Meg Mason’s novel about a sad, divorcing festival worker asks: can books save your life?

I sometimes say that My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical novel from 1956 – saved my life. My mother pressed her dog-eared copy into my hands during a year I was hospitalised repeatedly for major depression.

The sun-soaked Greek island of Corfu — as well as the Durrell family’s foibles and adventures – felt a world away from my hometown’s bleak winter and all those blister packets and doctors’ waiting rooms. I became fascinated by Durrell’s colourful childhood and his longstanding career as both an author and a naturalist. I could easily recall the story’s funniest moments and parrot the most memorable lines.

On even the hardest days, it somehow seemed to help.

This may seem like a roundabout way of introducing Sophie, Standing There, the new novel by New Zealand–born, Sydney-based Meg Mason, which centres on a soon-to-be-divorced festival worker and her fixation on an author whose work begins to speak to her. But this story, too, is about what books and authors can mean to us at particular times, and how they might save us – sometimes not only in their what but also in their when.

Mason is known, and adored by many, for Sorrow and Bliss, her second novel. It achieved breakout success in 2020 and became an international bestseller. Undeniably dark but famously funny, Sorrow and Bliss also traces the breakdown of a marriage and examines a woman at her saddest. The novel won Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2022 and was shortlisted for several other prizes, including the Women’s Prize.

Described by many (me included), as a near-perfect book, it’s a tough act to follow. Yet Sophie, Standing There, a different sort of book, deserves to be appraised on its own merits.

Not a literary crush

In the opening pages, Sophie, a freelance sound technician in an unnamed Australian city, is reeling in the aftermath of her recent separation, when some idle work chitchat reignites her interest in a prolific novelist.

Even though it demands a trip to the boxes mouldering in her ex-husband’s garage, Sophie rereads all the novelist’s books and listens to every interview and podcast she can find. The author’s voice – her maxims and quotable quotes – help block out the real world, like a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.

It’s the author – or Sophie’s idea of the author – who softens spiky moments and resolves crises of confidence. It’s the author who shares in Sophie’s dreams and private jokes.

It’s not a literary crush, though, Sophie insists. It’s not a parasocial relationship. It’s love. Obsessive, all-consuming love. The kind that’s purest when sequestered by the imagination.

Fantasy collides with reality, however, when the author is invited to stand in for Elizabeth Strout, who’s contracted COVID, at an upcoming festival. Improbably, a wardrobe malfunction leads to a brief but extraordinary entanglement that lays bare some of the complex dynamics that can develop not only between authors and their readers, but between women more generally: friends, sisters, colleagues.

The pacing in the first act of the novel is noticeably ponderous, a study of minutiae and meandering moments. Everything from tap water and falafel to the public library feels deadened and unsatisfying – mired by Sophie’s grief in the long shadow of her failed marriage. Sophie has no energy, no appetite. She’s financially compromised, renting a dank, poky flat that belongs to her ex.

Attentive, but rarely seen

Readers familiar with Sorrow and Bliss’s sharp, sardonic Martha, rendered in first person, may feel more distanced from third-person Sophie – a character likewise adrift, but much blurrier around the edges.

Sophie describes herself as “moderately beautiful”, a devout lover of books and reading, but someone always standing by. “Perhaps if she had one talent,” Sophie reflects in the opening chapter, “it would be noticing small things that the others didn’t.” This is Sophie in a nutshell: attentive but rarely seen, rarely acknowledged in a way that feels authentic or reciprocal.

As the story gathers momentum, what becomes clear – once again – is Mason’s enduring gift for writing women characters submerged in crises they often have neither the language nor the tools to dismantle. With her characteristically deft touch, Mason palpates the tender spots that linger in the wake of divorce, infertility, long-term job insecurity and even the wounds religion may inflict.

Through it all, Mason is careful to preserve the habit of reading as sacrosanct while refusing to glorify or mythologise the figure of the author. Sophie, Standing There is a book-loving book – studded with bookish humour and a satisfying peek behind the curtains at literary festivals. But it’s also a book that underscores the perplexing shortfalls of all human beings, including the ones we idolise, the ones who save us.

If nothing else, Sophie, Standing There is a story about loss – or perhaps emptiness is a better word. When Sophie crosses paths with the “subject and object” of her obsession, the fictive relationship disintegrates almost immediately: “The author no longer existed. Sophie had never known an absence like it.”

In another scene, she wanders past a local salon where a client is lying back against a tub to have her hair washed. Sophie’s longing to be touched feels wretchedly familiar:

While Sophie paused in the shadow of a bus shelter, the hairdresser placed a folded handtowel under the woman’s neck, taking the weight of her head in his own hand.

Watching, Sophie could feel the cradle beneath her own heavy head, and the incidental brush of his fingers on her bare neck. And the hairdresser, tilting the basin, and turning the hose on and testing the temperature in his cupped hand before drenching the woman’s hair, scooping water away from her forehead so it didn’t run into her eyes.

Sophie stood, and ached.

Sophie is, obviously, sad. Very sad – “She had never been this sad.”

Not a sad girl novel

It’s here that Sophie, Standing There makes a gentle departure from Sorrow and Bliss. Readers expecting to laugh uproariously on every second page may feel more subdued, even stricken, as they leaf the new novel’s pages.

Its humour is sparser and more muted – but nonetheless there. For example, when Sophie imagines her ex looking like “a poached chicken breast hogging the duvet” or her author quips about another prolific literary success: “He’s written forty novels … That’s not talent. That’s a disorder.”

Five years in the making, Sophie, Standing There demonstrates Mason’s own inarguable talent – for plumbing the depths of stubborn sadness with both sensitivity and surprising levity.

But “sad girl fiction” is a label Mason clearly rebuffs.

In an early chapter, Sophie insists she’s read Sally Rooney despite being “completely the wrong demographic”, as if to emphasise the novel as something very different.

However, if the term still encompasses, as author Phoebe Stuckes argues, an array of texts that speak to women’s complex relationships – with men, with other women, with family, with work, with the embodied self – and their “glittering, righteous anger”, why reject it?

As if referencing this article directly, Mason writes, via Sophie’s author: “Anger comes from sadness. Sadness comes from loss.”

Is this sad girl fiction – all grown up?

In the end, we may need to save ourselves, the novel seems to say. But there will always be books.

Amber Gwynne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.