Review: The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig

The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig

Imagine bouncing from life to life, undoing every regret you’ve ever had. In the space between life and death lies an infinite playground; the opportunity to reverse choices, right wrongs, and live “correctly.”

That’s the premise of Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library.”

The main character, Nora Seed, has attempted suicide. Before truly dying, she visits a quantum library of sorts, which houses a limitless number of potential stories of her life. What she—and we—learn is that the regrets that weight down our lives are often built on faulty assumptions and, in choosing differently, we would have triggered second-order effects we could never predict.

Maybe the premise isn’t completely original, but Haig intertwines philosophy and insights in a way that kept me engaged and thinking deeply about my own life.

Three passages that made me think

A good reminder about authenticity—especially that most gossip is envy in disguise:

‘If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming.

“Success” is something we should define for ourselves. There is no one race, no one prize, no real victor:

… what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary.

When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually.

You don’t have to live multiple lives to live the wrong one. And when we start to find the right one, I believe things get easier. There’s more attracting, and less striving:

Whereas in every other life she had been continually grasping for clues and feeling like she was acting, in this one she increasingly found that the more she relaxed into it, the more things came to her.

Haig’s story is one that will have you considering your own life choices—especially the ones you think you got “wrong.” We can never know what the outcomes of alternate choices would be, and there’s no point in wasting time in this life thinking, worrying, and regretting. Instead, put that energy into making the best choices we can today, rooted in who we are and what we want.

The Midnight Library is true gift in that regard—a chance for us to revisit all our revisiting, make peace with our choices, so we can live the best today we can.