A piece of paper is clipped to Meg Mason’s desk at her eyeline. Tell it to him as though you’re tired, it reads. “Him, being my husband,” clarifies the New Zealand–born author, who was shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her bestselling novel, Sorrow and Bliss. “If I’m tired, I can’t have any energy for a verbal flare or make it intentionally funny. That was my tone for writing Sophie.”
And that’s exactly what you get when you dive into Sophie, Standing There (published by Bloomsbury), Mason’s new novel about a cheerful woman, her creeping loneliness and her desperate attempt to outrun it. The eponymous Sophie is a sound technician at a company hosting literary festivals, mic’ing up authors for a living, doing her best to stay out of the way. Sophie is also reeling: from a difficult separation, from loving her friends and family but feeling unseen, from standing there, an observer to everyone’s life.
Sophie came to Mason while attending a literary festival in May 2024. “It’s not an easy job. Nobody applauds good sound at the end of an event. It’s only noticed when there’s a disaster. It takes a certain personality to tolerate being unseen.”
You do not have to be a techie at a literary fest to understand Sophie. Mason’s ability to hold her characters under a microscope makes Sophie’s solitude hard to escape. “I try to make every aspect of the character smaller and smaller. How well can I describe an unwell pigeon? Can I make it so quotidian that the reader will think they saw that same pigeon?” she tells me. “Sophie’s not just eating ravioli, she’s eating packet ravioli, because that says so much more about a person.” Sophie, as a result, feels three-dimensional: How the tap water tastes acrid in her mouth upon receiving bad news, how a dinner of eggs and sliced bread captures the desolation of eating alone in an empty apartment.
In writing Sophie, Mason argues that a person being plain does not mean they’re uninteresting. Having at least one viral hot take pinned to your Instagram feed shouldn’t be the marker of wisdom it has come to mean. “I don’t think Sophie is basic, and I certainly don’t think she’s unintelligent. But she is plain-spoken—not pretentious or performative.” Sophie’s life isn’t one for the movies, but in the age of social media and nauseating excess, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.