LM WOMAN / MEG MASON
Meg Mason is an Australian author who began her career as a journalist for the Financial Times, Vogue and The New Yorker. Her books tackle everything from marriage and motherhood to mental health, and her novel Sorrow and Blisswas shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Meg wears the Mila Turtleneck and Yoko Skirt.
What role do books play in your life and home?
It’s only when I try to imagine my life without them that I realise books really are my life, and my home. Besides my family, the one constant thing.
Meg wears the Mila Turtleneck and Yoko Skirt.
What are your earliest memories of books and reading?
I grew up in New Zealand, in a very small town, which didn’t have a bookshop or a library. My mother is a devoted reader and I’ve never thought to wonder how she kept me and my brother supplied with books but she did. I remember the feeling of being read to by her, the closeness, and calm, and never wanting it to end.
I lost interest in books as I got older but part way through Year 12, we moved countries and I was forced back to books, there was just nothing else. Jane Eyre led to Emma, which led to the Mitfords via Evelyn Waugh, and I started English at university a year later.
Coming to literature relatively late means I sometimes feel slightly fraudulent around other authors, but I’m also grateful that was my particular way in. It means I can’t feel any kind of snobbery about books and reading, which is something that writers can be a bit vulnerable to – the idea that literature is humanity’s highest pursuit and everything else is less-than. And while I don’t feel shame that I haven’t read Proust or Chekhov or all of Shakespeare, and unlikely will, I definitely twinge when I hear another writer describe themselves as that child who was always reading under the covers with a torch, that reading shaped them and Tolstoy made them who they are. I’m sure it’s true, but I was shaped by airfreight copies of American Harper’s Bazaar.
Meg wears the LM Classic Shirt and LM Classic Culotte.
Your first career was journalism, how was the shift into fiction?
Being a journalist is quite a reasonable thing to want to do and I never found it embarrassing to admit as an ambition, before I was established. But to say you want to be a novelist, oh my goodness, I found it so shaming and exposing – maybe I felt there was a sort of arrogance in it, a presumption that you’re capable of it, even though you’ve never tried it. And when you do first actually sit down and make people up and have them say things to each other, the shame is even hotter – it’s just such a peculiar thing to be doing when other people are in real offices, doing real jobs.
The one thing that has made a difference to how I perceive it is letters from readers, especially after Sorrow and Bliss, which is partly a story about mental illness. It’s almost like, after reading such a volume of personal experience and being told that the novel articulated something for them, or made them laugh or feel connected or ‘normal’, I’m not allowed to think anymore that there isn’t something worthy in the work.
Meg wears the LM Classic Shirt and LM Classic Culotte.
What’s your process when writing? What does your average day look like and what are your absolute must-haves for a day of writing?
Clive James says the job of writing is turning the story around and around until the light hits it. Which is beautiful and true, but actually means sitting and sitting and not getting up until you’ve forced some revelation. A novel in the end is just one million individual decisions – between words and phrases, and characters and events and form, but also between quitting and not quitting, hope and despair, novel over friends or family over art, all of those things.
I can’t quite believe fiction is now my full-time job, but it still feels – as I’m sure it does to all creatives – that the universe is arrayed against you when it comes to time and space and the conditions you feel like you need. I seem to be a human magnet to jackhammers and barking dogs and renovations, I am almost never alone and laundry and making dinner and quarterly BAS statements don’t care about your work. I’m training myself not to need anything to do it – silence or a proper stretch of time, an empty house, even coffee or any kind of writerly superstition, like doing things in a certain order, because they all just become reasons to give up. The only thing that I find fatal to concentration is feeling my clothes – I can’t produce a single sentence with a tight cuff or hard waistband. That’s how I justify so much LM cashmere, which I feel should be tax deductible.
You obviously have a deep connection with London and wrote so observantly about Oxford – what’s your relationship with England?
I got married the summer I graduated from university, and we moved to London two weeks later. Even though we only lived there for five years, when you cram a lot of firsts into a particular period and place – in my case first years of marriage, first career job, first baby – you never fully leave it.
Oxford is where I went to recover after I had to throw away the irredeemable manuscript that preceded Sorrow and Bliss and thought I would never write again. Every day, I walked along the towpath of the river, trying not to cry over everything being a bit broken, which is an experience I ended up giving to Martha, the main character of Sorrow and Bliss which I started writing when I got home.
Is there a book, author or poet you think more people should know about?
She is New Zealand’s most iconic writer but I am not sure if Janet Frame is as well known outside the motherland. She was one of the first writers, after Virginia Woolf, to write about mental illness from the female perspective. I would start with her first exquisite novel, Owls Do Cry, which is autobiographical, and then move to her actual autobiography, An Angel at My Table, to see how much more shocking the real version was.
Meg wears the Kitty Dress.
What’s next? What are you working on?
Ten years ago, I read a novel called Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido and it instantly bumped whichever had been my favourite novel of all time into second position and has never shifted. It’s a sort of sub-cult classic, like I Capture the Castle or The Pursuit of Love. After Sorrow and Bliss came out in the UK, I was at a party in London and talked to a woman for a hard ten minutes about how it was the book of my life, how much I loved it, and how much it had influenced me, before she told me that she was the publisher and would arrange a lunch. I had to excuse myself from the table twice out of overwhelm. Afterwards Barbara, who lives in Oxford and is in her eighties now, said we could become pen-pals and somehow, a year later, I am adapting Brother of the More Famous Jack for screen. I feel faint with my own good fortune. It also transpired that all the times I walked the towpath, weeping over my lost career, I was walking past her garden gate.
Meg wears the Rosa Long Sleeve Shirt.
Meg's Reading List
While there are times you feel absolutely capable of a 600-page historical epic, there are others that call for a slender volume. Being all under two-hundred pages doesn’t make these four novels any less impactful, and completely consuming.
Fox8 by George Saunders
To begin with, you will feel like you’ve accidentally picked up a children’s book because the protagonist is a fox who has inadvertently learned English by eavesdropping on a mother reading to her children, outside their window. But then you realise that, as well as being funny and charming, it’s the most moving and quietly devastating allegory about humans and the natural world.
Shy and Grief is the Thing with Features by Max Porter
Porter’s particular genius is telling vast stories in so few words, mostly tiny vignettes. His first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, is about a father trying to raise two boys after their mother dies, and while tragic, it isn’t depressing and mitigated with so much humour. Shy, his newest, is about a teenage boy running away from a juvenile home, and while it is quite dark in places, the ending is obliteratingly beautiful.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
This novel is about a man taking his ex-girlfriend on a road trip, except it is the ghost of his girlfriend and they are on the run. Even if magical realism is your natural oeuvre, it is so clever and exactly imagined and so darkly funny, you might make an exception.
Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
Esther Freud (daughter of Lucian, sister of Bella) wrote Hideous Kinky, her debut, when she was 25, from her experience of being taken to live in Morocco by her very young, single mother, when she and her sister were five and seven. What makes it unique and so moving, is the fact it’s narrated by the little girl and the readers’ job is filling in the gaps between what she understands and what is really happening.
LM WOman / Meg mason
Meg Mason is an Australian author who began her career as a journalist for the Financial Times, Vogue and The New Yorker. Her books tackle everything from marriage and motherhood to mental health, and her novel Sorrow and Blisswas shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Meg wears the Mila Turtleneck and Yoko Skirt.
What role do books play in your life and home?
It’s only when I try to imagine my life without them that I realise books really are my life, and my home. Besides my family, the one constant thing.
Meg wears the Mila Turtleneck and Yoko Skirt.
What are your earliest memories of books and reading?
I grew up in New Zealand, in a very small town, which didn’t have a bookshop or a library. My mother is a devoted reader and I’ve never thought to wonder how she kept me and my brother supplied with books but she did. I remember the feeling of being read to by her, the closeness, and calm, and never wanting it to end.
I lost interest in books as I got older but part way through Year 12, we moved countries and I was forced back to books, there was just nothing else. Jane Eyre led to Emma, which led to the Mitfords via Evelyn Waugh, and I started English at university a year later.
Coming to literature relatively late means I sometimes feel slightly fraudulent around other authors, but I’m also grateful that was my particular way in. It means I can’t feel any kind of snobbery about books and reading, which is something that writers can be a bit vulnerable to – the idea that literature is humanity’s highest pursuit and everything else is less-than. And while I don’t feel shame that I haven’t read Proust or Chekhov or all of Shakespeare, and unlikely will, I definitely twinge when I hear another writer describe themselves as that child who was always reading under the covers with a torch, that reading shaped them and Tolstoy made them who they are. I’m sure it’s true, but I was shaped by airfreight copies of American Harper’s Bazaar.
Meg wears the LM Classic Shirt and LM Classic Culotte.
Your first career was journalism, how was the shift into fiction?
Being a journalist is quite a reasonable thing to want to do and I never found it embarrassing to admit as an ambition, before I was established. But to say you want to be a novelist, oh my goodness, I found it so shaming and exposing – maybe I felt there was a sort of arrogance in it, a presumption that you’re capable of it, even though you’ve never tried it. And when you do first actually sit down and make people up and have them say things to each other, the shame is even hotter – it’s just such a peculiar thing to be doing when other people are in real offices, doing real jobs.
The one thing that has made a difference to how I perceive it is letters from readers, especially after Sorrow and Bliss, which is partly a story about mental illness. It’s almost like, after reading such a volume of personal experience and being told that the novel articulated something for them, or made them laugh or feel connected or ‘normal’, I’m not allowed to think anymore that there isn’t something worthy in the work.
Meg wears the LM Classic Shirt and LM Classic Culotte.
What’s your process when writing? What does your average day look like and what are your absolute must-haves for a day of writing?
Clive James says the job of writing is turning the story around and around until the light hits it. Which is beautiful and true, but actually means sitting and sitting and not getting up until you’ve forced some revelation. A novel in the end is just one million individual decisions – between words and phrases, and characters and events and form, but also between quitting and not quitting, hope and despair, novel over friends or family over art, all of those things.
I can’t quite believe fiction is now my full-time job, but it still feels – as I’m sure it does to all creatives – that the universe is arrayed against you when it comes to time and space and the conditions you feel like you need. I seem to be a human magnet to jackhammers and barking dogs and renovations, I am almost never alone and laundry and making dinner and quarterly BAS statements don’t care about your work. I’m training myself not to need anything to do it – silence or a proper stretch of time, an empty house, even coffee or any kind of writerly superstition, like doing things in a certain order, because they all just become reasons to give up. The only thing that I find fatal to concentration is feeling my clothes – I can’t produce a single sentence with a tight cuff or hard waistband. That’s how I justify so much LM cashmere, which I feel should be tax deductible.
You obviously have a deep connection with London and wrote so observantly about Oxford – what’s your relationship with England?
I got married the summer I graduated from university, and we moved to London two weeks later. Even though we only lived there for five years, when you cram a lot of firsts into a particular period and place – in my case first years of marriage, first career job, first baby – you never fully leave it.
Oxford is where I went to recover after I had to throw away the irredeemable manuscript that preceded Sorrow and Bliss and thought I would never write again. Every day, I walked along the towpath of the river, trying not to cry over everything being a bit broken, which is an experience I ended up giving to Martha, the main character of Sorrow and Bliss which I started writing when I got home.
Is there a book, author or poet you think more people should know about?
She is New Zealand’s most iconic writer but I am not sure if Janet Frame is as well known outside the motherland. She was one of the first writers, after Virginia Woolf, to write about mental illness from the female perspective. I would start with her first exquisite novel, Owls Do Cry, which is autobiographical, and then move to her actual autobiography, An Angel at My Table, to see how much more shocking the real version was.
Meg wears the Kitty Dress.
What’s next? What are you working on?
Ten years ago, I read a novel called Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido and it instantly bumped whichever had been my favourite novel of all time into second position and has never shifted. It’s a sort of sub-cult classic, like I Capture the Castle or The Pursuit of Love. After Sorrow and Bliss came out in the UK, I was at a party in London and talked to a woman for a hard ten minutes about how it was the book of my life, how much I loved it, and how much it had influenced me, before she told me that she was the publisher and would arrange a lunch. I had to excuse myself from the table twice out of overwhelm. Afterwards Barbara, who lives in Oxford and is in her eighties now, said we could become pen-pals and somehow, a year later, I am adapting Brother of the More Famous Jack for screen. I feel faint with my own good fortune. It also transpired that all the times I walked the towpath, weeping over my lost career, I was walking past her garden gate.
Meg wears the Rosa Long Sleeve Shirt.
Meg's Reading List
While there are times you feel absolutely capable of a 600-page historical epic, there are others that call for a slender volume. Being all under two-hundred pages doesn’t make these four novels any less impactful, and completely consuming.
Fox8 by George Saunders
To begin with, you will feel like you’ve accidentally picked up a children’s book because the protagonist is a fox who has inadvertently learned English by eavesdropping on a mother reading to her children, outside their window. But then you realise that, as well as being funny and charming, it’s the most moving and quietly devastating allegory about humans and the natural world.
Shy and Grief is the Thing with Features by Max Porter
Porter’s particular genius is telling vast stories in so few words, mostly tiny vignettes. His first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, is about a father trying to raise two boys after their mother dies, and while tragic, it isn’t depressing and mitigated with so much humour. Shy, his newest, is about a teenage boy running away from a juvenile home, and while it is quite dark in places, the ending is obliteratingly beautiful.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
This novel is about a man taking his ex-girlfriend on a road trip, except it is the ghost of his girlfriend and they are on the run. Even if magical realism is your natural oeuvre, it is so clever and exactly imagined and so darkly funny, you might make an exception.
Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
Esther Freud (daughter of Lucian, sister of Bella) wrote Hideous Kinky, her debut, when she was 25, from her experience of being taken to live in Morocco by her very young, single mother, when she and her sister were five and seven. What makes it unique and so moving, is the fact it’s narrated by the little girl and the readers’ job is filling in the gaps between what she understands and what is really happening.