You Be Mother: The debut novel from the author of Sorrow and Bliss

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Lucky for me, I had a partner who was very involved with his kids, and some great friends, who soon quelled the loneliness. Settling in Cremorne, in a small flat owned by Stu’ parents, Abi soon finds that Stu may not be ready yet to play happy families as he continues to lead his bachelor life, leaving her and baby Jude alone for long periods of time whilst he studies and meets his mates at the pub until the early morning hours. A friend at work started reading You Be Mother by Meg Mason and couldn’t wait to tell me how good it was. Her own family has been in tatters for some time, and she is willing to start afresh with her new family. Because I became a mother at 25, which is to say, quite a lot younger than present culture might show as average, I’ve never seen my particular experience in contemporary writing.

However, I found the last 100 or so pages riveting and very moving, and there were tears streaming down my face reading it, elevating it to a wonderful 4 ⭐️. Her second, Sorrow and Bliss (HarperCollins) was first published in Australia in 2020, and the US and UK in 2021.I remember walking for hours with my first-born asleep in the pram, just to get out of the house and talk to other grown-up people. Very quickly, their relationship becomes far more serious than either of them intended (as in, Abi finds herself pregnant). Having emigrated myself at an early age and raising my babies without the help of family, far away from my old life, I really related to Abi. But reading about Abi brought back so many memories of that time, and I felt like giving her a huge bear hug of the sort I often craved myself when crying for my mother!

As we get to know the characters we become invested in many stories and are seeing everyone’s perspectives without an inch of confusion of who is who or what was going on.So when she falls pregnant by an Australian exchange student in London, she cannot pack up her old life in Croydon fast enough, to start all over in Sydney and make her own family. Her first book Say It Again in a Nice Voice (HarperCollins), a memoir of early motherhood, was published in 2012.

Her character work is outstanding, and poignant - the hairline fractures, contradictions and nuances of the middle-class family dynamic are painstakingly rendered with moving familiarity and black humour, resulting in a combination as devastating and sharply witty as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.This book solidified my love for Meg Mason’s writing style and character building and put her as one of my favourite authors! Comparisons to Sally Rooney will be made, but Mason’s writing is less self-conscious than Rooney’s, and perhaps more mature. I haven’t cried while reading a novel in a very long time and this just took me straight to a place within that I never knew was there. It was so close to being a 5 star read but I can't give it full marks as a couple of plot twists at the very end didn't ring true to the characters that I had come to love. There were a few unlikeable dysfunctional characters which were well imagined but the ending was a bit too conveniently tidy.