“I hope to help people feel less ALONE”

In Reasons To Stay Alive, Matt Haig wrote about depression and anxiety. It’s time for something different, he tells Cyan Turan

Your new book, How To Stop Time, is about 400-year-old Tom, who ages one year every 15 years. Why does time fascinate you? When I had depression and anxiety, time was the one thing that seemed bigger than the conditions. At my most extreme, I was 24 and didn’t think I’d live to see my 25th birthday, but time passed and I did. The biggest cliché of all, time heals, is true. How do you feel about the attention mental health receives?

What’s happened in the past three years, where people feel emboldened to wear their ‘weirdness’ on their sleeves, is great. Not talking exacerbates symptoms. In Reasons To Stay

Alive, there’s a list of things that elicit more sympathy than depression… Like living in Hull in January! When I have bouts of anxiety, I remember how I felt, and I wanted to speak about it in a hopeful way that made people feel less alone. The true breakthrough will come when we break down the barrier between physical and mental health and just talk about ‘health’. Physical health impacts on mental health, and vice versa. It would erase stigma if that connection was made. You write fiction and non-fiction. How do you decide which is next? Sometimes I do the opposite of what I’ve just written. After Reasons, I wrote a children’s book about Father Christmas. Stephen Fry warned me about becoming ‘Mr Depression’, as it’s something he’s found hard since going public himself. In that case, it was conscious but, generally, I like to mix it up. What inspired the new book?

I always seem to have an outsider narrator. When I was writing The Humans, I had the idea of writing someone who was out of time. As a writer, I find it useful to have characters who are slightly more than human, who can have insights from a different galaxy or time, but I like realism. Tom doesn’t have a time machine, but he’s seen a lot of history. So he could walk into a bar in ’20s Paris and see the Fitzgeralds, or meet Shakespeare. It sounds like you played ‘My dream dinner party guests’? Absolutely. The moment I finished writing it, I wished I’d made Tom go to other places and meet other people. And Benedict Cumberbatch is starring in the film adaptation…

I found out a week after I finished the book – it’s very exciting! When you finish a novel, you become neurotic about it, but with this I thought, “Whatever else happens, Benedict Cumberbatch likes it!” How To Stop Time by Matt Haig (Canongate, £12.99; out 6th July)

“People FEEL emboldened to wear their WEIRDNESS on their sleeves”