Five years on from the success of her award-winning bestseller Sorrow and Bliss, New Zealand novelist Meg Mason has returned with Sophie, Standing There — a tender, witty exploration of loneliness, parasocial attachment and the strange world of literary festivals. The book introduces readers to Sophie, a freelance sound technician who spends her working life making famous authors look good while remaining largely unseen herself. When her marriage collapses, Sophie finds solace in the novels of celebrated writer Lilac Dunne — a woman she has never met but to whom she becomes fiercely, almost desperately, attached.
Already drawing praise from the likes of Ann Patchett and Gillian Anderson, Sophie, Standing There cements Mason’s reputation as a novelist with a sharp eye for emotional chaos and an even sharper ear for dialogue. Speaking ahead of her appearance at Henley Literary Festival in October, Mason tackled everything from the indignity of being labelled “sad girl lit” to the surprising joy of being best friends with a long-dead Mitford sister.
Behind the Wings
The literary festival setting is more than incidental — for Mason, it was the seed from which the entire novel grew. She had attended festivals as a reader for years before Sorrow and Bliss transformed her into one of the people on stage. The bit she fell in love with, she explained, was the wings — that cramped, adrenaline-soaked space where publicists, technicians and authors gather moments before stepping into the spotlight.
“It’s an incredibly intimate space, very close, dark, a lot of adrenaline, and everyone who works in the service of books and authors, from publicists to techs, is crammed together, and somehow it feels like all of life can be witnessed there,” she said.
The infamous “hot soup incident” that unfolds in the novel, however, is pure invention. Disaster has never struck at a Mason panel. Not yet, anyway.
The Kindness of Writers (and Their Consent)
Sophie, Standing There opens with a sequence of gloriously indiscreet anecdotes about authors behaving badly — name-checking real-life literary stars including George Saunders, Ann Patchett and Mick Herron. Given the gleeful cattiness of the scenes, readers might reasonably assume Mason was settling scores.
Not so, she insisted. “Every writer I’ve met on the circuit has been lovely.” The bad behaviour in the book was, she said, simply more entertaining to write. And crucially, she sought permission from all 12 authors she caricatured — a list that also includes Douglas Stuart, Bonnie Garmus, David Sedaris, Elizabeth Strout and Richard Osman. They all said yes.
It is, she suggested, further proof of their generosity. Writers, it turns out, are mostly lovely. Even when they’re being satirised.
A Friendship That Crosses Centuries
If Sophie is a novel about the hunger for connection, it is also a novel shaped by Mason’s own long-standing literary attachments. Asked whether she has ever been “completely in thrall” to someone she did not know, she answered without hesitation.
“I’ve been best friends with Nancy Mitford since I was 20 and first read The Pursuit of Love.”
She dislikes the clinical ring of the word “parasocial” — too redolent, she said, of “Dictionary of Mental Illness”. She prefers the warmer notion of literary friendship. “I think we all ought to have one.”
On the Other Side of the Signing Table
Mason has experienced the reverse phenomenon too. She has spotted Sorrow and Bliss tattoos. A woman once asked her to sign her ear, having listened to the audiobook; an alternative body part was eventually agreed upon. Yet she has never felt the intensity of reader adoration becoming uncomfortable. Quite the opposite.
“If there is a reader who might be in a lonelier time of life, just now, and a constructed version of me serves as company, the constructed version of me is more than happy to fill the gap.”
It is a disarmingly generous sentiment, and one that feels quietly central to the spirit of Sophie, Standing There itself.
Marriage, Upheaval and the Momentum of Pain
Like Martha in Sorrow and Bliss, Sophie is navigating the wreckage of a marriage. Mason did not plan the parallel — readers pointed it out to her. But she recognises the narrative logic.
“Meeting a character who is already in a state of tumult or upheaval means the momentum of the narrative is already there, and the question of the novel is immediately what brought them to this place.”
It is a tidy justification for an instinct that, by her own admission, she has never personally lived through.
The ‘Sad Girl Lit’ Problem
Few things rile Mason quite so visibly as the term “sad girl lit”, a label that attached itself to Sorrow and Bliss shortly after publication. She finds it both infuriating and reductive.
“I’d never heard of it as a descriptor before Sorrow and Bliss and couldn’t understand why such a pejorative term would be described, not so much to the book, but to the character of Martha who is neither sad, nor a girl. She’s a chronically ill woman in her forties.”
The phrase does the same disservice to a novel as calling it a “guilty pleasure” or “chick lit”, she argued — as though readers, and particularly female readers, should apologise for the books they love. The obvious question lingers: “Where is the equivalent tag in books written and read by men?”
Skazzing, Sports Psychology and Surviving the Second Book
The technical decision to write Sophie in a close third-person voice rather than the first-person intimacy of Martha’s narration was, Mason said, instinctive rather than calculated. The voice arrived with the character, and felt oddly naive in a way she wasn’t sure her editor would sanction.
The solution came via George Saunders — again. His book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, on Russian short fiction, introduced her to the term “Skaz” — a first-person narration mode that mimics the rhythms of a live storyteller rather than a polished author. She realised she had been skazzing all along. Her editor, obliged to let her continue, presumably breathed a sigh of relief.
As for the daunting task of following up a hit, Mason is refreshingly honest: she never quite let go of the pressure. It simply mutated — from deadline anxiety to expectation anxiety to a desperate urge to do something creatively different. The book that saved her was Perform Under Pressure by Dr Ceri Evans, a sports psychologist who works with New Zealand’s legendary All Blacks rugby team. She wrote him a thank-you note. They ended up sharing a literary festival stage. “Life is so strange and wonderful,” she said.
A Quieter Audience
For all the success of Sorrow and Bliss, Mason is at peace with the likelihood that Sophie will land differently. She understands why readers might long for a sequel in all but name. She also knows that attempting to deliver one would be the worst possible course.
“It would be a lesser version.”
Instead, she is excited to meet what she suspects will be a quieter, more contemplative readership — the readers Sophie was written for. And despite the blisters, the hunger and the general fatigue of a book tour, she still adores the public-facing side of the job. After the misery of the many half-finished manuscripts that preceded Sophie, the chaos of promotion feels like a prize.
Why it Matters
Meg Mason has built a career on excavating the tender, uncomfortable corners of women’s interior lives — and on refusing to let those stories be dismissed with a glib genre label. With Sophie, Standing There, she widens her lens to ask bigger questions about intimacy, idolisation and the strange solace that books, and the people who write them, can offer in lonelier seasons. In an industry still quick to package female pain as something twee or shameful, Mason’s insistence that her work deserves to be taken seriously — and her playful refusal to apologise for the readers she writes for — feels quietly radical. The result is a novel that doesn’t just entertain, but quietly insists on the dignity of its characters, its author, and the act of reading itself.
Sophie, Standing There is out now, published by Bloomsbury. Meg Mason will appear at Henley Literary Festival on 5 October.
