Don’t miss yesterday’s podcast with Matt!

What if there were a library that catalogued all your regrets – and opened the door to all the lives you could’ve led? What would happen if you could undo your choices, small and big, and change where you ended up?

This is the situation that Nora Seed faces in THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking; On Sale: 9/29/20), the imaginative new novel from the internationally bestselling author of How to Stop Time, Matt Haig. When Nora—depressed and unsatisfied by her current life—finds herself in a magical library, somewhere beyond the edge of the universe, she has the chance to change everything. Confronted with an infinite number of possibilities, Nora must consider: Should she have stayed with her ex-fiancé? Stuck with playing in that rock band in case they hit it big? Moved to Australia with her best friend? Followed her dream of becoming a glaciologist? Gotten coffee with that cute neighbor? As she tries on these different lives, experimenting with her great what ifs, she discovers what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Where did the idea for THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY come from?

I’d had an idea about a library between life and death for a long time. I have always been fascinated with fantastical libraries, such as Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, because I feel libraries are a kind of magic in themselves. In the Midnight Library, each book on the shelf is another version of the protagonist, Nora Seed’s, life. There are infinite books and infinite versions, so –with the librarian’s help –she has a chance to undo some of her regrets. Every time she opens a book, she falls into that life.I think the idea of wondering how your life would have played out differently is one that a lot of us think about from time to time. Also, my own personal experience with mental health issues, like depression and anxiety, obviously informed some of Nora’s experience.

Your two nonfiction books, Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, discuss depression and anxiety, issues that are also at the heart of THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY. How do you blend your nonfiction writing with your fiction?

I think that whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction, I always make sure I am writing the thing that interests me most at that time. I don’t think there has been a book that has fused my interests more closely than this one. It just turns out that fiction was the most obvious way to explore the ideas of regret and happiness that play out in this book. When I was 24, I had a breakdown. I experienced depression, anxiety, and panic disorder, and was suicidal for quite a while. My recovery was long and slow. And yet despite all that, a lot of goodness came out of that experience. It made me a better, more grateful person, and one that wanted to write about these issues clearly and transparently and shamelessly. Non-fiction is great for this, but sometimes fiction allows you to go even deeper. It can allow you to use fantasy as a way of exploring ideas and experiences. For me, depression was often flavored with the desire to inhabit parallel lives, lives where I had done something differently and ended in a different place. THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY explores that idea and takes it to the next level,I suppose. Writing it was a kind of self-therapy.

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY is your first adult novel written from a woman’s perspective. How did you approach writing from this different point of view, and how did it differ from writing from a man’s perspective?

When I started writing this book, the narrator was male, but for some reason, I couldn’t get a handle on the character –in some weird way –maybe because it was too close to me. So,I needed a narrator who was less obviously me and switching the gender helped do that. In terms of writing her character, there are certain moments –in terms of how she is treated by other people –where her gender plays a part, but to be honest I wasn’t seeing her as being defined by her gender, more by her initially desperate state of mind and the lack of options she felt she faced.

Several of your novels play with different fantasy elements, such as immortality in How to Stop Time, ghosts in The Dead Fathers Club, and now, of course, the titular magical library in THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY. What draws you to fantasy?

I like to use fantasy and science fiction in a way that sheds more light on our reality. I’m not into pure fantasy for fantasy’s sake. It’s more about exploring ideas and sometimes the easiest way to do that is to step into the imagination. Borges, Ursula K Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Mary Shelley, are among my favorite writers for this reason.

In THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, Nora gets the chance to live out alternate versions of her own life, based off her past regrets. During her exploration of these alternate realities, Nora becomes a pub owner, a glaciologist, a rock star, and an Olympic swimmer, to name a few. How did you come up with these alternate lives? Were any based on your own interests, or past regrets?

I gave up piano lessons when I was twelve years old because I was a self-conscious boy trying to fit in. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to continue with music, so the musician strand of her life definitely overlaps with my own wish fulfillment. I never wanted to be a glaciologist or an Olympic swimmer though. I suppose as a British person I have had the odd fantasy of being a pub landlord, but I’m pretty sure that would be a bad idea.

Libraries (as the title suggests) play a key role in THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY. Why are libraries meaningful to you?

Libraries have always been my safe space. When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time after school in my local library. There was a library in the center of the small town where I lived and it was my safe space. I think libraries should be especially valued these days, when particularly in my country, they are increasingly under threat. Libraries are one of the last public spaces that like us for who we are and not for our wallets. Libraries seemed the perfect metaphor for parallel lives as they are places that really do allow you to enter other worlds, if only for a while. In THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, Nora encounters her school librarian from childhood, Mrs. Elm, who acts like a kind of guide, and she is an amalgam of various teachers and librarians I encountered in my youth. For other people in the world of the novel, their portal to other lives is something different, but I’d like to think mine, like Nora’s, would be a library.

During our current moment, when many of us can barely leave our own homes, I’m sure a lot of people would like to enter a library full of alternate realities they can slip into as easily as opening a book. How do you think THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY relates to the current state of the world?

I think that when we are feeling physically confined our imaginations tend to roam into wilder territory. The idea of a place where we could go and be absolutely anything at all is possibly even more attractive now than in 2019 when I wrote it.

Of all the lives Nora tries out in THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, which would you like to live in the most? Which would you like to live in the least?

I would probably like to live in a vineyard in California, at least to give it a try. I am not that great in cold weather so I would probably skip being a glaciologist.

What do you hope readers will take away from THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY?

Well firstly I just hope they enjoy the story, but I also hope it helps them to think about their own lives and offers some comfort when feeling a sense of inadequacy or regret about their own present situation. Ultimately, like a lot of my books, I wrote it for myself. A kind of therapy for myself, a way of dealing with my own doubts and worries about the passing of time. So, I hope readers find the same comfort in reading it as I did in writing it.