The Midnight Library
The Midnight Library
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Matt Haig on The Midnight Library
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A decade of parallel lives, finally unlockedThe idea had been circling for ten years before he found a form that could hold it. What stopped him was not lack of interest but the worry that the territory, alternate lives and roads not taken, had already been mapped so thoroughly by others that he had nothing to add. The library, when it arrived, resolved that doubt by giving the premise a container that was both plot engine and philosophical argument.
For a decade I’ve been wanting to do something about parallel lives. Obviously, this is a well-trodden territory in film and literature, so I thought I didn’t have anything new to bring to the table... What I liked about the concept of the library is that it managed to be a neat plot device, but it was also the center of what I was trying to do on the philosophical side of it. I liked the library because it was literally and metaphorically what I was trying to sort of do with the story as well as it being a little love letter to libraries, because libraries, I suppose, are our portals to other places anyway.
Before the book was a novel, the feeling behind it was a symptom. His breakdown at twenty-four left a specific residue: not just despair about the life he was living, but an obsessive pull toward the lives he was not. That texture of depression, the craving for an alternate self, gave the project its urgency and its subject matter simultaneously.
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 book is frequently read as a response to the pandemic, arriving as it did during the first U.K. lockdown. He pushed back on that reading, locating the emotional roots in something that preceded COVID by years: a restlessness he recognized in himself long before the world was forced indoors.
It was a pre-COVID book. I mean, it’s often seen as a COVID novel because of when it arrived, but it was pre-pandemic. I was doing a lot of wishful thinking, a lot of regretting, a lot of feeling like time was passing by. [paraphrased from audio]
He also located the book inside a specific cultural pathology he had been watching spread before he started writing. Social media had made comparison a continuous background condition, and he saw it producing something stranger than envy: people measuring themselves not against other people but against the curated versions of themselves they performed online.
It’s the flavor of the times I feel almost. Regret tied with that comparison culture where we’re not only on social media comparing our lives to other people’s lives, but we’re almost comparing our actual selves to the version of ourselves we project online. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
The wrong title, the wrong narrator, the right libraryThe title is the first thing a reader encounters and, for him, the last thing that fell into place. For a significant stretch of drafting, the book existed under a working title that pointed toward loss rather than possibility. Getting the three final words right was not cosmetic; it reoriented what the space in the story actually meant.
I was really struggling until I got the title, until I got The Midnight Library. I think it was ‘The Library of Lost Lives’ for quite a while. [paraphrased from audio]
The title was not the only thing that needed to change. He spent the first half of the first draft writing a narrator who shared his gender and, crucially, his age at the point of crisis. Proximity became an obstacle: the closer the character was to him, the harder it became to write truthfully rather than defensively.
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.
The library setting was not only a narrative device. He drew on two decades of personal experience in real libraries, institutions he had sought out as a child for reasons that had nothing to do with books in the narrow sense. That history fed directly into how he built the fictional space and the character of Mrs. Elm, Nora’s guide through the stacks, whom he described as assembled from actual people he had known.
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... Libraries are one of the last public spaces that like us for who we are and not for our wallets.
He also arrived at the book carrying specific literary debts he wanted to acknowledge. The alternate-lives premise had precedents he respected, and naming them was a way of locating where his own contribution began: not in the concept of branching possibility but in what he did with the emotional and philosophical weight of it.
Obviously there were sort of literary influences — you’ve got the Sylvia Plath idea of the fig tree branching off, you’ve got Borges’s idea of labyrinthine libraries, and I always loved that sort of stuff. [paraphrased from audio]
Plath’s fig tree, from ‘The Bell Jar’, is an image of a young woman paralyzed by the impossibility of choosing only one life. Borges’s labyrinths are places where every path exists simultaneously. Haig took both images and asked what it would feel like to actually walk inside them.
The personal thread
What regret looks like from the insideSome of the alternate lives Nora tries on in the Midnight Library, the book’s between-worlds space where each volume on the shelf corresponds to a different version of her life, came directly from his own catalogue of abandoned paths. He gave up piano at twelve to fit in socially, a decision he still turns over. The musician strand of Nora’s life was where that regret went.
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.
Fiction gave him access to material that nonfiction, with its obligation to stay on the surface of the factual, could not reach. His earlier memoirs about depression and anxiety had documented the experience from the outside; the novel let him go somewhere the memoir could not follow.
Sometimes fiction allows you to go even deeper. It can allow you to use fantasy as a way of exploring ideas and experiences.
One line he wrote for Mrs. Elm, Nora’s librarian guide, ended up as something he kept for himself. The fact that it migrated from character to personal motto suggests how little distance there was, finally, between the book’s argument and his own.
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.
On what the book is wrestling with
Against the promise of a better life elsewhereThe book’s central philosophical target is a very contemporary form of dissatisfaction: the belief, fed by television and social media alike, that ordinary life is a deficit to be corrected rather than a thing to be inhabited. He went into the project with a specific counter-argument in mind, and wanted the structure of the novel, Nora’s successive disillusionment with each perfect alternate life, to make that argument without stating it.
I wanted to write a book that’s very much about accepting normality and imperfection, and actually there is no perfection, and, you know, green grass isn’t always the best grass. [paraphrased from audio]
He also placed the book inside a longer argument he has been making about what fiction is for. The novel, in his account, is the only technology that lets a person inhabit a life they cannot actually live, not as escapism but as a way of processing the constraints of being a single self moving in one direction through time.
I think that’s one of the reasons why humans have stories. We’re very aware that we’re in this finite existence, travelling in one direction, and there are all kinds of things that keep us in place. We can’t just walk out of every relationship or drop everything or be in every country simultaneously. But novels are a way to do that, to an extent.
What he wants us to sit with
The life you have is enough to learn fromHis intended takeaway is not consolation in the soft sense. He wanted readers to finish the book having genuinely tested, through Nora’s experiences, the assumption that another version of their life would resolve what this one cannot. The comfort he offers is the kind that requires giving something up.
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.
He chose fiction for this argument because nonfiction, however honest, stays tethered to what can be stated plainly. The Midnight Library needed fantasy not to escape the real but to get underneath it, to reach the feelings that direct argument cannot dislodge.
Sometimes fiction allows you to go even deeper. It can allow you to use fantasy as a way of exploring ideas and experiences.
The line he gave Mrs. Elm, which he also claimed as a personal motto, names the book’s final position on regret. It does not say that regret is wrong, or that the paths not taken were worse. It says that the only knowledge available to a person is the knowledge that living produces, and that knowledge requires staying.
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.
The novel earns this line by testing it hard first. Nora does not arrive at the value of her own life through reassurance. She arrives there after exhausting the alternatives. That sequence is the book’s argument, and it is why the ending lands differently than a simple message of hope would.