More likely we'll open a bottle of wine and have a good natter about motherhood, marriage, friendships, feminism and all the pertinent issues Mason touches on in her novels.

I first interviewed her back in 2012 for her first novel Say It Again in a Nice Voice. This was the introduction to that story:

I'm pretty sure Meg Mason thought I was a little wacky. I was waffling on about how much I loved her book, how bleak it was, how honest, how it touched a very raw nerve. I cried, I told her, in that last chapter; a chapter that was like a big sunrise of joy. Yes, I actually said that. It's hard to be professional when someone just gets you (I didn't tell her that, it would have been taking it too far). Gets exactly what you're feeling, at the very moment when you need them to.

I'm beginning to scare myself reading it back even now.

Then in 2017 we touched base again, for You Be Mother, where she touched on how women of a certain age are invisible and how loneliness affects mothers of all ages. All of her books, and indeed the regular freelance columns she was writing, have managed to capture not only the minutiae of motherhood and marriage, but also explore those dark, private things we don't often talk about.

Now she's back with Sorrow and Bliss, another bleak, brutal, honest story, emotions Mason does so well. It's the story of a woman called Martha. She knows something is not quite right, but everyone else thinks she's fine. It's a story of a complex marriage, a complex family, a story of lies and truths and what we keep secret. It too will make you laugh. But it will make you cry more.

It's also a story that almost didn't happen. Mason's a similar age to Martha, 40 something. After You be Mother, she spent all of 2018 trying to write the next novel but couldn't.

"I kind of felt post hope ... it just didn't work and I laboured over it for an entire year and then had to scrap it. I felt I just wasn't good enough, that I just couldn't do it. And so I stopped writing. But then writers can't help themselves and when I sat down again it wasn't actually to try again, I just needed to write something. And what came out felt a bit empty and bereft."

But it also felt right. Mason said she gave herself permission just to write. If scenes or dialogues or ideas came into her head, she wrote them down. The book reads like that too, it rambles, flips back and forth in time, there's no real structure. It's Martha's life.

Mason sent it to her publisher anyway, this stream of consciousness, with a note that said "I know you can't publish this". Her publisher disagreed with her.

"I just wanted to show her, I just loved doing it, it was the most exquisite thing and it had been so joyful."

The story is a lot about hope but Mason admits she isn't sure how.

"Considering where I was at the time, I don't know how hope actually managed to creep into it, because it certainly wasn't where I was in my own head.

"It's essential to it really, because you just couldn't leave it anywhere else, when I've taken readers to really quite dark places, maybe I owed it to everyone to end up where it does.

"But I do think that if you've worked as hard as Martha has, on your marriage or on your mental health, if you've battled that out and you've emerged from the other side, then there is hope."

That's what she wanted readers to feel at the end, especially readers who are at that stage of life, feeling as though those pillars of their identity have kind of fallen away, and they're trying to start over.

"I wanted them to feel like, gosh, you know, if this character, who I hope feels real to them, can find hope, even though it hasn't turned out the way she wanted it to, it wasn't like she got everything she's been longing for.

"I do genuinely hope that readers will think oh well, maybe life can be something else, it might not be the thing I wanted, but it might be something that will fulfil me in a different way or feel like a triumph because you had to fight for it."

Mason says it's kind of ironic that the book she thought was the end of it all has given her something new.

"From where I started, to where I finished up, it just seems extraordinary to me because this was the post-hope novel and it's amazing that it's given me a new direction."