and true. We talk about failures both creative and personal - how people telling her she had her children too young made her almost believe it, how she regrets writing an 'angry' memoir, and how she fell-out with a childhood friend and almost lost her forever. If you've ever been through a friendship break-up, then this one's for you.I love Meg and I love this episode. It seemed an utterly perfect way to end our season. But, don't worry. We'll be back soon.--You can buy Sorrow & Bliss by Meg Mason here--My new novel, Magpie, is out now. You can order it here.---How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger, because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. During my first post-pandemic holiday this July, I took a novel with me I'd been wanting to read for ages. It made me laugh out loud on my lounger and cry behind my sunglasses. It made me feel seen and understood. It was, quite simply, one of the best novels I've ever read. In fact, I was so moved by sorrow and bliss that I badgered the author's publisher to forward her a gushing fan letter. She replied,

and even that email made me laugh and cry and feel seen and understood. She is the incomparable Meg Mason. I was surprised to learn during the course of our subsequent exchanges that a novel which seemed to me to be so quintessentially British had actually been written by a New Zealander living in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two teenage daughters. Knowing this, the creative feat seemed even more dazzling. But sorrow and bliss almost did not exist. After years as a freelance

journalist for publications including the Financial Times, Vogue and GQ, Mason published a 2012 memoir and then, five years later, her first novel, You Be Mother. She spent a year writing her third book before concluding after 85,000 words that it was, her words, an abject failure. With her confidence shaken, she told her editor she was quitting fiction. But after six weeks, Mason found she couldn't shake a singular image that kept coming into her head. It was the image of a nameless woman eating a canapé. So she wrote it down and kept writing. And that became Sorrow and Bliss, which is now a critically acclaimed global bestseller with a legion of fans,

including Anne Patchett, India Knight and Gillian Anderson. Ostensibly, the novel tells the story of Martha, who has just turned 40 and split up with her husband, Patrick, but the narrative is underpinned by another deep love affair between Martha and her sister, Ingrid. These two relationships are the guiding stars of a book that examines mental health, family trauma, parenthood, and what it means to be human. family trauma, parenthood and what it means to be human. I'm just a noticer of things, Mason writes self-deprecatingly. All I'm saying is here is something I saw once, have you seen this too? Isn't it funny? Isn't it sad? Meg Mason, welcome to How to Fail.

Thank you so much, it's just such a pleasure to be here. That was such a long introduction I'm sorry but there was so much I wanted to say and I wanted to convey a flavor of the book but also how incredible I find it and your writing and you will know that I find it almost impossible to talk about Sorrow and Bliss without bursting into tears so I don't know if I'm going to hold it together during the course of this recording. No, well, it's going to be a total race to the bottom in that case, in terms of who cries first, because I was just writing notes about my failures today and started crying just to be speaking to you and all of those things. So let's just see who cries first.

Okay, great. It's a competition and I'm very competitive, so that's even better. Okay, great. It's a competition and I'm very competitive, so that's even better. One of the many, many glowing reviews I read that so tallied with how I felt about Sorrow and Bliss came from the Sydney Morning Herald, where the reviewer seemed almost like apoplectic with frustration at your brilliance and asked this question, how can something this tender be this dark? And it's a question that I really want to pose to you. Does that tone come naturally? Well, do you know, it's so funny because there's been lots of reviews and that was one of the first. And I will always remember it specifically because I read it to my mother on the phone.

And the second part of it was, how can something this tender be this dark? And how can something this funny be so sad? And I read it to my mother and she went, went darling that's what I've always wondered about you so I think that it must just be somewhat intrinsic I don't know I think because of what you describe in such a lovely way it just sounds so nice the way you tell it because of that failure I just didn't have anything left apart from what was truly sort of core to me do you know all the artifice and pretension and all of those things that had failed me completely just weren't there anymore and so I think I suppose what was ever core to me and what I really thought is what's in

Sorrow and Bliss. This is why I've been so desperate to have you on the podcast because Sorrow and Bliss really is the book born of failure, isn't it? Do you feel that creatively you had to hit rock bottom to produce this work? Oh, completely. I'm always conscious when I talk about it that it isn't, you know, saving lives and all of those sorts of things. But to me, it was desperately important because it is, you know, the one thing that I've always wanted to do and that I sort of, when we get into my failures, I can talk about why it had additional meaning. But, you know, it is a sort of quintessential failure story. But I had to really believe it. You know, I wasn't sort of telling myself, oh, it's all over in a really

dramatic way. It really was all over. You know, I definitely couldn't have written the book that I have without that, because everything came out of it, the tone and the sort of desperation and the visceral, I guess, nature of it. And all of that humor, which is quite dark, was obviously written without fear of anybody reading it and thinking, gosh, this is a bit too dark. So yes, I did have to utterly fail first. And I wonder what book it would have been if my editor had said, no, no, just fix this. You know, I'm eternally grateful that she let me abandon it, because I think a lot of editors would have said, no, you can salvage it, a couple more drafts. And I just think that diabolical book would sort of be sitting on a shelf or actually in a bin

out the front let's be honest with a big sticker on it and we wouldn't have some so I have so much to be grateful for but the funny thing is I can't obviously it isn't on my list of failures because it hasn't ended up that way and the failures that I'm interested in are the ones that aren't redeemed or redeemable. That's great because that's one of the things that sometimes people criticize this podcast for. It's like, why don't you interview a real failure? Someone who hasn't learned anything, who's just really depressed still.

So now I have you. So that's great. Well, there you go. You found me. No, perfect. I'm so happy to fill that role. Do you think that you are an artist of extremes? Do you feel that your best creations come from a place of extremity? Sorren Bliss is my favourite thing that I've

written. And I think that probably it is just the best thing I've written. I don't mean it's the best book in the world. I just mean it's my best book. I suppose I did have to find almost that rage and the desperation. And I think if it wasn't there it could have been quite middling you know it could have just been a story about a woman with a failed marriage and all of those sorts of things but even though it's not autobiographical the part that I really relate to in the sense that I poured it into the character of Martha was just that post-hope feeling that I had when I began it and that she has sort of throughout the book so I suppose I did have to feel that I was absolutely the end of things before I could really find what I was trying to do.

As I say in the introduction you open the book with Martha having just turned 40 and you wrote Sorrow and Bliss in your 40s. Do you think you could have written it earlier or is there something about Sorrow and Bliss that can only come from a place of I guess what I depressingly have to call midlife and I and I love myself in that too. No I mean definitely and I'm so pleased to be in midlife I really really truly love it and it turns out that all of the things that everybody says are sort of true in the sense that you do let go of a huge number of your insecurities and things that mattered awfully just don't matter anymore. One of the loveliest things that anyone said about Sorambliss,

I'm lucky there are so many to choose from, but my agent when I first met her, which was after Sorambliss came out, said it isn't the sort of millennial book. It isn't a Sally Rooney or a Fleabag or any of those things because it is just such a Gen X book. And she said, you know, it's sort of a wise book that would have taken a wise old bird to write it. And I just sort of love that because, I mean, I just feel really lucky if I've acquired any wisdom at all. And I think that if I've

managed to put some in the book as well, I'm really pleased to be able to do that. Because I think the one thing that I struggle with a bit in fiction, you know, modern fiction, and maybe especially fiction by women is that there is a tendency to focus on the mess and the disaster and a woman unraveling and all of those sorts of things but I sort of want to see what comes after that and I know that Martha doesn't completely get there but I'm really interested on what is sort of on the other side of the disastrous failed marriage failed career and all of those things a sort of messy woman which has become not a trope, but I think we're getting close. Yeah. I loved the Gen X aspect of it myself as a borderline Gen Xer millennial. You encapsulate it so well in just the tiny plot details that you have. For instance, Martha and Ingrid constantly exchanging WhatsApp pictures of Kate Moss

looking bedraggled but fabulous in a bikini smoking a fag on a yacht, which I think so many of us of a certain age can relate to that specific era of Kate Moss. I would love to know how you describe Martha and Ingrid. Describe those characters for us in case anyone listening hasn't read Sorrow and Bliss yet. Well from my perspective it's a wish fulfillment situation because I don't have a sister and I think everything that I would imagine and hope a sister would be was poured into the character of Ingrid. She's definitely you know an amalgamation of lots of the relationships that I've had with female friends and all of those sorts of things but I think there's that sort of intimacy and shorthand between them and just that

sense that they are sort of co-survivors of the same really difficult childhood and I think that's something that was intensely beautiful about sibling relationships sisters or brothers and sisters that you were both there or you know however many there were of you you were the only ones there who saw it from the inside. And I think that that sort of breeds something completely irreplaceable, which is what those two have. And I think because the sort of central, I suppose, question of the novel around this, you know,

mystery and mental illness that Martha has, the question that she's trying to work out and everybody else is trying to work out around her is what is really her and what's actually the illness and sort of where does one start and the other end and I think what might happen in a situation where you're caring for somebody with mental illness and you've been doing it for 20 years is that the tendency at some point would just be to become completely fatigued and decide that deep down maybe they could just pull themselves together and you're unable anymore

to give them the benefit of the doubt but I think what Ingrid is is she's the person who always believes Martha and always thinks the best of her and she's the last one to give up on her and you know only comes close to it and so I think that's what that is is that siblings even more than friends are sort of you know they just hopefully can't let you go and I think that's what those two are to each other. And the character of Martha, as you say, that she has an unidentified mental illness that you leave unidentified in what I think is such a brave and beautiful writerly choice. And I was astonished when I came to the end of the book, and I read lots of reviews, to find that there were people who thought it was a book about mental illness. I thought it was a book about what it was to be human. And I felt I related to Martha so deeply.

And I was then surprised to find some people saying, oh, it's a great novel and Martha can be quite unlikable. Because again, I didn't see that at all. I didn't know what that says about me. But I suppose I want to ask you the question that I know you've been asked a million times before about why you didn't put a name to the mental illness that Martha lives with. Well, it wasn't just to annoy people, which I know that is how some people have felt about it. And I obviously can't have a neutral experience of it because I don't know what it would be like. I mean, apart from sort of those towns that aren't mentioned in Jane Austen novels, I don't know what it would be like to strike a redaction, you know, to come across it. in Jane Austen novels, I don't know what it would be like to strike a redaction, you know, to come across it. But there were just so many reasons to do it that was separate. And then

they all coalesced and not naming it was the way to solve all of these problems that were sort of building up. But as soon as I decided to do it, it stopped making sense to ever have put a condition in there. So obviously, I began with one and I wrote around that for a while, but quite quickly got beyond it in terms of the limits of my understanding or my ability to research and really understand it. And then, you know, I was really worried, of course, once the book was going to come out that I wasn't truthfully representing a real condition. I'd put very much a sort of narrative spin on it and I'd taken things out and put things

in in terms of symptoms and, you know, amplified some and reduced others. And so I couldn't live with myself to then say oh this is what it's like and I'm an authority on it and all of those sorts of things but I think overall in a sort of much more you know large-scale perspective it is just because otherwise that is the one thing and the only thing that Martha would be she would just be that illness she would be the illness in the book and the story and on the blurb and on goodreads and on amazon and everywhere it would be the book about Martha and this condition and that's not what I wanted for her and I think you know I've read a lot of novels about women with mental illness and they're all beautiful in their own way and I'm really grateful to you know all the women who've written about it but it isn't always a character who's aspirational on any level.

And I sort of wanted there to be elements of Martha that are really charming and that she's funny and she's obviously beautiful because that's always being reflected back to her. And I felt that to do all of those things, I needed to let everyone see that first, and to not know that about her before we then sort of got down to the core of who she is. And I felt that you were making a deeper point too about how women are sometimes treated by medical professionals and indeed ignored or dismissed even though they're saying something profoundly meaningful that needs to be paid attention to. Was that a conscious decision? No that was one of those amazing things that you don't realize

you've done until somebody tells you and I think additionally in this was one of those amazing things that you don't realize you've done until somebody tells you. And I think additionally, in this case, one of those things that because there is that increasing conversation around medical misogyny in those two incredible books that have come out about sort of, you know, institutional bias against women in medicine, which I find so interesting. But I definitely didn't take that and think I'm going to advance that conversation. And I've, you know, I've got things to say about that. I just think it would be the experience of a woman who had been shuffled through the medical system for 25 years. And if we sort of think that this was maybe mid nineties, that this began for her, I mean, and she was a teenager that was back when teenagers couldn't

have mental illness and, you know, they were just moody and it was when girls were how girls are and all of those sorts of things. And so that's when it began for her and I think it would be really unrealistic and also there'd be no story around and a doctor took her absolutely seriously and didn't write her off as hysterical and medicated her appropriately and it was all good because I think whatever your condition as a female I think it's unfortunate to say that we've all probably felt ourselves to be brushed off or minimized in some way by one of the few terrible doctors because there are so many amazing ones obviously it's so interesting that it wasn't conscious but almost when he came to write about it it was automatic because presumably those are experiences that that a large amount of women do have and I know

you just said there that you didn't think you were necessarily advancing the conversation as a happy byproduct, but you really have advanced the conversation. And most meaningfully for me in terms of fertility, because that is another area of medicine where I think women are often diminished and dismissed. And there is a bit on page 271 of Sorrow and Bliss, which spoke to me so profoundly. And I can't read it out because I will be a mess and also because it gives something away about a specific character. But I just want to thank you for writing that. And at the same time as I'm on the edge of tears, I want to just say again how unbelievably funny Sorrow and Bliss is and how you manage those two aspects of it beautifully

it's also a book I promise I'm going to get onto your failures but I have so many like basically fan questions for you no I love it so much and in that letter I'm sorry I'm completely talking over you because it needs to be said in that beautiful letter that you wrote me which is actually stuck upon my wall you you told me that you had wept behind your sunglasses while reading it on this lovely beach holiday that you were having. And I wrote back and I said, oh, goodness, I, you know, my publishers should probably stop, I guess, representing it as a perfect beach read. And you're like, not if the beach is Dunkirk, which is my favorite kind of beach read. And I just was like, that's what it is, the Dunkirk beach read. That's all I want to write in my life. Have that blurb on the front instead of Ann Patchett I mean

that's all you need to sell this book but talking of the desire to have children Sorrow and Bliss is also about what we bequeath our children and how dysfunctional families can be even when everyone is trying their best and I suppose I wanted to ask you what interested you about that and adjacent to that I know that Australia is currently in lockdown and you have two teenage children and how aware you are of it in your own life? I think that where it began is that I was really interested to explore a relationship between those two sisters of Martha and Ingrid, beginning in the same place and then being taken in different directions by their life choices. Because Ingrid has children and she's married and she has the house and, you know, all of those sorts of things that Martha doesn't get. And she would say she didn't get them because of her illness.

of her illness. Above those two is their mother Celia and her sister Winsome who sort of run in parallel I suppose and Winsome married money and Celia married a poet who's described as the male Sylvia Plath except he hasn't written anything and so money and class kind of is in the middle of that relationship so it gets very complicated and I think I am really interested in roles and the way that we're sort of cast in a role so early on. And, you know, despite everybody's best intention, the way we act is always sort of used as evidence that we're in the exact right role. Do you know that where you're the person who ruins Christmas every year and look, you just ruined Christmas. And it is one of those things that why is it that when we go home, especially, we return and sort of revert to our 15 year old selves, bickering with our siblings when we're actually where Barrist is in our other life or something like that so I think all of that

is really interesting and I think the idea of repeating those generational mistakes despite as you say our absolutely earnest intention not to is really tricky because it is somehow in you like it's just in your DNA and I think the opposite is when we just try and do the opposite you know my parents did this, so I'm going to do this, but then it's still completely informed by what they did. It's just the inverse, which might not be right either. So we're sort of, it's tricky, isn't it, to actually forge our own way and not be bringing all of that lineage with us in everything we do. Do you think it's made you more aware as a parent writing this book? Or maybe the awareness came

first and then you wrote Sorrow and Bliss? It's so tricky isn't it because you don't consciously sit down and think I'm going to put everything I've learned into a book and yet when I look at it now I can see that a lot of it I have had to learn by doing and a lot of the lessons that Martha has to learn I had to learn and I think why it's a novel about a 40 year old andold and not a 35-year-old is because 40 for me was very much the age where I realized and really came to understand for the first time in my life that no one was coming to save me. And it was around everything. And I suppose the locus of it was this book.

And if I wanted to write a book, no one was going to help me. And I was just going to have to start again on my own. But that was sort of a theme through my entire sort of 20s and 30s that I just thought, oh, it doesn't matter. Someone else is going to help me and I was just going to have to start again on my own but that was sort of a theme through my entire sort of 20s and 30s that I just thought oh it doesn't matter someone else is going to fix this and I think any wisdom that is in it maybe comes from that understanding and what women especially I think what we face in turning 40 and the the limiting of choices and the bearing out of choices and all of those things I think they're in there I think they're in there. I hope they're in there. They definitely are. A final question for getting onto your failures. Why is it set in Britain?

And why are you so good at writing British? Thank you for saying that. Can you hear the Australian rain? I'm so worried. It really doesn't rain here that much. I know I've given you the impression that it does. It doesn't. And when it does rain, we get six months worth in

one go which is what we're getting tonight on the tin roof of my shed so I really apologize if um I actually love it and I find it very very calming and it's sort of lulling me into a lovely interview rhythm and I also like the image that it's left us with of you in a shack it's just my unibomber cabin yeah exactly just Just talking about fiction. It's the dream. What was your question? Oh, why is it British? Why are you so good at Englishness?

Yeah. Well, the reason that this book is set in the UK is because that failed manuscript from which it was born had a decidedly Christmassy theme to it. And in a horrible commercial way, I mean, I hope this gives an indication of how bad it was that I was making commercial decisions at the beginning of a novel, for heaven's sake. I felt that I couldn't write a

Christmas novel that was set in the Southern Hemisphere because nobody would understand our, you know, summer Christmases. So I felt that it just had to be in the UK. And then I think that probably some of that Christmas, you know, as the sort of the point that Patrick and Martha meet and when they keep meeting and those sorts of things that happen around those family Christmases which I just think there's more richness to them somehow and and just all of those traditions and the formality of it and you know the family friends aspect and all of those things just felt more British to me but I think the humor somehow just needed to be that and I think what I sort of raised myself on in terms of Victoria Wood and French and Saunders and all of those sorts of things. That's what I think is funny. And I mean, that doesn't translate so well to other places, I think.

And I suppose that's what it is. And I must have been collecting more than I understood when I lived in London for five years in my 20s. I must have put enough things by that I could manage it. But I did get every single British and Welsh and Irish person I could lay my hands on to read it beforehand because I have such a horror of sort of one jackhammer when it should be a pneumatic drill and so I had people just going through finding those for me which I was so grateful for because I was worried that it

wouldn't ring true it would be enough for all of us but it wouldn't convince you but hopefully it has. Can you remember any of the initial errors that your early readers picked up on yes I can your crisps are chips here and then your chips are hot chips here and I think I put hot chips in and my friend was like no no they're just chips they are hot that's just what they are so it was things like that it was hopefully quite small and then we shorten I mean we shorten everything but a prescription is shortened to a script and so my friend caught that one as well there were lots of little things like that which I was really grateful for and I had my Welsh friend check that I had accurately portrayed a slag heap

because obviously it's really important to get any slag heap related details right so hopefully I've done that too. Let's get on to your failures or as you wrote about them in an email to me, deeply suboptimal things I have done by Meg Mason. So your first failure is that you believed everyone who told you that you had had children too young. So when did you have your children? I had my first daughter when I was 25 and my second daughter when I was, I think, 28 or 29. So that's young in the sort of, I guess, socio-demographic that I'm in. It's not young in lots and lots of places, but it was young, I suppose, to everyone around me. And I suppose for somebody who looked like she was going to

have a certain career to then interrupt it by having children at 25. Yes, it made it seem young. And I definitely didn't have any peers who were having children at the same time as me. So that was how that all started. And why did you have them young? Well, do you know, it's so funny because obviously everybody's assumption, and this is where we sort of start to get into the failures. Everybody's assumption was that it was an accident and it absolutely wasn't and ironically I'd had a doctor when I was a teenager like a late teenager tell me that I was going to have

trouble conceiving because I had something like polycystic ovaries which I didn't but I heard that and believed it as we all do with doctors and I just thought well it's going to take me a long time to conceive and I want to have a child when I'm sort of maybe 27 or 28 so I better start now at 25 and obviously that doctor was wrong and so this lovely baby was sort of on its way quite swiftly but I wanted to have children and I have a young mother so I you know I know the benefits of that and it wasn't really until people started pointing out how young I was and expressing their sort of shock and judgment that I started to realize that I had done something quite almost countercultural in a way. But it had not occurred to me that anybody would have an opinion and certainly that such a mass of people would have an opinion and feel at such liberty to tell it to me, even when the sort of so-called accident was next to me in the pram. This is so interesting and

there's so much I want to ask you about it you got married young as well didn't you yeah at 22 we were just doing it 1970s kind of style I guess I think it's so sweet I think it's lovely and I don't think that that sounds too young but as someone on the other side of this whole conversation, which we can get into, who is 42 and doesn't have children. I think that sounds so sensible that you did that. But I'm so astonished that people had negative opinions about it. So would you tell us a bit about how you heard those negative opinions? Well, I'm sounding so negative about doctors, but it began there. And it was because doctors would ask me, and I have nothing to compare this to, but they would ask me to a stage in my pregnancy that felt very late as to whether I was happy about it was the language

they use. That was always their first question was, are you happy about it? Up until in my memory, maybe 16 or 17 weeks, which seems really late to be asking someone if they're happy about it? Up until in my memory, maybe 16 or 17 weeks, which seems really late to be asking someone if they're happy about it. And I was happy about it. And I didn't really know what they meant. And then it sort of, I suppose, began to occur to me when I had a lovely, lovely female boss at the times where I was, and she was amazing. But sort of the second tier, you know, some people with less sensitivity were like oh my goodness gosh you must be devastated you know your career is only just going and now you you know that's kind of shelved for the foreseeable future and what a terrible mistake you've made and all of those sorts of

things and people were just speaking their minds and I think looking at it most of the time I'm sure when people have said you look far too young to have children of whatever age they are, which I can honestly, I think in 18 years, because my oldest daughter's 18, I can remember four times where I've told somebody, you know, that I've just met the age of my children, and they haven't said, you look far too young to have children that old. So it isn't just in my mind, it has been constant. Obviously, it doesn't go away, because they get older as I get older. So I still apparently look too young to have an 18 year old. I thought it might catch up, but it hasn't yet. Anyway, because it was so many people, even if they just meant it as small talk or as a compliment, it began to feel like an absolute consensus because there wasn't anyone apart from my mother, thank goodness, who told me

that it was fine. Everybody had that sort of opinion and you start to believe it because also I was 25. So what these adult seeming adults tell you, people in authority and all of those sorts of things, you just think they must be right. And I didn't have the self-confidence to think, well, maybe it isn't right. Maybe this is exactly what I wanted to do. And maybe it's incredibly rude that you felt able to express that but I did the exact opposite and when I say my failure was to believe them it was really that I then used everything that might ordinarily happen to someone in their 20s and 30s you know individually and as a couple the terrible difficult things that happen and the things you're not able to do if it's buying a house or all of

those sorts of things or mismanaging something or losing an opportunity every time something like that happened I would use it as evidence to the rightness of that narrative and I would say we don't have a house because we had children too young and I don't have this job that I want because we had children too young and I gave them that total total authority to sort of frame my narrative and it it wasn't that it went away once I'd had the baby. It continued. It was a daily thing. And I found it really difficult to make friends with people who had children because they were all 10 years older than me. And my own friends didn't have children for kind of another 10 years after that.

So it was really strange. And I think the saddest thing for me when I look back on it is that I basically acquired the sense that we weren't a valid family, Andrew and I and the girls. I just felt that we didn't have anything to be proud of. And I was sort of became really apologetic about, I see how I'm going to cry now, about sort of who we were. And I couldn't really see the merits in us, you know,

and I just felt sorry. And I think that's so sad because I just wasted things that I should have been really proud of because we did a good job with them, you know, and we had a lot of energy. And I think we were really, really present in a way that you can be. And I think what I've only come to understand now as well, and this is kind of around the career thing, because I did give up my job at the Times, was a job I really wanted. And I did want to do that, but I felt strongly inclined to be at home with them even though they obviously had some financial cost attached to it what I sort of never understood was how women

sort of in their late 30s and 40s having their first children might say oh it's so hard to give up work because I've lost my identity and you know I don't know who I am and I'm used to this and that and I really never understood what they meant but I can see it now that if I had to give up my career now, I would find that much harder. But at 25, it wasn't my identity. I'd been doing it for like three years. So it was actually really easy to walk away from it. And I think part of the process of coming around probably only three or four years ago to deciding that that narrative wasn't true was seeing that there wasn't anything I wish I'd done that I haven't done because of the children so everything I've sort of ever wanted to do I've done it

and I think you know you're asked sort of a lot when a novel I guess performs at a certain level what's the most amazing part and there's been things like perfectly considering Kate Moss on a super yacht is a thematic motif that Olivia Wilde was perhaps shot you know she was photographed reading it on the back of a super yacht with Harry Styles just kind of standing there idly waiting for it to finish wait that was your book that was Sorrow and Bliss yeah there was shut up I know that photo people photoshopped it claiming it was their book and it was actually Sorrow and Bliss it was Sorrow and Bliss with it was the US edition with the dust jacket taken off which makes it white and blue,

which is why it required a great deal of forensic Twitter sleuthing to find out. And I didn't realize because I had never taken the dust jacket off the American edition myself. So I didn't know it was mine until that sort of hashtag came up around it. So there were moments like that, which are obviously surreal and hilarious and really useful if you're the parent of a teenager. But those moments were not for me they're not the moments I think the moment that has been the most meaningful is that after my daughter was born and I wasn't working we were still in London and I didn't have any friends I had nothing to do all day every day with a baby and so I would just get on a string

of buses and I would go into Daunt Books in Marleybone. And I remember a couple of times where I was so lonely and so, I suppose, upset by the idea that I wasn't ever going to be a novelist. I remember crying a couple of times in the store, just silently weeping between the shelves with my little baby. And 18 years later, it was all of one window in Daunt. So this was all of one window and someone sent me a picture of it. And I just wished that I could have told 25 year old me that it was all right. And I was still going to do it. I just, in 18 years, I just had to wait and I'd be back.

That's so beautiful, Meg. Thank you so much for talking about that. Because it's a failure that we've never had on this podcast before. And it's a failure that goes to the root of what this podcast is about, which is essentially that there are so many different ways to live a life. And I think it's so fascinating to hear from you the counter narrative of my experience growing up was absolutely at school, we were taught almost to the exclusion of everything else, just don't get pregnant, just absolutely don't accidentally get pregnant as a teenager.

One thing you do before you die. Exactly, exactly. And so I didn't need to question that because we were so busy and because you and I are the same age we were so busy carrying out the feminist bequests of our mother's generation and so busily being educated that we could have it all and that we must absolutely have a career and pursue that and just whatever you do just don't get pregnant because that happens so easy and you just need to be on contraception and I went on the pill for 14 years straight thinking, well, I must absolutely not get pregnant without planning it. And when I come off the pill, my ovaries will open

up like glorious flowers in a field of plenty. And then I can get pregnant and I can plan it that way. And as regular listeners know, and as you know, that hasn't happened for me. So I'm now in a position where I'm still actively engaged in the journey to become a mother, and I will be an older mother. And listening to you, it strikes me how much that narrative has become the dominant one, and how actually other things are seen, as you so eloquently put, are somehow less than. And actually, there is so much to be recommended for being a young mother because of all of the reasons that you have identified. And I just wonder whether you feel a bit squeezed out of the conversations that happen around motherhood now still.

It's so funny. I do actually when I think about it, but not in a way that I mind because I sort of I think by nature, I'm somebody who would rather be on the periphery and sort of observing than actively participating in any situation. So I don't mind. I mean, I have obviously, you know, it's been grist to my journalistic mill and I've written about motherhood and all of those sorts of things. But usually disguising my age, you know, it usually wasn't about my age because I think I would have lost credibility almost in that sense but I have just noticed and obviously I'm particularly key to it but just in the last few months I've started to read more stories about perhaps there is benefit in doing that way because infertility is such a just agonizingly common problem and I think maybe women are beginning to feel like they've slightly

been sold a bill of goods in a way. India Knight, who I have always loved as a journalist, you know, for years and years and years, wrote a piece and it was about, you know, how she can see the benefits of it and all of the reasons it's brilliant. And I was reading it while I was out. And I mean, it makes me sound so weepy, but it obviously just chimed in with some need. I still have a validation because I started weeping and then I cried all the way home reading it. And then when I got home, I had properly wrecking sobs. When you're actually releasing something from your entire body, and it honestly felt like the last fully excising of all of that shame and pain I'd acquired around thinking

for 15 years that I'd done it wrong, because that was my mantra, that was my narrative. And that was sort of the repeating phrase in my mind all the time is that we did it wrong, we did it wrong, we did it wrong. And then just lately, I've sort of started to really cautiously think within myself and just privately, I mean, I know I'm talking about it now on a podcast, but within myself, I think, well, I think we did it right for us. I'm really glad that we did and did Andrew your husband have the same feelings when you were experiencing that of we've done it wrong and every there's an absolute consensus against this or do you think it was different because he's a man yeah in a surprise to no one he has never been told that

he doesn't look old enough to have children the age that he does I think I am probably especially at 25 I was quite a young looking 25 so you know maybe it's that but he's certainly never had colleagues or you know people he's met socially tell him you know really weigh in on his reproductive decisions but I think it was would have been really hard for him to watch me ebb away from being a relatively confident person to just becoming hugely apologetic about myself as a mother and to sort of you know let myself be influenced that way and to feel not valid in it I think that would have been really hard to watch and I can't really imagine it and actually we haven't really talked about it but

I do wonder what that would be like and you, for him to know that he was leaving for work every morning, knowing that I didn't have anyone to see all of those sorts of things, I think would have been really hard in that kind of the way that an observer can't help really, but is very much in your pain with you, but can't actually do anything about it. I wish I'd known you then. But being lucky enough to know you now and to know your daughters a little bit I just could not conceive of any better parent or any two more delightful daughters so I think you have absolutely played a blinder Meg that's one of those British phrases that you could have put into sorrow and bliss and it would have made it even more filled with English integrity. And there hangs a tale, which is another phrase you've taught me, which I cannot stop using.

And actually, I mean, that is just so kind of you to say. And there was another moment when my oldest daughter and her friend, I thought they were, you know, in there studying for their A-levels. But actually what they were doing was making hilarious TikToks around plot points of Sorrow and Bliss, you know, sort of taking different characters like Jonathan, the awful first husband, and making TikToks out of them. And obviously, you know, if I had a three-year-old, they couldn't operate the TikTok with that level of dexterity. So it was all strategic. I say it was a mistake, but it was all completely strategic. Your experience with having children too young leads us on to your second failure which is that you wrote your first book which was a memoir that you have decided not to name during the course of

this podcast and maybe you can tell us why but your failure specifically is that you wrote it in the way that you did. So tell us about that. Yes. I mean, it's called Say It Again in a Nice Voice, which is actually really difficult to say. You said you weren't going to name it. I know I wasn't, but I think it sort of makes it sound, I mean, it's so easily Google-able and I don't want to sort of create this intense mystery around it,

but I just tend not to use its name because the point of that book for me is that I learnt how devastating it is to other people and to me to write thoughtlessly in nonfiction. And my shame about that book is so intense and unabating. And I want to be able to talk about that because I think it's important and it is one of those failures that I can't redeem. There is absolutely nothing I can do about it and it will live in perpetuity. You know, it's like a horrible tattoo that I've given myself and other people in a way, but I want to be able to talk about it. But if I talk about it by its name, I think it sounds really disingenuous because as an author,

you know, half the job is selling our books. And if I say, you know, I wrote this book and it's, I'm so full of shame and it's regrettable, and it's available at all good bookstores now, you know, that's what it sounds like when I do that. So I think just not naming it. I mean, clearly, it's a theme, isn't it? I just don't name difficult things. But it just allows me to feel like I'm being honest in it. And what I really am talking about when I talk about that book is my relationship with it, not the actual content of the book, or, you know, please go and buy it. So what are the contents? And why do you take issue with them now? Well, I haven't actually read it since 2012. And I don't own a copy because I can't look at it.

So I read about 30 pages of it about six months ago because I had to the way I pitched it to the publisher and what was bought sort of off that was a book about how to be alone basically after you've had children which you can see where I got that idea from but it was because I felt like even if you stay home with your children for six weeks or you stay home with them for 10 years or you do half and half this may be the first time as an adult that you've experienced what it is like to have no one concerned with the shape of your day except you and nothing external to shape your day and to be alone at the level you are with the child, which is to not be alone, but to be incredibly lonely. So that's what I wanted to write about. But in order to do that, it kind of obviously evolved when I had to share stories. And then

eventually it was sort of 2010, I guess, when I was writing it. That was the peak of the sort of mummy blogging, mumois type awfulness. Anyway, so it just became that. And I wrote mostly humor as a journalist. And that's what the publisher wanted. And I think what is really hard to understand and what I absolutely did not understand before your published author is that people are going to see it and it is going to last forever. Because I mean, as you know, as a journalist, it's so disposable and you write a magazine

story and this number of people see it and then it's gone forever, especially back then when none of it was online. And I didn't understand that. And in order to make it interesting and to make it funny you absolutely amplify everything and make it more extreme what I regret is the way I wrote about people I know and love and people that I've worked with and all of those sorts of things and how fundamentally cruel I was and when I read those 30 pages have you ever had that feeling where the closest thing I can think of is when you've written an email about a person that's not kind and you've accidentally sent it to the person and the minute you realize you've done it

you feel hot and sick and like your entire insides are evacuating themselves into this prickly just awful nightmare and that's how I feel about that book everything I said about them because I just didn't think and I didn't have the wisdom. I'm sort of told lovingly by friends and family who've read it that it isn't as bad as I remember, but I did hurt people. I know that I did because once it came out, and of course, unthinkingly, I didn't even give anyone the opportunity to read it. And I just thought it was funny. And I just hurt people. And that is awful. And there is no excuse for doing that. And I mean, there's other parts of it that have aged really badly in terms of just what I write about the

sort of socioeconomically women, you know, my age, who were having children at 25, where I live, they weren't like me. And you know, it was just othering the shit out of people. It was awful. And I just didn't know any of that and I think the fundamental problem is that I wrote it while I was still angry and in pain about all of that and I wasn't reconciled to it and I think that's the lesson that I took from it is that you can be too close to your own situation to write about it in a measured and wise kind of way and I just wish I hadn't written it and I think the other thing that's because obviously there's lots of stories about my two daughters in it. And they were three and six, I think, at the time.

And it was sort of the real beginning of I think Facebook was relatively new. And it was really at the beginning of us sharing about our children as freely as we do. And that's become greater and greater since then. But what I didn't understand then when you only have a child who's three or something like that, you don't really know in your deepest core that they are going to grow up and they are going to read it. And you treat them and their stories like your possessions. So you share them as freely as you want to and you frame them and that's through your lens and all of those things. But what I didn't understand, and thankfully my older daughter has read it and told me that there's nothing in it that embarrasses her and, you know, that she finds unkind. But that was me telling

stories about them that become their story. You know, we believe what our parents tell us. And this was a book that I wrote, taking on notes for the publisher to saying, Oh, can you put more of this in, you know, and sort of, I'll dial this up a bit. And so a lot of it's not true. And I portrayed it as though, oh, our conceiving was just a big, funny old disaster. And it wasn't, it was absolutely intentional. And my poor daughter, after she read it, she said, was I an accident? And I was like, oh my gosh, no, you were not an accident. But I wrote a book that said she was. And that's why I find it so difficult with this book, because there is so much talk about self-forgiveness and how we must learn to forgive ourselves and let things go.

But sometimes I don't think we talk enough about the fact that there are things that feel unforgivable to us and remain that way. And I think this is unforgivable and I can learn to live with it and I can learn to not do it again, but I will never let myself off the hook for it. And I mean, I hope I don't make it sound worse than it is and I still get letters really regularly from women usually who either say they're postnatally depressed or sort of is transmitted from the email you know or it can be inferred and they say that it's meant an incredible amount to them and it's really true and

one woman said recently that it because I wrote really freely about the troubles we'd had in our marriage and she said that she decided to stay in her marriage for a bit longer just to see if it turned out the way it had for Andrew and I and that kind of thing is amazing so I think it has resonated with people but it still doesn't make it all right as far as I'm concerned for those around me wow there is so much to unpack there. But I think one of the things that I would say, and I often say this about failure and grief, that some failures are much more easy to live with than others, and much more easy to learn from than others. And then there will be failures or things that you have lost or things that you've done that you can never easily assimilate as a life lesson they just become embedded in your bloodstream almost

and so I think that you can not forgive yourself and be at peace with not forgiving yourself because actually not forgiving yourself is the ultimate act of having learned from it do you know what I mean does that make sense yeah I know it completely does and I think why I sort of hold to that is there is that sense if I say I've forgiven myself I must think it's all right I think that's why I can't do it because I just don't want and you know I know people will read it and even though I chose for it not to be published in the UK after Sorrow and Bliss because it had mercifully only come out here and then you know obviously with Sorrow and Bliss the thought was to put it out there and I chose not to do that and anybody could find it and anyone could read it and I'm okay with

that but I just I hope that I'm not in a really self-interested way I'm scared to be judged for crimes that weren't crimes when I committed them as well in terms of the conversation has moved on so much and those sorts of things so there is also an element of just self-protection in it and basically cowardice. My final question on this is about how you are perceived as a result of this memoir I don't know I mean I imagine because everything you write is touched with genius that it did very well in Australia and I think that when one writes a memoir that does well, there's a danger that the reading public thinks of you forever as that person. And actually, so often memoirs are snippets of a particular phase of your life.

Do you feel that you have to battle against that in Australia or not? I don't think so because it didn't do spectacularly well because I had absolutely no profile, which is also why it was really weird and retrospectively embarrassing that I even wrote a memoir because I wasn't anybody. I was just a jobbing kind of journalist. But I think that it at least has made me a lot more sympathetic or I try to understand and remain mindful of the fact that every author doesn't feel about everything the way they did 10 years ago. And it just, when you're reading it in the present moment, that's what we're all inclined to think. And,

you know, I loved what Catlin Moran did with More Than a Woman that she went back and said, actually, these are all the things I've changed my mind about. And I think that's so powerful because we do, that sort of gets trapped in amber. I was about to say aspect, but that's the gelatin salad that we all eat. It can be trapped in either. Can it be trapped in both? But aspects easier to get into probably. Exactly. Well, that's about right, isn't it? Because you can get to it if you really want to. I just hope you won't. But anyway, I think that's a really important thing to sort of remember. And when I had to read those 30 pages, in fact, I was supposed to read the whole thing, but I could only tough out 30 pages. I went into the

house and Andrew was in there and I was really upset and crying again. Obviously, I am an easy crier, a ready crier. But I was just like, I can't believe what an awful, awful person I was. And he's like, we're all awful. It's just most of us don't write it down and then have it stay there as a permanent sort of un-evolving reminder of what we all thought 10 years ago. So that was incredibly gracious. And sometimes I do cling to that whilst also thinking that it isn't true and it's different rules. But it isn't interesting when people sort of talk endlessly about their shortcomings.

But I just feel really strongly about that one that I just wish I'd been wiser. Meg it is really interesting when people talk perpetually about their shortcomings because that's the entire premise of how to fail so I'm not having that it's fascinating. That's really true that's true. And I love what Andrew Mason said that we're all awful it's just that some of us haven't written it down I think that's such a good thing to return to. Let's move on to your third failure. I'm so glad you're talking about this because I think so many of us struggle with friendship breakups. And your third failure is that at the age of 22, you chucked your childhood best friend after a falling out. chucked your childhood best friend after a falling out what happened there oh I'm definitely going to cry in this one so I met my lovely best friend Juniper when she and I were 13 when we started

high school and I'm a firm believer in that sort of theory that there is something chemical about seeing a person you know that instant sense that you sometimes get that there's my friend, we just haven't met yet, but there she is. And that was so much what happened with her. And we became sort of firm friends. And we were absolutely inseparable throughout high school. And then at 16, I moved to Australia with my parents, and she moved to a different town. So we were no longer sort of together every day and since it was the early 90s that meant you know six hours together at school and then out after school on our bikes and then home to get straight on the phone in the hallway which you will remember dragging it sometimes in the vacuum cleaner cupboard if it could stretch all the way

and then talking until your mum picked up the extension and told you to get off because she needed to call somebody so that was us anyway then we moved and it was it's always harder to stay as close as we'd been but we used to write endless endless letters and we used to make cassettes of ourselves talking to each other and post them back and forward and then we had an exercise book that we used to write letters in and post the book back and forward so it was almost like a thread it was like a text thread just the analog version so we were really close. But what we weren't able to articulate to each other in the way that teenagers can't

is a lot of the things that were going on for both of us at home, just the difficulties and things that you're contending with as teenagers. And that meant that we needed each other, I think, a lot more than we ever articulated. And so it was really hard to be separated. And then our lives just hard to be separated. And then our lives just began to diverge. And I went to university and she entered the theater and then all those sorts of things. And the one thing that used to happen is that she wasn't able to come and visit me in Australia. And I desperately wanted her to. And for reasons that I didn't understand, and I now do, she would book it and then she would cancel it at the last minute and I began to build up this absolute reservoir of bitterness and this absolute uncut victimhood you know around

oh she constantly lets me down and all of this sort of you know thing that you do when you're that way and then I was getting married and this is I mean it's just so painful to even explain it but I got engaged and I told her and she said will I be your bridesmaid essentially because of course she would be my bridesmaid and I said no because I sorry it's awful because you won't turn up you know you'll say that you're coming and then you won't come and what pains me about it apart from the fact that how cruel it is and how just outsized to everything that reaction was it's just that it was just a wedding do you know what I mean and I think when you've been married for a really long time you just realize it's just a wedding like it's not the

be-all and end-all that you think it is when you're 22 and I don't say that in my defense but I just now it seems even stupider that I blew this into such an enormous thing when it was just about one day. Can I ask a quick question? Did you say that as a joke and then did you immediately think, oh gosh, that's gone a bit too far? Or did you mean it seriously? No, I think I meant it seriously, which is really weird because 98% of the time I am joking, but obviously I hadn't been dealing with this rising sense of hurt in that regard. And so it had reached a certain point by then, and that was kind of the acne of it. And so obviously she didn't come to the wedding, which was awful. And I mean, neither should she, that was completely understandable. Why on earth would she? Because

we had that sort of awful discussion. And then Andrew and I moved to London kind of two weeks after that. And I didn't fix it in those two weeks before we left. And then I didn't fix it after we got there. And then I just kept not fixing it. Then I didn't fix it for 10 years. And we stopped speaking to each other in that time. And we lost touch because we were now in different countries and she'd moved and she was working, all of those sorts of things. And so my kind of excuse to myself is I didn't know where she was. And I couldn't track her down, which was increasingly less plausible as Google was invented and all those sorts of things. But it was a combination, I think, of shame and misguided rage that she should have done this, and she should have done that, and all of those sorts of things, which

became less and less easy to remember. But I think as time went on, I just didn't understand, you know, you forget what on earth it was that you were so upset about. But by then it was completely entrenched that we'd fallen out with each other. And then obviously I thought she was mad at me as she should have been. And it gets harder and harder, doesn't it? When you think that someone's angry at you. And so I just kept not fixing it.

But I think because of how close we had been, it wasn't one of those situations where I could just tell myself that, oh, we've just lost touch and we sort of grew out of each other, you know, as the way some seasonal friendships do or circumstantial friendships do. It was more like an estrangement. It had that awful, unnatural feeling of an estrangement that something isn't right. And I would sort of have dreams about her, or I would think that I saw her in the street, even though I was in London and I had no reason to think she was in London. You know, I would see someone in my peripheral vision and think it's her and I would turn around and it wasn't her. Because I always thought about her constantly and thought about being in touch and all of those things and I never did it. And then I just thought she must hate me.

So then what happened, we had no contact at all in our 20s and then my dad ran into her at an airport in New Zealand about probably seven or eight years ago and he rang me up and you know I hadn't really talked very much to people about what had happened and he said oh guess who I saw and she wanted your email address and she so I gave it to her and then she emailed me and I just oh my gosh Elizabeth it's just a big blur but it was her do you know what I mean and we then we saw each other shortly afterwards because she was in New Zealand I saw her when I went there and I couldn't even look at her I had to sit next to her and look straight ahead while we were chatting because I just was so overwhelmed with this person. Because I think in a way,

the friendships we form as teenagers between girls, I think before you've had any romantic relationships, those girls are the love of your life. Do you know? Like that's who you felt most passionate about outside your family. And it was her. And you know, you know their hands and you know their mannerisms

and you know how they walk and how they sit down. And it was was her and so now we're friends and we get the second go at things and she's just adopted this gorgeous gorgeous little girl who I get pictures of her and you know my girls kind of know her and my girls adore our letters and our diaries and our exercise books which I kept all of thank goodness and we get this undeserved and my part second go at things and you know she's this repository of my memories and vice versa and so it's really exquisite and so undeserved I can't actually tell you how undeserved it is that's just so beautiful and I think what you've conveyed there so beautifully is the depth of love that one feels for one's friends. And then what happens when you have this love, but there isn't the cultural history.

There isn't a sort of instruction manual for friendship. There isn't an etiquette that we have been fed by a diet of romantic comedies so when you break up with a friend you don't really know how to do it and especially if you're conflict avoidant like you and I are then the easiest thing to do in a way and also the hardest is essentially to fall into ghosting someone that you love the most and then to have it come back to you but have you ever spoken about it yeah have you spoken about the breakup and what happened and how did you find the words to do that yes totally we have and actually I texted her to say is it all right if I talk about this on a podcast and she said it

was completely fine and we sort of shared kind of versions of events and she said oh I don't even remember and neither of us can really pin dates on it and all of those sorts of things. But I think what was there is just both of us just feeling so grateful and feeling so lucky that neither of us were actually mad. I was so quickly not mad at her. I was mad at myself, but it was easier to pretend I was mad at her in that kind of self-protective way. But because I didn't want to acknowledge that it was my fault and I think that we can both put it down to age to an extent and you know she's just so gracious and all of those sorts of things and we just understand so much more about what both of us were actually contending with outside of our own friendship and why things kind of arrived at the point they did

because there was a lot more to it but I think you're so right that there isn isn't language. There's not what's the equivalent of actually breaking up in terms of the real grief of it and the divorce-like feelings or the estrangement-like feelings. There just isn't really that. And yet, I'm sure every single one of us has had a friendship that's ended either spectacularly or with the awful, just as painful squib of a finish and I suppose the one thing that I'm really interested to wonder about with her and I is just whether we would have made it if we hadn't had that fight do you know like maybe our friendship would have just tailed off as some friendships do and instead it's kind of stronger because we had this massive massive break of 10 years in the middle so I think maybe we're lucky

because the reconciliation doesn't always happen. And so I think that our experience is quite rare and I'm very grateful for it. Do you think friendships are failed friendships if they end? I think they're failed friendships if they ended because you behaved in a way that you know wasn't right and as I did and you didn't you didn't do the right thing essentially because no I mean there are lots and lots of friendships that are just for a season and whether or not you know it at the time it's kind of the work friend or the mother's group friend or whatever and those friendships are beautiful and amazing and they serve that purpose for both of you. And then things take you in different directions. And that's fine. And you were really lucky to have them when you did. But I think that

for me, it would have been an absolute failure because you get one of these people or two or three, you know, in your lifetime. So to fail at those friendships, which I've done as other cases as well, then I think that is a failure that is really difficult to forgive yourself for as well and do you feel that the pandemic has changed how you feel about friendship because I know you're in Australia and so you're experiencing now what we in Britain experienced I don't know I've lost all sense time, but like at the beginning a year ago, which is kind of lockdown and not being able to see people in person. And I know that for me and for many people that I know, they've really reassessed their friendships because they've suddenly realized who is meaningful and important and who they need

and how overwhelming life can be if you're just constantly giving up your time to people who place demands on you. So have you undergone a reassessment of friendship? Well, strangely, I had sort of a bit of a front runner on the pandemic with friendships in so far as when I really applied myself to writing Sorrow and Bliss and starting again from nothing, applied myself to writing Sorrow and Bliss and starting again from nothing. The only way to get it done was to be completely and utterly single-minded and selfish beyond description and to let everything else fall by the wayside completely. And the thing that fell most by the wayside was friendship because, you know, there are certain things that you have to do for your family and you have to do for your work. So I did those, but only the bare minimum,

and said no to every single thing that I would have said yes to before. But I said no to basically anything to do with friendships. I stopped socializing. I wasn't available. I would never have my phone on me to sort of 5 o'clock in the afternoon. I worked every weekend, and I worked at night. So I basically withdrew myself and without any explanation because I didn't tell anyone I was working on that book for a really long time

because it wasn't a book. It was just something I was doing, but really wanted to do. And the hardest part of the writing was not the writing, but it was the guilt that went along with doing that because it isn't okay to just disappear yourself and to suddenly go from being you know hopefully a reliable friend and someone who's present to being absolutely unavailable but that's what I had to do and I think there's been a bit of an echo in that in the pandemic in the sense that you know I'm someone who needs to be alone for maybe like a minimum of 12 hours a day in order to just basically function as a person. And instead of that, I'm alone never, and haven't been alone since June. And it's now October. So I have found that quite challenging. And it's meant that there isn't much of me left to be available to friends.

So I think I've sort of gone into a similar sort of state of slight withdrawal. And I do feel guilty about it. But I think for us, the second second pandemic there's been none of the zoom cocktails and the quizzes and the banana bread I don't know if you were the same but yeah it's much more of a mentality of like I'll just see you on the other side do you know I it's to sit on complain about it to each other is not helping let's just I'll just talk to you when it's over so I think there's definitely been some of that much more hunkering down but then of course you have that slight resistance to unhunkering again because it becomes such a preset doesn't it especially for introverts I'm sort of apprehensive about re-entry but it isn't quite healthy to be in the shed to the extent that I am at the moment well I actually wanted to end on that note which is about how important privacy can be to the creation of art if that doesn't sound too

pretentious for you oh no you couldn't out pretentious me if you tried I'm aware that as you've said during the course of this wonderful interview that sorrow and bliss came from a place which was post-hope where you were sort of left alone to your own devices and you deliberately ensured that that continued to be the case. But now that you are so successful and so heralded rightly as the literary voice of a generation, is it going to be harder for you now to create from that same space? And does that worry you?

Yes, to both of those things because I've never been less alone in a practical sense whilst being more almost surveilled professionally I have been intentionally honestly I can really say I was never one of those journalists who sought to develop a profile for myself I just wanted to do the work in service to my life. So I just wanted to write enough stories as a freelance to pay for the daycare that was required for me to write them. That's honestly the only ambition that I really had around that. I just wanted it to be a function.

So I never went to anything and I never went to openings. And I'm not even now on social media and all of those sorts of things. I'm not even now on social media and all of those sorts of things. But that has somewhat evolved to the sense that people are aware of my name a bit more and people sort of want you to do things and things like that, which I'm not really used to, which is lovely. And what an amazing problem to have, because the other problem is that no one cares, which is definitely the worst problem, because I don't know if I would have had the wherewithal to write another book if this one hadn't done anything.

worst problem because I don't know if I would have had the wherewithal to write another book if this one hadn't done anything. So I am really aware of the challenge, but I think it's run parallel with just me coming more and more to appreciate privacy. You know, I just feel like there's such value to it. It just feels like the absolute prize. And I just think that it's a really interesting idea of what we give away and what we keep. And I do get to control that. So in my next book, even if I wrote nonfiction, I would still get to decide and what I give away and what I keep. And I think I've just become even more aware of containment. In my later years, I have such respect now and admiration for people who bottle things up. I've just come to appreciate bottlers. I just think what an extraordinary public service they

provide and how mature, you know, they're always held up as, oh, it's unhealthy. You must tell everybody how you feel at all times. But I just think, especially with, you know, sort of all the people that I've talked about, you know, husbands and friends and family, just bottle it up. Do you know what I mean? If it's just an everyday thing, just wait for it to go away. This is what I've decided. This is my new modus is just sit on it until it passes because it totally will. And what's the point of having a big tearful argument? I've gone on a tangent, but it's just really, I just want to extol and celebrate bottlers. It's so funny because there's a bit in Sorrow and Bliss where Ingrid says to Martha, we as a society have to break down the stigma

around mental illness. And Martha says, oh my gosh, Ingrid, I'd, we as a society have to break down the stigma around mental illness. And Martha says, oh my gosh, Ingrid, I'd rather we as a society built it up a bit so we could talk about something else. Which is obviously a joke, but it's so funny and goes to the core of what you've been saying. And I think that that's such a typical passage

from your beautiful novel because it elucidates something profound about what it is to be human and makes a really brilliant laugh out loud joke at the same time and I would love to do something deeply embarrassing for you which is I would love to read a passage from Sorrow and Bliss to end this podcast interview with because I started off by saying that for me Sorrow and Bliss is a book about what it is to be human and there's a specific paragraph that you write that I think does this beautifully and this is the point where I might cry because I can't read as well because I could honestly

listen to your voice you could read anything and I would be captivated by it so I will just sit here and enjoy hearing it said by you. So thank you in advance, whichever bit it is that you're about to read. It's a bit where Martha is describing what it is to be married. That is what life was and how it continued for three years after that. The ratios changing on their own. Broken, completely fine, a holiday, a leaking pipe, pipe new sheets happy birthday a technician between nine and three a bird flew into the window I want to die please I can't breathe I think it's a lunch thing I love you I can't do this anymore both of us thinking it would be like that forever Meg Mason you made me cry what is it about prose? I think it's just contagious because maybe I'm crying all the time and I just send out a really tearful energy on people. It's just nobody wants to. to live in this chaotic, extraordinary, magnificent world. I thank you for blessing this podcast with your presence.

Meg Mason, thank you so much for coming on How to Fail. Thank you so much. And I must just say that the only reason you wrote to me was because I sent you, not knowing you, only knowing you as a novelist whose books I'd enjoyed, I sent you a copy with a note first to say, this book came out of failure and I sort of I can't remember the exact wording but I came to appreciate the conversation that you'd begun

around failure so much more I mean it took on the most immense poignancy once that had happened to me and I was sort of freshly grateful for what before that was just an idea and just a concept and I hope you don't forget because it's become your normal and your ordinary now that people didn't talk about this before and this is a conversation that has brought so much comfort to so many people and to feel that we aren't alone and that we're not the only ones and I'm so happy to be the person who remains a depressive failure that everybody's been asking you to have on the program. And I can feel the finger of your kind of like subscribers just gliding over my name, looking for somebody more famous. But I'm still really happy to be here, even though my imposter syndrome has had the best day of its life.

Oh, Meg, that is such a beautiful, flattering thing to say. Are you basically saying that I'm responsible for Sorrow and Bliss and that you prefer me to Ann Patchett? It's a straight line. From A to B, it's a very straight line, isn't it, to draw. And I think that all listeners should draw it and then continue to draw it all the way out to Magpie on the other side, which is also a heavenly novel that you're incredibly elegant

in not promoting as much as you should. No, I just, it needs to be said. There we go. I'm going to cut you off now before it becomes a mutual gush fest, but I love you and thank you for coming on How To Fail. That's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. this episode of how to fail is sponsored by cb2 feel good cbd are you one of the 44 percent of brits that gets six hours or fewer of sleep each night 23 percent of female britons record that they feel tired all the time followed by 35 percent who feel tired often. I feel their pain. CB2 have hundreds of reviews about how their CBD oil has changed people's lives for quality sleep, for managing

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