The protagonist of Meg Mason’s new book, the follow-up to the 2020 tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, is an invisible woman. She works as a techie at literary festivals, shuffling up to famous writers to adjust microphones while they chat with chairs or accept water from publicists.
A Sad Heart and a New Obsession
Sophie lurks in the wings of her own life. Her husband ended their relationship with callousness—she was in the shower, he kept his earbuds in—and with it her hope of becoming a mother. Now she lives alone in a dingy rental flat owned by her ex, with her books in storage. Mason’s prose is wan and witty, handling pathos and bathos well. Sophie is bookish and glumly aware of her literary analogues—there is “a lot of sad girl fiction” on her Kindle, including Eleanor Oliphant.
The Engine of the Plot
The story is driven by a parasocial relationship: Sophie becomes obsessed with a famous writer, initially called “the author” and later named Lilac Dunne. She rereads her books, talks to an imaginary version of Lilac, and spends hours scrolling images and listening to podcasts. Fantasy and reality collide when Lilac is booked to appear after Elizabeth Strout drops out of an event. Sophie’s infatuation with the public persona is complicated by a first glancing and then deeper encounter with the real Lilac.
A Knowing Metafictional Caper
If there is a fault, it is in the character of Lilac—harder and more ruthless than her persona, yet impenetrable, lacking the psychological complexity of others. But perhaps that is by design. As Mason writes near the end, “If someone wrote a novel about Sophie, which they wouldn’t, but if they did, it could end there.” It doesn’t. Sophie, Standing There is out now in Australia (HarperCollins) and will be published in the UK on 27 August (Bloomsbury).
