Q&A With International Best Seller Matt Haig Talks Anxiety, Panic, Depression & Writing As Therapy

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.

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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.

3 Tips to Keep Your Career Rolling During A Pandemic

by Sara Fujimura

My first traditionally-published YA book, EVERY REASON WE SHOULDN’T (Tor Teen), launched on March 3, 2020. And there was much rejoicing! For about a week. Then ERWS promptly fell into the COVID19 Abyss along with pretty much the entire Spring 2020 catalog. Whether you were the big fish scheduled for a 10-city book tour or the tiny minnow throwing your own launch party catered by Costco, COVID19 was the great equalizer. Launch parties, book festivals, book tours, and other fun in-person marketing events all went *poof* overnight. Yep, there was a lot of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the Football going on.

I was understandably disappointed, but there was a silver lining. I’m a hybrid author with two indie-pubbed YAs under her belt, so I’m used to doing my own marketing. Yes, Tor Teen can do things that I can’t, like getting reviews from NPR and making it onto Buzzfeed specialty lists. But I can also do things that Tor Teen can’t. So, if you’ve finished Netflix, baked enough bread to feed a small village, and created a TP-hand sanitizer-Oreo stockpile that would make a doomsday prepper envious, it’s time to get to work. Here are three things you can do TODAY to get your writing career rolling whether you are indie-pubbed, traditionally-pubbed, or a hybrid:

#1--EXPERIMENT WITH SUPER-TARGETED MARKETING

When my second indie-pubbed book came out in 2018, I hired two local HS teachers to create curriculum for me. BREATHE is set in 1918 Philadelphia against the Spanish Flu pandemic and is rich in both science and history. The resources have been on my website for over a year now and have mostly garnered…*crickets.* Fast-forward to April 2020 when a nation of parents and teachers were desperately trying to figure out how to make distance learning work. The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (www.scbwi.org ) asked its members for content of all kinds and levels so teachers and parents could have free, quality activities at their highly-sanitized fingertips. So, I dusted off my suddenly extremely relevant, teacher-created, pandemic curriculum and sent it over to SCBWI. Though I can’t track specific sales of BREATHE to the SCBWI promo, I did see an exponential jump in sales from April to June. What about you? Can you create something (a how-to blog post, newsletter article with a short science lesson, an Instagram post featuring a vintage recipe, etc.) for your audience which can be passed along to their like-minded friends? Can you offer up your expertise in a particular subject that ties into your books for a Zoom workshop for a school, club, or organization?

#2--STOP LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE

Is there a list of email addresses collected at your last event gathering dust in your office? Have you been too busy in the past to update your email newsletter list? These are people who WANT to hear from you. There are whole courses on building email funnels and optimizing your email-opening rates, but it’s okay to start with the basics and build. One caveat: Make sure you are GIVING readers something along with your “Buy my book!” pitch. It could be a new short story with beloved characters, a bonus chapter cut from a published book, or a behind-the-scenes look of your latest project. If that feels too overwhelming, try a recipe for a food your characters eat. Or invent a themed cocktail readers can sip while enjoying your book. Create something fun, light-hearted, and connecting. It may not result in a sale right away, but you’re building momentum toward your bigger brand.  

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#3—EXPAND YOUR CIRCLE

“It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.” This adage is 100% true. Indie-pubbed authors, if anybody ever looks down their nose at you and says that indies never get to sign at book festivals, be on writing panels, or see their books in Barnes & Noble, feel free to point at me. I’ve done all of the above multiple times in the last three years. Thank you very much. And that was BEFORE my traditionally-published third book came out. How? Connections. How do you make connections? Join a writing organization. I write romantic, coming-of-age stories for teens. Therefore, I belong to both the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (www.scbwi.org ) and the Romance Writers of America (www.rwa.org ) and have been very active in my regional chapters for many years. It might feel a little squidgy, but this is a form of both short-term and long-term marketing. Absolutely don’t be pushy about your books, but being that helpful, experienced writer who answered a newbie’s question is a form of marketing. Be an active member of your chapter. Volunteer to check people in at your regional conference (one day!). Do a writing craft workshop for your chapter. Mentor a newer writer. Join a subcommittee. Can’t afford a membership fee right now? Lift up other authors in your genre by retweeting their book cover reveals, showing up to their book launches (one day!), and bragging on them when they win an award. All the good you put out will come back to you. Case in point, while I was writing this post, an SCBWI-Arizona friend from the other side of town pinged me that her local library branch is looking for books from Arizona authors and that I should apply. This is the same author who I invited to be part of a special event at MY local library earlier this year. See, it’s not squidgy!

There you go. As someone with a degree in Public Health Education who wrote a book about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, I need to give you a hard truth…COVID19 is going to be here for a while. So stop waiting for publishing to go back to normal and take the reins on your career today.

From Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire: If you desire to find an interesting writer job, you can check out some job search websites to accelerate your job search.

Sara Fujimura creates stories for intelligent, adventurous, globally-minded teens who aren’t afraid to fall in love with someone completely different than themselves. Sara started as a journalist, so it is no surprise that her young adult books contain a lot of facts to go along with the fiction. Whether you want to know about Nagoya, Japan (TANABATA WISH), the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (BREATHE), what it’s like to be an Olympic-caliber skater (EVERY REASON WE SHOULDN’T), or how unscripted television works (FAKING REALITY, Tor Teen, July 2021), Sara takes the reader on a swoony journey to unusual places. She is a creative writing teacher, literacy advocate, and is excited to support the next generation of authors.

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