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Matt Haig on The Midnight Train
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
An argument with his own bestsellerThe Midnight Library sold in the millions and then left Haig unable to write. The success did not produce confidence; it produced collapse. He stepped away from the desk, entered therapy for the first time, and came back with a book aimed at the very conclusion the earlier novel had drawn.
It’s not really a sequel. It comes to a completely different conclusion to The Midnight Library — it’s having an argument with it, in terms of what it’s saying about life.
Before the new direction became clear, the period between the two books was one of the harder stretches of his adult life. He has spoken openly about depression since his breakdown at twenty-four, but the crisis that followed his biggest commercial success caught him by surprise.
I had an existential crisis and was in therapy for a while.
The protagonist of The Midnight Train is Wilbur Budd, a man who chose professional ambition over his marriage and watches the cost of that choice replayed in front of him. Haig has said plainly where that character’s wound came from, identifying a specific window in his own past when the same trade-off was live.
I don’t believe in re-doing things, but if I had to I’d go back to when my kids were young — when they were a baby and two — and spend more time with them. I was hyper-ambitious, working like crazy, writing three books a year and just burning out.
That candour sets the emotional register for the whole novel. Wilbur’s regret is not a philosophical puzzle; it is a domestic one, and Haig had already lived a version of it.
How he wrote it
From dystopian AI novel to a train with rulesThe book that became The Midnight Train spent a long time as something almost unrecognisable. Haig carried a title around without knowing what to do with it, a state he describes as sitting with an unanswered question rather than a story.
For ages, I had the title The Memory Thief, but I wondered, ‘Whose memory? Who’s the thief? Why is this even in my head?’
That early draft was not a ghost story about regret on a train. It was science fiction. Almost nothing from it survived into the finished book, and the two elements that did survive are telling in their smallness: a character’s name and a location.
The only thing that’s been sort of preserved from that first draft is the fact that there’s a character called Agnes and also there’s a honeymoon in Venice. Everything else was new and sort of redrafted. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s tension depends on a set of constraints Wilbur must observe while riding the train, a ghostly carriage that replays his life from the vantage point of his final day. Those rules are not decorative; they are the engine of the plot, because the drama lives in the pressure to break them.
Wilbur can’t interfere with the life he’s watching, and one of the stranger rules is that he can’t see himself asleep because sleep and death in the novel are sort of two [things] close together. [paraphrased from audio]
Writing Wilbur as a bookseller who spent his career recommending other people’s stories had an unexpected practical consequence. By the time Haig finished the manuscript, he had convinced himself to attempt something he had never done before.
Writing about bookshops and bookselling and the art of recommending books made me want to become a bookseller myself. So I’m in the process at the moment with my wife, where I live in the UK, of looking for a bookstore to open. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
The good old days are happening nowThe Midnight Library asked its protagonist, Nora Seed, to stop fantasising about the lives she had not lived. The Midnight Train makes a different demand. Where the earlier book counselled acceptance, this one asks for action, and Haig has articulated that shift as a deliberate correction rather than a sequel.
I feel like The Midnight Library is very much just about acceptance. And I agree with that. I agree we shouldn’t always imagine the grass is greener and stuff like that. But I feel like this book represents a desire to act or to change things. So it’s a different approach to regrets. [paraphrased from audio]
The mechanism Haig designed for the novel, a dead man watching his own life unspool on a train he cannot stop, is meant to produce a specific effect in the living reader. The perspective of the last day, he argues, is something anyone can borrow without waiting for it to arrive.
Be nostalgic about the present. Realize these are always the good old days we look back on, whatever age we are, there’s always a future we look back on today. So, yeah, that’s what this book’s trying to do, make us appreciate our lives. [paraphrased from audio]
That phrase, ‘be nostalgic about the present,’ is the book’s thesis compressed to four words. Wilbur cannot reboard the life he left, but the reader, by the final page, still can.