Ahead of the publication of her new novel, Sophie, Standing There, Meg Mason sat down with Outlook for an exclusive conversation.
Mason became a global phenomenon with her 2020 novel, Sorrow and Bliss.
Sophie, Standing There circles an author-reader relationship across the imagined, the projected and the real.
With her third novel, Sorrow and Bliss (2020), Meg Mason took off. A global phenomenon translated into more than 30 languages, its mordant riff on relationships and the most private recesses of ourselves swim over into her next, Sophie, Standing There. The titular protagonist is a sound technician who shifts between odd gigs like working backstage at book festivals. Sophie is also a very canny reader, though she’s not someone who’d usually pitch her thoughts in a room unless nudged. The novel opens in the shadow of her divorce. When a novelist, Lilac Dunne, is slotted in to replace Elizabeth Strout at an upcoming festival, Sophie turns to her books and senses an immediate, bracing connection. She invents a fanciful relationship with the Lilac in her head, to whom she whispers her deepest secrets.
Even as the parasocial relationship intensifies, hijacking her dreams and every shred of her waking thought, Sophie insists on its purity, unclouded by sexual inclinations. When the encounter does happen, Mason invests the dynamic with livewire awkwardness and as a window of psychological unravelling. The previously constructed reader-author equation crumples as Lilac takes charge.
This book is the ultimate ode to literary festivals that are swarming every other city, its perspective equal parts cynical, warm and exuberant. Mason demonstrates a fine eye for the rich interface between life and art, the many projections literature helps enable, configurations of characters and their specific pangs that somehow feel tailored to speak to our precise heartbeat. While Sophie and Lilac’s relationship veers between gushing and guarded, Mason never loses sight of her heroine’s dignity. The wounds, the fragility, they speckle a quietly observant, tender tale of a woman slowly turning round after a halting moment.
Bloomsbury is publishing Sophie, Standing There in a bunch of territories including India and the UK. Before the novel hits stands, Outlook’s Debanjan Dhar caught up with Meg Mason for an exclusive interview.
Sophie keeps herself at a remove in most spaces. The aftermath of her divorce hangs heavy. She’s quietly disconsolate. There’s abundant grief and trauma which you gradually unravel. However, the narrative which could have been wallowing in self-pity is shot through with lightness, occasionally squirm-inducing humour. Could you speak to juggling the unnerving and bittersweet emotional temperatures in the book?
While of course, I’m the one writing the book, I’m also the book’s first reader – sentence by sentence, as I write. And as a reader, I never want to read a novel that is unrelentingly sad, or likewise, entirely happy because to me, that isn’t how life is and it’s real life I want to see on the page, and life that I’m always trying to capture. To achieve the right mix and balance, I think it’s about gauging your own reactions as you go – by which I mean, noticing when I needed relief from the bleakness, or when I wanted to feel something deeper, more than just entertainment. At any point, if I start to feel bored or unsatisfied, I knew it was time to switch modes.
Lilac Dunne enters the novel, rather meets Sophie at midway point. Was there some kind of pressure in how you finally got around to present Lilac in the flesh after the long lead up?
Yes! The first half of the novel wrote itself in three weeks, but as soon as Lilac Dunne arrived, turning from Sophie’s imaginary friend, the unnamed ‘Author,’ into a real person, Lilac, everything slowed down and the second half of the novel took nine months. Apart from trying to work out who Lilac was – as difficult or near impossible for me as it was in the end for Sophie – by that point in the action,, Sophie is so habituated to thinking not just about the Author, but to the author, I knew she wouldn’t automatically stop doing that, which meant having to operate two Lilacs at once.
How much of Lilac’s inner self, her past and life you always knew you were willing to divulge? Could you trace that process of whittling through what she does share with Sophie versus holds back?
From the beginning, I knew we wouldn’t get a full sense of who Lilac is, as a person, because the book isn’t a study of her, it’s a study of what fame does to someone, how it forces on a persona as a means of self-protection. There were drafts in which I gave much more away, and had Lilac sharing about herself to Sophie, but I realised the real pain of that week-long relationship – the real sucker punch to Sophie when their time is about to end – would be Lilac saying, ‘What did I tell you that everyone doesn’t already know.’ The answer was nothing. And so, I had to be true to that. Through their conversations, Sophie asked Lilac many questions about herself, but when you look back, Lilac never answered them.
How do you achieve the kind of ease and lucidity in striking a sort of interior monologue? The novel sits long and deep with awkwardness, embarrassment, an intricate inner world of presumptions and projections. Does chiselling out those delicate beats demand a lot of revision and rewrites?
Although the novel presents itself in the straight third-person POV – she said, he said – the action is filtered through Sophie’s consciousness, using a narrative style called skaz, which aims to mimic everyday speech, the rhythms, idioms and unpolished phrasing of, traditionally, a character of lesser education. It was invented by Chekhov, which makes me sound very fancy for using it, but truthfully, I’d never heard of it until I was half-way through writing the novel, not sure if I would get away with narrative that is so consciously naïve, and full of what are, technically, mistakes in grammar. But then I read about it in George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond with Rain, and that felt like license, and I was thrilled because instinctively, it had felt like it was the best, truest way to capture Sophie, to let the narrative read exactly as she speaks. As it turned out, that was the easiest part of the writing – to just imagine her talking and write it down, to make sure I was never invading with my own thoughts or style – in a funny way, I miss listening to Sophie talk all day.
There’s this great intimacy you bring to moments and disclosures, but also an unshakable privacy, a protective regard for Sophie. How vital was establishing this?
I’m so glad you felt like that! It was absolutely vital, and a very conscious decision. From the first moment Sophie arrived in my mind, I loved her and I knew that while I would put her through all sorts of trial, and mortifications, I would never mock or make fun of her, I would never let her come across as pathetic. Because although she struggles, she isn’t weak and she never gives up, and I wanted always to show her quiet strength.
Did the fame, the stratospheric visibility you got from Sorrow and Bliss, ever feel like they were impinging on your writing process? How do you shut out that noise of expectation?
Oh, it was so hard. Although I never felt ‘famous,’ after Sorrow and Bliss, the success of that book meant I couldn’t write with the sense that nobody would ever read what I was working on so it didn’t matter if it was no good, and that belief has always been key to my feeling brave enough to be at my desk. So, I kept starting things and throwing them away, feeling more and more desperate and defeated. When I finally identified that it wasn’t writer’s block, it was actually stage fright, things became a little easier. But what actually got me on the right road was a book called Perform Under Pressure by Dr Ceri Evans, who works with the All Blacks rugby team (my team.) I love the idea that I’m a novelist with a sports psychologist.
What’s your relationship with being on book tours like? Is it a source of delight or constant exhaustion? Have you had any odd/particularly memorable fan interaction?
A lot of authors complain about having to do publicity, and I can imagine it would be difficult if you were incredibly introverted. But I love it, the chance to meet readers and talk about literature. It’s also the only time in my life when I don’t feel like I should be writing.
Are you in favour of meeting your literary heroes? Is there anyone living or dead you wish you could run into?
People say never met your heroes, but I think always seize on any opportunity to meet an author you admire. Either they will live up to our expectations, and possibly exceed them. Or, like the poem ‘Two Cures for Love’, that person will be nothing like what we imagined, and we’ll be freed of all loyalty! I would give anything to go back in time and meet the author, Nancy Mitford. I cannot imagine that she’d have disappointed.
In this age of intensifying digital encroachment in all its avatars, how do you look on literature as still being a connective thread, a balm for various kinds of loneliness?
In seasons of loneliness and isolation, I do not think there is anything more powerful and consoling than literature. I became a reader when I was lonely in high school, after moving countries, and I am not sure what I would have done without books.
Finally, can any artist today find audiences without constantly thrusting herself in the promotional juggernaut?
Well, everyone seems to believe that an author must have a social media presence to sell their book, but I went off social media in 2018, well before Sorrow and Bliss came out, after realising how emotionally depleting I found it and deciding that whatever emotional resources I had in a given day, I would be better off investing in the novel. So maybe, I’m an example of an author who sold copies of a book without ever getting near Instagram.
Sophie, Standing There releases on August 27.
