Writer Meg Mason on her second novel, Sorrow and Bliss

Author of Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason. Photo / Supplied

Meg Mason's second novel, Sorrow and Bliss, was a lockdown hit. The Sydney-based writer grew up in Palmerston North and contributes to Vogue, Elle and GQ.

At what times do you feel most Kiwi and how does that manifest itself?

Even after 20 years in Australia, I still can't see it when it comes to the Australian landscape, especially the rivers. Actual, proper Australians seem to find them beautiful, I just find them very brown. And shallow, and slow-moving. Real rivers are iridescent turquoise, swift, fathomless and heart-stoppingly cold.

You write often about motherhood. What brings you back to it again and again?

Because motherhood is so glorious and terrible and hilarious and dull and desperately important and for a writer, such a bottomless source of material.

Mental health is a major theme in Sorrow and Bliss. Is depression something you have experienced?

Gosh, anyone who hasn't at one point in life – either personally or in caring for a friend or family member who is struggling with some kind of mental illness – is extremely lucky, and a complete statistical anomaly.

I read that you write in shifts - school hours for the magazine writing and nights and weekends for the fiction writing. How did you come to this arrangement?

I think "arrangement" might imply order and balance but working and parenting and fulfilling a personal ambition at the same time is for me - and thankfully most women I know - a constant daily catastrophe of half-done, poorly done, not-done things, of fudging and forgetting and toast-based meals.

You didn't read for pleasure until you were in high school. What brought you to a writing life?

And not until the very end of seventh form either, although I was read-to all the time as a child and my very bookish mother begged me to read as a teenager. Even when she offered to pay me 10c a page one year on holiday I resisted. But then I couldn't get out of reading Jane Eyre for school - and that was the beginning of everything.

Best holiday you've ever had (and why?)

Meeting London friends half-way, in Sri Lanka, two years ago. For the men and the children in the group, it was probably the pool or the scenery or something that made it so memorable. For the mothers, it was just staying somewhere with a cook. If you still have to make dinner on holiday, it really isn't one, it's just everyday life with a poorer selection of utensils.

Three words to describe Palmerston North.

No hills whatsoever.

What's on today's to-do list?

I just looked at it and felt so overwhelmed I slid under a pile of other things on my desk. For now, I'm pretending it's just this and a whites wash …

Best Netflix discovery of 2020?

Derry Girls, with my daughters; and I Hate Susie, absolutely without my daughters. There are scenes you'd not want anyone to walk in on you watching but it's so unlike I've seen before and Billie Piper is heaven.

Would your teenaged daughters have been friends with the teenaged you?

I hope so, but it's so hard to imagine them biking to the dairy, cutting up back issues of Dolly to decoupage their ringbinders and talking on the hall phone all afternoon, which were my primary occupations then. Although, I suppose, Uber Eats-ing sushi, Pinteresting clothes and FaceTiming all afternoon are iterations of the same thing. And they do wear now what I wore then, the Levi's, the slip dresses, Doc Martens, and sweatpants but mercifully not Barkers track pants, which were huge – figuratively and literally – for the Palmerston North teen, circa 1993.

What is your secret ambition?

To move back to London after the children leave home. Or some absolutely remote part of the South Island. Or live between both, which is quite a grand ambition. So maybe just … read Middlemarch, which I try and fail to do every year.

Your fiercest wish for 2021?

To be allowed back to New Zealand, to see my family, drink an Allpress coffee, hear a tūī and drive to a braided river, light a fire and cook a sausage.

as told to Eleanor Black