Why Meg Mason didn't want to write another sad girl novel

Meg Mason explores power of parasocial relationships in new novel, Sophie, Standing There It's common for astronauts returning from space to struggle to readjust to life on Earth. Meg Mason knows why. The New Zealand-born, Sydney-based author likens writing her latest novel, Sophie, Standing There — her first since her surprise 2020 bestseller, Sorrow and Bliss — to the "insane re-entry" to regular life experienced by astronauts. Much like a space mission, the publication of Sorrow and Bliss, which was shortlisted for The Women's Prize, changed Mason's life. "The landscape shifted for me," she tells ABC Radio National's The Book Show. "Before [Sorrow and Bliss], I was a journalist and I wrote novels as a hobby. And then Sorrow and Bliss turned it into my full-time job." It was impossible to communicate just how weird and life-altering the experience was, Mason says. Instead, she "pushed it all down deep inside". "But when you come back to your desk, it's all there needing to be processed." The result is Sophie, Standing There, set in the wings of a literary festival in an unglamorous town, where the likes of George Saunders, David Sedaris and Mason's real-life friend Ann Patchett make cameos. Mason never intended to set her latest novel in the "insular" and sometimes "cliquey" world of writers. "I set out to write a couple of different books all about very different things that I hadn't experienced," she says. "Eventually, this one just asserted itself as if to say, 'You have to write this before you can write anything else'. It was almost like a cleansing." Untethered in every way The Sophie of the title is a 37-year-old sound technician who develops a fixation with a famous author. Mason acknowledges that this brief synopsis makes Sophie sound like an "unhinged" stalker, reminiscent of the terrifying Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's 1987 novel Misery. "It immediately sounds really creepy," she says. "[But] it's not Misery … because Sophie's never going to do anything about it. The relationship's never going be actualised as far as she is concerned." Except, of course, it is. The author is announced as a late addition to the festival program when Elizabeth Strout pulls out, and a horrified Sophie must contend with meeting her idol face-to-face. As the novel opens, Sophie is at a low point in her life. Her husband has left her and she's living in his shabby flat for a peppercorn rent. She feels estranged from her best friend, Emma, whose life is on a different trajectory — one with a happy marriage and kids — and her beloved brother, Laurie, lives two hours away. Even her cherished books are inaccessible, boxed up in her ex-husband's garage. "She feels in every single way untethered," Mason says. But Mason is at pains to point out that Sophie is not a stereotypical "sad girl" in the vein of Martha, the masochistic protagonist of Sorrow and Bliss. "She's a lovely, personable, well-liked, really kind, optimistic person," Mason says. "But this thing has happened to her that means she lost everyone in her life, and in that season of loneliness, she turns to books, which I believe we all do." It's at this vulnerable moment that Sophie comes across a quote by the famous author that perfectly encapsulates her sadness. It prompts her to read the author's new novel and then re-read her back catalogue and listen to every interview she's given. Inevitably, Sophie feels a connection with the author, as if the two are engaged in a private conversation. The author soon becomes like an imaginary friend to the lonely Sophie, both a form of escape and succour. Unlike a real-life friend, "someone you've invented is available to you all the time", Mason says. "If you wake up in the middle of the night, seized with terror, you talk to this person in your mind." Dealing with unexpected loneliness Sophie has read her way through the sad girl canon, from Woolf and Plath to Rooney and Moshfegh. She reflects: "Despite how miserable and depressing they were, she had loved them at the time … Now those books scared her, that many sad women trapped inside her e-reader. Trying to live." Mason admits that Sophie's slightly critical view of sad girl fiction closely resembles her own. "As the author, you get to insert your own opinions," she says. "[It] means nobody can call this book sad girl fiction and they can't put a sad girl cover on it because I'm like, 'I've dismantled sad girl fiction in here.'" A sad girl cover, Mason explains, often features a woman reclining on a piece of furniture. "She's usually prone, sometimes she's supine. She's often an illustration, but fundamentally she can't support her weight on her own legs. That's how you know that it's a sad girl book." Sophie may not be a sad girl — but she's undeniably sad. As a sound technician, her job is to be invisible as she discreetly attaches microphones to the talent's clothing before they step out on stage. This invisibility seeps into her personal life, too. "Living alone, you are unregarded," she observes. "It was breathtaking, how empty a flat could feel. Still genuinely shocking after four months of living by herself." On a particularly bad day, the automatic doors at a superstore fail to detect her, even as she waves her arms under the sensor. The doors slide open for an approaching man, and Sophie follows him out, "feeling like she had been obliterated as a human being". Still, she manages to maintain a dark sense of humour. The effect is a story that is "strange and singular in the best way possible", The Book Show host Claire Nichols writes in her review of the book. "There's a bigger story here about power and those who wield it, and it packs a punch." Reading as a revelation Like Sophie, Mason came to literature late. When Mason moved to Australia as a 17-year-old, she was both new to reading and desperately homesick. "I'd never experienced the way that a book can contain your story for you," she says. That changed when she was given a copy of Owls Do Cry by acclaimed New Zealand author Janet Frame. She was stunned to find her life — "everything about New Zealand that no-one in Australia would understand" — held within its pages. "I just couldn't believe it, and I think I've always felt this deep gratitude to Janet Frame ever since," Mason says. "There are so many books of hers that I've loved, and at every stage of my life, when I've gone back to it, there's something else in there, which I think is always a sign of a good book. "It's the way you can return to Emma or Pride and Prejudice, and there's something you haven't noticed because it wasn't the moment for you to notice it, and then all of a sudden there it was." Mason believes readers are predisposed to forming parasocial relationships. "We're trained … to believe in relationships that aren't there because that's why we read novels," she says. "The authors become so alive to you." Central to the novel is the idea that these one-sided connections are very normal and something most people have experienced. "And if you say you haven't," Mason says, "you're possibly lying." The other side of the coin As an author, Mason has, of course, experienced the other side of parasocial relationships. "People who come to see you at a festival or in a signing line often tell you in … the short time that you're going to have together that they love you," she says. "They don't always say, 'I love the book'. They often say, 'I love you' … It's funny to hear those words from a stranger." Mason has made a habit of being sceptical of the positive things people say about her and her work, so as not to "turn into a monster". But she recognises this humility has its limits. "If someone comes up to you and says, 'I love you', they don't want you to say, 'Don't be ridiculous, that's stupid, I'm a normal person, that's so embarrassing', because they've put themselves out there to say it, they've made themselves vulnerable," she says. "You have to be the person that they want you to be in that time because you don't want to send them away disappointed."