some thoughts on the midnight library, matt haig

fiction

i grew up using the city library. i have strong memories of the smell of the water fountain in the atrium; the green of the glass; the tossing of coins to join so many coins before mine. wishes all.

the midnight library is a most unique library. it consists of books that tell the story of your life as it is and as it could have been if you had made different decisions or choices along your path. it’s an intriguing idea.

Regrets ignore chronology. They float around. The sequence of these lists changes all the time…p.34

the book includes thoughts and quotes from various philosophers over time (the protagonist studied philosophy in school). what i appreciate in this use is that haig isn’t trying to prove to the reader how smart he is, as the author, but as a way to develop his protagonist and unpack some of the ways in which she is thinking. he isn’t trying to name drop to prove to us how smart his protagonist is.

while i’m on about the protagonist, she can be hard to like/hard to identify with and i think this is done deliberately. nora’s lack of ‘wanting’ things/anything and her desire to cease to exist, to me, illustrate what it is for her to be depressed. her experience of depression is what makes her the way she is. the way she is is the whole reason the book makes sense. nora doesn’t choose to be depressed, no one does, and her life is messy. matt haig has never kept secret his personal struggles with depression and so i feel somewhat safe in this assumption.

…you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome…p.83

i do want to add a criticism here - one interpretation could be that if you revisit your regrets and see you made the right decision for you, you’ll change your mindset about your life. that’s….not exactly how a deep depression is resolved. i guess the second criticism i would add is that there is no real role for therapy in this book. these didn’t keep me from enjoying the book, it’s more that i worry that it somehow implies that depression is a mindset that can be overcome on your own if you accept your life. it’s just not that simple. i don’t think matt haig meant for us to interpret it that way, or at least i hope he didn’t.

I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths…but maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths…p.179

some have found this book a bit self-help or auto-fiction mixed with magical realism and i can see that. the messages and the book’s ending are a bit obvious, but i didn’t find this ruined the book for me. maybe it’s because i approached the book from a ‘this is commercial fiction’ rather than a ‘this is literature’ perspective. i wasn’t expecting it to be a bronte or a violet kupersmith or something like that.

if you find death and suicide difficult to read, this book may not be for you. i’ll put this one in one of our neighbourhood little libraries.

n xx