Matt Haig: ‘We’ve been forced to have a life edit’

Best-selling author Matt Haig on second chances, silver linings – and why we’ll all look back on 2020 with gratitude (yes, really)

matt haig is, in many ways, a good measure of the nation’s mental health. The best-selling writer – he’s sold over a million books in the UK alone – is best known for Reasons To Stay Alive, his ground-breaking memoir detailing his depression, while his other non-fiction book, Notes On A Nervous Planet, offers guidance on how to stay sane in our fast-moving world. Meanwhile, his Instagram posts are widely liked and shared. So… how does he think we’re handling 2020 so far?

‘I don’t think people are actually more mentally ill,’ he says over the phone from his home in Brighton. ‘I think what has happened is that we’ve all had time to think about things. So a lot of people who have low-level issues that they can disguise around the business of work and socialising, suddenly they haven’t got that so they have had to reflect and absorb what’s going on. Which can actually be healthy, even if it’s uncomfortable – essentially, working out what’s right and what’s wrong with your life. We’ve all had this enforced life edit. I feel like mental health is often used in a negative way – people struggling with mental illness – but it’s just something we all have, and actually by paying attention to it doesn’t mean that we’re being neurotic, it just means we’re looking after ourselves.’

Mental health is something Matt knows an awful lot about. Reasons To Stay Alive was originally a side project, written between novels, but from the moment it was published in 2015 it became a wordof-mouth hit. The book recounts Matt’s attempted suicide at 24 and subsequent struggles, and is a heartfelt as well as genuinely helpful read. It stayed in the UK top 10 for 49 weeks with countless readers saying it had saved their lives. Fans include everyone from Stephen Fry (who loves his writing but warned him not to become ‘Mr Depression’) to the Duchess of Sussex (who has described him as a ‘force for change’).

His new book, The Midnight Library, is fiction but, as with much of Matt’s writing, forces the reader to muse upon their own life. The library in question is a place of second chances, where the protagonist Nora Seed has the chance to live again, undoing past mistakes to create the ‘perfect life’.

‘I’ve always been obsessed with parallel lives,’ says Matt, 45. ‘I envisioned how this infinite universe would look and I thought a library would be the perfect metaphor for that, and that every book in this library would be a night that you lived in another universe in which you’d made different decisions that had different outcomes.’

Is there anything he would have done differently in his own life? ‘I’ve had mental health issues before, and a lot of it feels like regret, like you wish you’d done things differently. I wrote this book almost as therapy for myself. It’s a way of being content with the universe you’re in.’

Matt was on a working holiday in Ibiza with his girlfriend Andrea, now his wife, when his life started to unravel. He stood on a cliff edge and considered taking his life. ‘My total breakdown was due to decisions I’d made in my twenties with dead-end jobs and then going to Ibiza and being superunhealthy – they were all mistakes that led to three years of being suicidal.’

Still, he wouldn’t change a thing. ‘I’m a great believer that some of the very worst patches in our lives – and this year is going to be a test of that – actually end up with the brightest silver linings. You appreciate things more. No one has a perfect 100% happy-all-the-time life – and nor do they ever have a permanent 100% all-the-time miserable life. When you’re in a bad patch it’s helping the good stuff grow.’

For Matt, life since lockdown has had its ups and downs. ‘In March and April, I handled it badly. Then I got into the rhythm of it and became appreciative of Zoom meetings and not having too much choice about things and not having to go on trains. I’m very privileged in that I can do exactly what I do from home. It’s been a mixed bag but there are things about it that I’d want to take forward.’ He wrote a pertinent Insta post in June to that effect – how many of us are missing ‘our former world of… stressful commutes, traffic jams, hectic crowds… and 24/7 everything’, he wondered. ‘You don’t notice that things are stressing you out as you’re walking through Victoria Station,’ he says. ‘That franticness. You never say, “Oh, something really bad happened to me today; I walked through a crowd of people.” But it all builds up, that hectic state of mind.’

To keep himself sane, he’s been doing virtual gym classes (‘I’d never been to an actual gym class in my life before; I’m far too self-conscious’), as well as learning the piano with his children. He has also been writing The Comfort Book, out next summer, borne of his time during lockdown. So where can we find comfort right now? ‘In the fact we’ve had time to reflect,’ he replies. ‘Although we’ve seen horrendous things this year, we’ve also seen so much goodness and togetherness and community spirit. There’s been Black Lives Matters and all the discussion that has come out of that, so yes, this has been a period of reflection. I’m hoping there will be a massive motivation coming out of this of people wanting to build a better, fairer world. The old world really wasn’t the perfect utopia.’

‘The Midnight Library’ is out 13 August (£16.99, Cannongate)