‘Writing is my therapy - it’s where I confront my demons’
Matt Haig’s outlandish new novel – about a 439 year-old history teacher – was inspired by his own ‘mental hell’, he tells Anita Sethi
Matt Haig first developed his neurosis about time during a near-fatal bout of depression. “A lot of my writing goes back to my experience of being ill and getting better,” the bestselling author tells me over tea in London. “Depression and anxiety made me obsessed with time because suddenly days felt like years. I felt trapped in the present moment.”
This “nightmare version of mindfulness”, as Haig puts it, occurred in 1999, when he was 24 and living in Spain. But his latest novel, about Tom Hazard, a history teacher who is 439 years old, proves what a profound effect the experience had on him.
“The length of time [Hazard] has lived is a metaphor for how long you feel you’ve lived in just a couple of months of depression – you can feel like you’ve lived a century,” says Haig. “I wanted to send him to hell – the mental hell of wandering through time.”
It sounds heavy going, but anyone who has read Haig’s books – such as The Humans, a touching, funny novel about an alien who takes the identity of a university lecturer, or Reasons to
Stay Alive, Haig’s 300,000-selling memoir – will know the author has a knack for turning his struggles with mental health into heart-warming, perceptive prose.
“To write a book, or do anything that’s hopeful, you have to go to the dark place, as that’s when you can be genuinely optimistic – when you’ve found hope in the bad place,” he says. How To Stop Time, which has already been snapped up for a film adaptation starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is infused with this same optimism. Chronicling Hazard’s long life, from the Elizabethan age to the modern day, the novel features cameos from, among others, Shakespeare, Captain Cook and F Scott Fitzgerald. History, it turns out, is another one of Haig’s obsessions. “I find it therapeutic thinking about the past,” he says. “It makes you realise how mind-bogglingly bizarre it is that we’re at this flukey point in time when we’re the ones that are alive and that this is our moment – this is the slice of life we have.”
Did he have a good history teacher himself, at school? “I had a bad time in secondary school – I became an introvert because I found it hard to socialise,” he says.
Born in Sheffield in 1975, Haig wrote stories throughout primary school (his mother still has them all in a shoebox), but stopped at 12. “I thought reading and writing weren’t cool and weren’t what I should be doing as a boy, which is a bit sad,” he says. “I didn’t have the confidence to imagine myself as a writer. I only really got the passion back when climbing out of my breakdown in my 20s. Because I was agoraphobic for a while and had a panic disorder, and that simmered down into anxiety and depression, I needed a job that I could do at home. So writing was the thing.”
His debut novel, The Last Family in England (2004), told the story of Henry IV, Part One from the viewpoint of a black Labrador called Prince, torn between his duty to his master and his loyalty to a spaniel called Falstaff. It was a bestseller.
His second book, The Dead Father’s Club, took its inspiration from Hamlet. Shakespeare is obviously a big influence on his work. But there are other leitmotifs. Haig often imbues his writing with a powerful sense of alienation and is drawn to creating outsider characters.
“Having spent time being ill, I’ve felt very detached from the world,” he says. (In 1999, he came within a few steps of jumping off a cliff.) “But even before that, I think my personality is like that – I have no reason to feel like an outsider, I’m from a very loving middle-class, ordinary family. But, in any group, I’ll find a way to feel like I’m on the outside. In my head, I’ll always feel like an alien.” Although he has a few deep relationships, including those with his wife, Andrea, and his two children, Lucas and Pearl, he says he finds it hard to connect with people. He, nevertheless, comes across as warm and engaged during our interview.
“I wrote The Humans from the perspective of someone who wasn’t from our planet, so that was a book about space, and then I wanted to write about time,” Haig tells me. To Stop Time “How
taps into our deepest fears and desires. I like putting a microscope on what we feel – we all have those worries about losing people or growing older.”
Writing the new novel coincided with his mother having open-heart surgery, and an acute sense of the transience of life infiltrates the book. “That definitely made me think more about time and mortality,” he says. The novel’s protagonist also wrestles with some of the same issues that Haig examined in Reasons to Stay Alive. How does he feel about that book’s incredible success? “My approach is that there’s nothing to be ashamed of about mental health, and I’m hearing a lot of hopeful stories. For everyone who says they wish they could have given it to their son who took his life, I hear from people who’ve got through their own hell.”
What does he think is the greatest stigma? “I think if we got over this whole difference between mind and body and understood health as health.”
How To Stop Time also traces how attitudes to mental health have evolved, from asylums to psychiatric hospitals, from witch-hunts to SSRIS. “We used to believe all difference and unusualness could be explained away by demons and the supernatural,” says Haig, who has been researching the ancient practice of trepanning, where a hole was drilled in the skull in the belief that a stone of madness could be released.
“I’m fascinated by the idea that we’re now in this enlightened time. I think we’re in a continual dark age that’s slowly getting lighter. In another hundred years they’ll look back and be pointing at us.”
As for Benedict Cumberbatch, Haig thinks he’s the dream person for the role of Tom. “I can imagine him, because of the intensity of his eyes, having 400 years of baggage and carrying that slightly tortured intensity to the part.”
Raising his profile yet higher, Haig is a prolific tweeter, regularly getting into arguments with other users. (He recently called Piers Morgan a “globally despised narcissist”.) Isn’t that detrimental to his mental health? Haig says not.
“My anxiety is very much backed up in myself, and sometimes externalising weirdly and temporarily makes me feel better.” There are other things that are worse for his mental health – not sleeping; drinking too much; too much caffeine. “I think I’m a bit addicted to Twitter – it’s a nice therapy for me. I need it.”
He needs writing, too. “When I’m between books I literally feel in my body the anxiety rise up,” he says. People congratulate him for being prolific, but he needs to be, to direct his mind, he tells me.
“Because if I don’t direct my mind it will go inward, or I’ll end up drinking too much, or I’ll just go wrong. Having books to write keeps me on the straight and narrow.
“The hard bit is getting a story under way, but as soon as it is I’m itching to finish it. Writing is a great way of externalising the internal. Writing is letting out the demons without having to drill a hole in your skull.”
‘Being ill made me obsessed with time. In two months of depression, you can feel like you’ve lived a century’