Hello,
It’s been a while! Things have been busy lately… I started to write this post a month ago and I struggled to find the time to sit down and finish it.
I absolutely adored today’s recommendation. I can’t stop thinking about it. I listened to the audiobook and found the voice actress fantastic! If you decide to read it, I hope you enjoy it!
Have a lovely day,
mariana
Why did I read this book?
My wonderful friend Laurita recommended this book to me a few months ago. She said she had found it really interesting and darkly funny, which I totally agree with. She just had her baby, so I want to dedicate this post to her!
What is the book about?
Mis-diagnosis: For most of her adult life, Martha has known that there’s something wrong with her, but she doesn't really know what it is or how she can make it better. Nevertheless, she has always coped with herself as best as she can. As she turns 40 and her marriage ends, she’s forced to rethink things.
Illness, stigma, and support: Do we treat others differently when we learn they have a certain medical condition? Most importantly, how do we treat ourselves when we learn that “something is wrong with us”. Health issues are part of the human experience, yet we have such a funny relationship with them. Why are some conditions easier to talk about than others and what is the price of this silence?
Love: How can we support our loved ones when we see them profoundly committed to what appears to be their own self-destruction? This book tackles this question from the romantic partner and family angles.
“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss
Why should you read it?
A beautiful and unique story: I still can’t seem to find the right words to explain why I enjoyed this book so much, and I feel like I’m selling it short. I found the writing funny, clever, and exquisite. Mostly, the plot captivated me. The author drew me further and further in, until all I could do was think about what was going to happen next. It’s also my understanding that this book it’s going to be made into a movie, so there you go.
If you want to laugh and maybe cry: I found this book very moving. While the actual story of Martha isn’t particularly funny, the author finds ways of making you laugh. I fell in love with all the characters, not just Martha. As a hopeless romantic, I very much enjoyed the feeling of hope and warmth I got when I finished the story.
“I know it hasn’t been that long but this is what I have been able to see since then: things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss
Links to buy the book
Always try to support your local bookshop. If you’d like me to add any bookshops to the list, let me know. Thanks to those who keep sharing new bookshops with me.
UK
Spain
Mexico
Italy
US
Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book, if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”
“Everything is redeemable, Martha. Even decisions that end up with you unconscious and bleeding in a pedestrian underpass, like me. Although ideally, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.”
“I am not saying you haven't suffered, Martha. But I am saying, grow up. You're not the only one.”
“As a child, watching the news or listening to it on the radio with my father I thought, when they said ‘the body was discovered by a man walking his dog’, that it was always the same man. I still imagine him, putting his walking shoes on at the door, finding the leash, the familiar dread as he clips it onto the dog’s collar, but still setting out, regardless, in the hope that, today, there won’t be a body. But twenty minutes later, God, there it is.”
“It is hard to look into someone's eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through.”
“We hugged each other like two people who had no practical experience of embracing, had only taught themselves the theory from a poorly worded manual.”
“An observer to my marriage would think I have made no effort to be a good or better wife. Or, seeing me that night, that I must have set out to be this way and achieved it after years of concentrated effort. They could not tell that for most of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been trying to become the opposite of myself.”
“What happens next is your choice.”
“I know you and your sister tease me for the repurposing but all I've been trying to do, all these years, is take rubbish and turn it into something beautiful and much stronger than it was before. I'm sorry if that's a bloody metaphor for everything.”
“First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.”
“Paris, Martha. “Please go to Paris.” “Why?” “Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is vastly better than crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.”
“There are things, crimes in a marriage, that are so great you can not apologize for them.”
“Perhaps what I think is wrong. Perhaps I’m not entitled to think of your pain that way, but it is the only way I can think of to give any of it a purpose. And I wonder, is there any way you could come to see that what you’ve been through is for something? Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else? Is it why you are the love of your sister’s life? Why you’ll be a writer of much more, one day, than a small supermarket column? How you can be my fiercest bloody critic, and someone with so much compassion she’ll buy glasses she doesn’t need because the man fell off his stool. Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?”
“Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.”
“I already know I’m a monster.” I wanted her to tell me I wasn’t.
“Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.”
“I know it hasn’t been that long but this is what I have been able to see since then: things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us.”
“But the thing about labels is, they’re very useful when they’re right because,’ I carried on through her attempt at interruption, ‘because then you don’t give yourself wrong ones, like difficult or insane, or psychotic or a bad wife.”
“I stayed there and read so many spines, then one by one I started taking books off, building a pile in my left art. My selection criteria was threefold. Books by women or suitably sensitive/depressive men who had made up their own lives. Any book I lied about reading, except Proust because even with everything I had done I did not deserve to suffer that much. Books with promising titles, that I could reach without having to stand on a chair.
They were old. The covers made my fingers feel chalky, and the pages smelled like the bedroom of waiting for my father to finish in a secondhand shop when I was young. But they would tell me how to be or what to want and they would save me from a gratitude journal and it was the only thing I could think of.”
I said. ‘I’m not. I want it not to be miserable. I just don’t know what non-miserable options exist if you don’t like animals or helping people. If you’ve wanted the things women are supposed to want, babies, husband, friends, house –
– successful Etsy business.’
‘Even the women who get those things lose them again. Husbands die and children grow up and marry someone you hate and use the law degree you bought them to start an Etsy business. Everything goes away eventually, and women are always the last ones standing so we just make up something else to want.’
“Everything is invented. Life is invented. Everything you see anyone doing is something they made up.”
“I was the victim, and victims of course are allowed to behave however they like. Nobody can be held to account as long as they’re suffering and I made you my unassailable excuse for not growing up.”
"I’m not good at being a person. I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people"
Important notes
For UK and US readers, Bookshop.org is a great option to support your local bookshop. You can read more about it here.
If you’re using Gmail and the newsletter keeps going to your Promotions tab, you can try the following:
Open Gmail on your computer or laptop (it doesn’t work on mobile phones), and then drag the email from the Promotions tab into the Primary tab.
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