MATT HAIG

The bestselling novelist talks doubt, depression and success

- Jonathan Wright

EVEN CLOSE TO 20 YEARS INTO A CAREER that has garnered bestsellers and plaudits, Matt Haig says he still suffers from moments of doubt about his professional trajectory. “As human beings, we’re just prone generally to the grass-is-greener idea,” he says. “I know that with me, as a writer, I compare myself unhealthily to other writers. It’s just what we do.”

We also compare ourselves to imagined, hypothetical versions of ourselves – an idea that underpins Haig’s new novel, The Midnight Library. “Even during 2020, with Covid-19, we all play the comparison game of how we could be doing things,” Haig notes. “Oh, we could be learning the piano; oh, we could be doing this or we could be doing that. That’s quite a dangerous thing. We’re not really encouraged to accept ourselves as we are and to go with the flow.”

In the case of Haig’s protagonist, Nora Seed, her regrets over roads not travelled overwhelm her. Why did she quit competitive swimming? Why didn’t her relationship with her fiancé endure? Why did she turn down the chance of a career as a musician? Seed attempts suicide. Which is how, caught between life and death, she finds herself in a library where the books enable her to see different paths.

There’s an element of “self-therapy” about the book, Haig explains: a way to explore the idea that, while there may be different versions of yourself at play in the multiverse, you still have to deal with “that painful feeling of realising you’re only going to get this one timeline”.