Matt Haig: 'I’m an optimist, but it’s something I’ve had to work on'
When Matt Haig speaks to me from the house overlooking the sea in Brighton that he shares with his wife, Andrea, and children, Lucas, 16, and Pearl, 15, he’s in what he calls his ‘neurotic phase’, just before a new book is published. This might seem surprising for an author who has had such huge success: his most recent novel, The Midnight Library, has clocked up more than 9m sales worldwide; his children’s book A Boy Called Christmas was a bestseller and became a hit film starring Dame Maggie Smith and Jim Broadbent; and a film adaptation of another of his books, The Radleys, is in production with Damian Lewis in the lead role.
Talking to Matt, though – and knowing his history – it’s clear he’s someone who feels things deeply and carries his emotions close to the surface. For such a public figure, he’s refreshingly open about the ups and downs of life. A lot of the appeal of his breakout book, Reasons To Stay Alive, – about a period of depression in his 20s – is down to this mixture of honesty and self-deprecating humour.
Before Reasons, Matt’s career looked very different. He’d published three novels that he describes now as ‘very dark and gloomy’, before being dropped by his publisher. Reasons turned things around for him and he’s since published 13 more books.
In recent years, he’s become known for a particular type of fiction best described as ‘opti-lit’ – what he calls "life-and-love-and-the-universe" novels.
His latest, The Life Impossible, is about newly widowed Grace, who is left a house in Ibiza by a friend and who finds transformation there.
I hadn’t written a word of anything for a year when I had the idea for The Life Impossible. Psychologically, I’d stepped away from writing completely. I was having a bit of a dip, mental health-wise.
For the first time in my life, I had therapy and a lot of things came out of it. The theme of the therapy really was my inability to face up to things in the past, and one of those things was Ibiza. Because I became suicidal in Ibiza, it was always a place that I couldn’t face; even the word was kind of a trigger. To go back to Ibiza, and to see lots of places where I’d last been in a terrible state with completely new eyes, was a very healing and transformative experience for me. It was a full-circle moment. I realised that it’s never the place, it’s who you are. I really wanted to capture the other side to the island in my book – the nature, the history.
I’m an optimist, but it’s something I’ve had to work on. I think, in a very strange way, recovery from depression can have the silver lining of leaving you with a more optimistic outlook. When you’ve had extreme pessimism for so long and that’s been disproven by time, then you end up becoming naturally optimistic.
It was recently my 49th birthday. When I was suicidal more than half my life ago, at 24, I was convinced I wouldn’t live to be 25. So then you live to be 25, to be 30, 40, then nearly 50, and you realise that it was a voice that you shouldn’t have been listening to.
In The Midnight Library, a line Mrs Elm, the librarian, repeats is ‘the only way to learn is to live’. That’s a bit of a motto for me. Some things you can’t actually get a shortcut for or you can’t get a self-help book for; you just have to let time and life do their thing.
My earliest reading memory is of reading farming catalogues! My parents weren’t farmers, but for some reason we would get lots of farming brochures. I was obsessed; I can still remember the joy of flicking through those pages, looking at tractors and combine harvesters. At secondary school, I learned to be self-conscious about reading because being a boy in the 1980s and sitting on a bench reading a book made you a target.
I definitely wasn’t a swot – I was a bit of a waster at school – but books were my escape. I loved Stephen King and the American writer SE Hinton, who wrote The Outsiders.
As a teenager, I wrote the occasional really bad poem, but I started taking writing seriously in my mid-20s when I was recovering from a breakdown. I knew I couldn’t go and get an office job like I had done in my early 20s. So, against the advice of my parents, partner and everyone else, I thought, ‘You know what, the most sensible career path for me is to become a novelist.’ I worked as a tech journalist while writing fiction. I was getting all these rejection letters – I think it was nearly 50 in the end – but I just treated that as a kind of creative writing course and learned how to hone my craft.
Reasons To Stay Alive was a side project and I didn’t devote much time to it. It was written very fast, in about a couple of months. When it did so well, it was overwhelming. I was getting a lot of messages from people, which was amazing but also quite hard to deal with. Lots said I’d helped them, or sometimes they’d even say that I’d saved their lives. I didn’t know what to do with that information or how to absorb it. I stumbled around for about a year, then I got advice from a couple of mental health charities.
I’m a bit all or nothing. I go months without being able to write anything, and then, when I get an idea, I could be writing 5,000 words a day. If I’m struggling to write, I do get nervous, but very rarely does anything come from staring at a Word document.
I’ve learned not to try too hard to make everything perfect but to accept things the way they are and to find the value in them. When I was younger, I had a lot of forward momentum, but I was always imagining a sort of utopian future I was working towards. Then you get a bit older and you realise life is always a mixed bag. There’s never going to be a sense of completion, or if there is, it’s only temporary. So it’s important to enjoy the journey rather than think about the destination.
• The Life Impossible (Canongate) by Matt Haig is out now
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig
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