Imagined lives: Meg Mason on the fiction of knowing someone

Over the last few years,the internet has flattened a remarkable range of novels into the catch- all label of “sad girl literature”. Stories of complex women navigating mental illness, family, relationships, marriage, and parenthood have often been reduced to shorthand for depression and melancholy. Meg Mason, whose critically acclaimed Sorrow and Bliss (2020) frequently finds itself at the centre of that conversation, has never resonated with that description. “I saw [Martha] as a complex middle-aged woman with mental health issues,” she tells me.

When Mason joins the Zoom call from Sydney, she’s framed by wall-to-wall bookshelves. Contemporary fiction sits beside classics—Hamnet rests near Hilary Mantel, Stephen Fry’s Mythos peeks out from another shelf—and the books are packed tightly enough to feel less decorative and more architectural. It’s a fitting backdrop for a writer whose own words have become cherished companions for thousands of readers.

The perception of her previous work, however, lingered. When the time came to write another novel,the protagonist that emerged couldn’t have been more different. Sophie is instinctively optimistic, warm, and generous—a character Mason says partly arose in response to the way Martha had been received. Yet the novel’s deeper concerns—loneliness, imagined intimacy, and the emotional lives readers build around authors—weren’t ideas she consciously set out to explore.“My editor said, ‘Oh, so you’ve written about loneliness’,” she laughs.“I started thinking and realised, yes—the word lonely appears an awful lot.”

 

The idea for Sophie, Standing There arrived in the aftermath of Sorrow and Bliss, when Mason suddenly found herself inhabiting a literary world she’d previously only observed from afar.“I’d never really met any of the writers I’d admired before,” she admits. Afterwards came literary festivals—green rooms and conversations with authors whose names had once existed only on book covers. In that liminal space, where readers and writers come together, she became fascinated by the people who worked in the wings.

“I came home from Auckland Writers Festival wondering what it would feel like to be on the staff side of a literary festival—to be in such close proximity to writers and this world, but never quite a part of it,” she says. “And what does it feel like to love an author who doesn’t know you exist?”

That question sits quietly beneath every page of Sophie, Standing There. At its heart, it’s a novel about projection— about the stories readers create around the people whose words arrive at exactly the right moment in their lives. Those questions naturally led her to the increasingly familiar phenomenon of parasocial relationships. “We encounter books at exactly the right moment in our lives, and when that happens it’s easy for admiration to extend beyond the page,” she says. “When what you need aligns with what’s on the page, it feels like fireworks.”

She laughs softly, aware of how quickly the conversation risks becoming more psychological than literary. That emotional attachment, however, was never something Mason wanted to ridicule. For her, Sophie arrived fully formed in her imagination and quickly became someone she felt protective of. “I don’t really care whether readers like me or even the book—I just want them to like Sophie and understand her.”

Sophie, reeling from the collapse of her marriage and the loss of several of her closest relationships, finds solace in the work of a celebrated novelist. The more she reads, the more she begins to feel that she knows her. Of course, she doesn’t.“Because Sophie doesn’t know her, she can imagine her into being,” Mason says.“As she consumes more of the author, she begins to feel as though she really knows this person. When they eventually meet, she discovers she’s built a different version of the author in her own mind.”

It’s an experience that, Mason is quick to point out, is anything but new. Readers have always forged deeply personal relationships with books and the people who write them.“Parasocial” may be the modern label, but she resists the idea that it’s inherently unhealthy. “Readers are especially good at imagining because books train us to suspend disbelief,” she says. “Who hasn’t believed that, if they ever met their favourite author or artist, they might form a special connection?”

 

Other novels might have turned Sophie’s attachment into an object of obsession, but Mason never allows that to happen. Instead, she writes her with extraordinary tenderness.The protectiveness she feels towards Sophie, in some ways, is a rebuttal to the reception of Martha.

“An academic, John Mullan, once said that every new novel is a reaction against the one that came before it,” she says. “That resonates true for me. The danger after a successful novel is trying to write it again. Martha was so often described as a ‘sad girl’— which I never recognised —and there was a part of me that wanted to rebel. I thought, ‘Fine. I’m going to write the happiest character you’ve ever met then’.”

As the novel explores what readers imagine about authors, Mason has also had to confront the reverse: what it feels like to become the subject of other people’s projections. The success of Sorrow and Bliss transformed her life almost overnight. At 43, with an established career and family already in place, she suddenly found herself flying around the world and meeting readers who treated her as though they already knew her.

“I knew not to believe it,” she says.“But at the same time, you do have to inhabit that projection graciously that readers have created. Your only hope is to not start believing it yourself.”

As our conversation runs over the scheduled time, Mason slips from talking as a novelist to talking as a “late reader” remembering the book that made her feel less alone. As a teenager who had just moved from New Zealand to Australia, homesick and desperately lonely, she found her sanctuary in the work of Janet Frame. “I opened one of her books and suddenly, there it all was—my childhood, the landscape, the language, the food. It felt as though she’d handed me home in a book.”

It’s perhaps why Mason resists reducing literature—or life—to a single emotional register. She isn’t interested in unrelenting bleakness because that’s not how life feels.

“We make jokes in terrible moments, and we can feel an unexpected pang of sadness during perfectly happy times,” she says.“I want my books to reflect that.”                                         

The quickest answer she gives all afternoon is when asked about the pressure of writing post-Sorrow and Bliss. She admits she felt it “only every minute,” and the only way she knows how to respond to that expectation is through craft. “I write the book, rewrite it, read it out aloud, and then rewrite it again because I want the reading experience to feel effortless.”

As our conversation draws to a close, I tell her that a friend proclaims Sorrow and Bliss as one of her favourite novels, and ask if she’d mind recording a short message for her. Mason doesn’t hesitate. I also confess that based on my friend’s love for the book, I’d made her up to be this mythic figure too. She laughs immediately. “I hope I’ve quashed that for you.

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's August-September 2026 print issue.

Image credits: Anne Peeters 

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