Brown’s slim but deadly novel teems with ideas about race, class and the stories we construct about ourselves. Assembly Natasha BrownĪs she prepares for a party on her boyfriend’s family estate, our unnamed narrator, a jaded employee at a prestigious finance firm, questions her life choices. Still, if you tend to like character-driven, MFA-feeling contemporary fiction, I think you’ll find plenty to like in this one too.Animal author Lisa Taddeo: ‘I showed my four-year-old Kill Bill to teach her about gender inequality’ 5. As my friend Bernie put it, “it was a well-written book of unoriginal ideas” (or, I’d say, mostly unoriginal her experiences with mental illness did feel moving and important).īottom line, I’m glad I read it, but I wasn’t completely blown away.

The not-so-good was that many of the plot points felt cliche, like things we’ve seen before. Also, Martha is an excellently written character, and her arc is executed insightfully and skillfully. One thing I can absolutely put in the “good” category for this book is that it kept me reading. Then we learn what happened most recently and to damage her marriage, come back to where we started the story, and continue forward in time just a bit. She flashes back to the start of her mental illness, takes us through college and her 30s, first marriage and eventual second marriage, diagnosis after diagnosis and medication after medication. We first meet her just after her husband left. The story is narrated by a woman named Martha who has struggled with mental illness her whole life. This one feels a little hard to review because parts of it were hit or miss for me, but overall, I liked it. I read Sorrow and Bliss because it was shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize. Maybe there is a different story to be written, if Martha can work out where to begin. It feels like the end but maybe, by going back, Martha will get to start again.

With Patrick gone, the only place Martha has left to go is her childhood home, to live with her chaotic parents, to survive without Ingrid, the sister who made their growing-up bearable, who said she would never give up on Martha, and who finally has. There has been since a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, leaving her changed in a way no doctor or drug could fix then and no one, even now, can explain-why can say she is so often sad, cruel to everyone she loves, why she finds it harder to be alive than other people. But she must now that her loving husband Patrick has just left.īecause there's something wrong with Martha. Now, she lives in a gated community in Oxford that she hates and can't bear to leave. Now, she creates internet content for no one. She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel.

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