![]() ![]() ![]() Meg Mason and her second, brilliant, novel (Photo: Grant Sparkes-Carroll) ![]() ![]() It was my dearest wish to be a consumptive child, lying in a hospital bed, because if you’re in hospital everybody has to be nice to you and no one makes you clean your bedroom. I also love to read books about sickly yet beautiful women, brilliant underneath their frailties, the favourite person of all those who try to love them. I love to read stories about mental illness, unhappiness, loneliness, desolation. You will survive the next 200 pages because you know somewhere in your subconscious that she will survive with you. There is hope for Esther, if not for Sylvia. On the first page of Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, the protagonist Esther Greenfield leaves the reader a small breadcrumb, in the shape of a plastic starfish, to let them know that she makes it out alive. Books about depression should carry the content note: “This book is about multiple complex mental illnesses but no one commits suicide.” I’d pick up a book that had that on the cover. Trigger warning: loneliness, isolation, depression, anxiety, middle-class urban malaise. ![]()
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