Matt Haig on the Magic of Redemptive Literary Journeys

Goodreads: First off, this is a terrific book. I have been thinking about the title, The Life Impossible, when it's a story about all the possibilities in life, when it feels like there are none left. How did you come up with the idea, and what were you trying to do with the story? 

Matt Haig: The book is set in Ibiza, a place I know quite well. I used to live on that Spanish island myself, and it was always a source of bittersweet feelings for me. When I was younger, that's where I became suicidal. 

I hit a point of crisis at the age of 24. I talk about this in my sort of memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive. I say “sort of” memoir because it bridges the gap between pop philosophy and memoir and different things. 

I was diagnosed with panic disorder, I was put on diazepam, and basically I had three weeks in Ibiza after three years of living there that were so hellish, they were the worst moments of my life. It was such a place that I associated with a bad experience that it took me 20-plus years to get to a point where I could face precisely where that happened. 

It's ridiculous to say that after 20 years of depression and writing about depression, I never actually had therapy until during the pandemic. I had therapy, and the theme of my therapy was about facing things that I hadn't been able to face. 

I went back and traveled to that part of Spain, and it was while I was there, I got the idea for this book. I had this totally different time. It was very transformative for me. Out of that personal experience of having a full-circle moment of embracing a part of my past that I had been running away from. I didn't want to write about that in a nonfiction way.

I find it much freer to explore things and explore even truthful things in fiction. I think fiction gives you the space to be so emotionally honest. It all came out of that. 

Also, I was already getting a little bit intimidated by people in the U.K. Rather than being called a novelist—I'd be increasingly called a mental-health activist or mental-health ambassador, which is all well and good up to a point, but I'm not a doctor. I'm not the world's expert on mental health. I was just a person who went through an experience and wrote about it. 

GR: How did you start writing?

MH: I started writing novels almost out of necessity.

I never had much confidence as a teenager and in my early 20s, when I had anxiety disorder and panic disorder. I never had it as an ambition in those early days to be a published writer, simply because I didn't really feel it was available to me. I didn't have the confidence to go for it. 

When I came back from Spain, and when I was very ill and having panic attacks and stuff, I was in a position where I couldn't go out to a nine-to-five office job and work. I had to think of something I could do from home. So I started writing. 

I was paying the rent with freelance journalism, but on the side, I was doing what I really wanted to do, which was fiction. I was doing it with one eye on the future and one eye in the present. I was still quite depressed then, and this was my escape. 

And I realized that when I was going through anxiety, when I was having panic attacks, when I was depressed, fiction would be a space for me which would calm me down. I think it's that thing about creating a world that looks a little bit like this one, but it's different, and you're ordering it and creating a logic that works, where cause and effect work together in the way you want it to work. It's a very comforting thing to do, and I think it's the same comfort of reading. 

GR: How do you follow a book and a hit like Reasons to Stay Alive or The Midnight Library? How do you begin again?   

MH: The Midnight Library came out in a strange time for the world. It came out in, what was in the U.K., the first lockdown. 

It was, to date, my most widely read book, but I didn't feel the impact of it, partly because of the pandemic and because I didn't do a book tour. So even though it became this big book, for me as the writer, it felt less like a moment than some of my previous books where I'd done a tour and everything else—it was all just internet, emails, and things like that. 

Having said that, after The Midnight Library, I did take time off. I'd say I didn't write anything for about a year, maybe more. 

That was partly a pandemic thing, that was partly life stuff. And that was in part too, The Midnight Library, and that I was feeling a lot like there would be a lot of eyes on the next book, which is obviously a good thing, but it also meant I had to really make sure that when I started writing again, I was writing from an honest place, from a place that wasn't too much thinking about “the market.” 

I suppose I needed the confidence and the courage, which I didn't have at that point, to write something that won't necessarily meet everyone's expectations.

GR: And writing The Life Impossible?

MH: I'm happier with this book than anything else I've written, for all kinds of reasons. I'm not saying this will be everybody's favorite of my books, but for me, I felt it came from such an honest place. I had said to myself, I'm not going to write another book unless I really feel that feeling where you get an idea and it won't let you go.

It's not a case of [The Life Impossible] writing itself. It was hard at times, but I wouldn't stop thinking about the idea. I think if you can write the book you would want to read, then it's going to, hopefully, appeal to someone else. It's not necessarily going to appeal to everyone else, but there's going to be other people like you who it will speak to. That's the most you can hope for. 

I wrote it for honest reasons, and I hope other people connect with it in that way. 

GR: How did you develop your characters and their journey? 

MH: In terms of the character, it's always good to start them off in a bad place and then try and find a way to work them through to another better place. I find that it's a nice story arc to write. 

In my very early days, I wrote some quite depressing books. There's one book I wrote called The Possession of Mr. Cave, which is by far my bleakest book—it has the opposite tragic trajectory, everything falling apart, and ends with all sorts of deaths and horribleness.

I don't absolutely hate that book, but I can't really look at it now. It's like looking at a bad photograph in the past. Nowadays, I always try and find some kind of honest optimism in a story. Obviously, this book is very fantastical. It's more fantastical than The Midnight Library. 

GR: It does have psychics and clairvoyance and aliens and murder…

MH: It goes crazy. But what I thought would be fun with this book is to start in a conventional way. You start off reading thinking, “Oh, is this just going to be some missing person, possibly murder-mystery thing," and then, chapter-by-chapter, going a little bit weirder. That was my idea.

GR: I loved it. To folks coming to this book knowing nothing about it, what would you say it’s about?

MH: I genuinely find it harder [to describe] than The Midnight Library. Midnight Library had such a high-concept hook. With this, I would say it's more character based.

It's about a retired math teacher, Grace Winters, who is feeling at the end of things. She's drowning in her own grief and guilt about things she's done in the past, and she doesn't feel like anything is ahead of her. Then, out of the blue, she gets left a house on this island of Ibiza from a friend she hasn't seen or had any contact with for about 30 years. This person from her past has either died or gone missing and has left her this run-down house on this Spanish island. 

She has no interest in visiting, but the mystery of it gives her that incentive. So she goes over there and starts to ask questions, and the answers she finds are increasingly mysterious, increasingly strange, and she ends up not just discovering the truth about what happened to her friend, but the truth about her own life and her own self, and she ends up becoming a person she didn't think she was capable of becoming…by a little bit of strange things occurring in the ocean. 

I should mention the other characters, Alberto, who's this old, slightly roguish, a former marine biologist who's considered a crank in the academic community because he's embraced the concept of alien contacts on Earth and on Ibiza itself. He was fun to write because he's this wild character who symbolizes nature and the animals of the island. 

It was a fun one to write—it felt like having a vacation while I was writing because of the things I was writing about. 

GR: You have a pure villain in this book. Was he fun to write?

MH: Villains are always fun to write. And this hotel developer, Art, he ties to a theme of ecology and a theme that, in that part of the world, is very important about mass tourism and development. 

As a British male person, the British male baddie is a little bit of an archetype now. I felt with him, the challenge wasn't making him bad, the challenge was making him interesting—to try and put a little bit of a backstory where nothing is excused, but there's a little bit of context there. That was the hard bit, to not make him a totally two-dimensional villain but to give him a little bit of a reason or an understanding. 

I've written children's books in the past. When you're a writer, you can learn more from writing for children than you can writing for adults. Children are such pure readers. They don't worry about what reading a certain book looks like; they just like what they like. And it's proper storytelling. And proper stories always have a villain, and every fairytale has a villain. I saw this as a kind of fantasy fable, and it had to have a villain. 

GR: And Art has backstory and a motive! For me, as a reader, that was a surprise and something I should have seen coming but did not. 

MH: It will be quite interesting for me to see how American readers respond to the setting of the book. I feel like, in America, you have heard of Ibiza, but it's definitely not as visited or known.

The last thing anyone would want to read, I think, is a book set in this cool version of Ibiza, where it's some young, trendy, hip person who goes. I wanted Grace to be the opposite of what the cliché of Ibiza is. Grace is the opposite of spiritual ideas and that whole system of thinking. 

GR: You have such great titles for your chapters. Do you write straight through and then title them after, or do you write the chapters as chapters, themselves, from the start? 

MH: I do it after the event. 

I really like short chapters, as a writer and as a reader, for that practical thing of I like to finish reading at the end of the chapter. That's much more possible if you're doing short chapters—it gives you that turning-the-pages feeling. I also like the look of white space. 

My favorite part of the writing process comes when you’re almost redrafting the first draft. You've got it written, but then you go back through and do a half edit, where you break it up into chapters. 

It's one way you can cheat and make yourself look like a clever author than you are, because you know what you’ve written. And you can take key information and go back to where you started and just thread that through. That’s quite a satisfying process, because it doesn't take too long once you've got it all written to really elevate that first draft. That’s become my thing now.

GR: How many drafts do you typically do? How long did it take you to write this one?

MH: I would say, for reasons I'll explain, this was probably my most redrafted book. 

I wrote a book years ago called The Humans, which had the biggest edit that I can remember going from first draft to second draft. In that book, I chopped 50,000 words, added 40,000 new words, it was very major redress.

This wasn't quite like that, but I had more editors on this one than ever. I had my U.K. editor, then I had my U.S. editor, then I had some international contributions from Canada, Germany, Brazil. Because of its setting, it's got some Spanish language in there, so I checked it with a friend who lives in Spain. 

And so it had a lot of checking, cross-checking, editing, re-editing, so it'd be impossible to give a number, but it felt like a long process. At least as long as writing the book was editing the book. 

GR: Can you talk about themes that you have that are important to you in developing your books? One of the reasons your fiction is so appealing, at least to me, is that it feels like you're writing a children's story for adults.  What is the impulse to bring in philosophy, the mysticism and magic?

MH: I think, as a writer, you're always trying to write the ultimate book for you. For me, I like it to be a proper story, I like things to happen, I like plot and all those things, but I also like a little bit of existential conversation in books.
 
It's a good sign when you're writing a story, and the story seems to set its own rules, if that makes sense. You sort of think, “Oh, yeah, this is a time to go into a little bit of mathematics, or this is a time to go into a little bit of science fiction” and play about with it like that.
 
The reason the book has a framing device—she's writing to an old student—was because then the reader can become the person she's writing to. It's not me stepping in and offering advice as an author; she's been asked advice, so she's responding. I could have my cake and eat it, where you could have the nice little aphorisms here and there and talking about life but still be telling a story.

GR: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about Es Vedra and La Presencia and the role of nature and animals that you have, which figures in prominently to the plot of the book. Do you have a science background? How did you pull in science and math?

MH: Science was my worst subject at school. I never thought I was a science person until I was out of school, out of university, and then I realized I was reading a lot about science.

Ibiza, when you go somewhere like that, you are just hit with nature. It's a place that gets you thinking, because it's got a lot of tourists and a lot of ecological damage. If you're a writer in the 21st century and you're writing about natural places, then inevitably the themes will take on an ecological dimension and the fragility of everything. 

I think we're all becoming a bit more aware of our place, not just as humans to other humans, but as our place as humans to other species and to the planet. That's going to be a thing that people only end up thinking more and more about as the century progresses. We will get more of an animal understanding of things. 

GR: Got it. Then what authors are your favorite?

MH: I have so many! Borges, as in Jorge Luis Borges for short stories, are very inspiring for me. I'm from Yorkshire, so I'm definitely a Bronte person. I like Wuthering Heights. I like Jane Eyre. I feel like in the U.K., if you study literature at university, you either have to be a Bronte person or a Jane Austen person. I was definitely more of a Bronte person. I studied Victorian literature at university, so you’ve got to put Dickens in there.

For children's authors, I’ve been inspired by Roald Dahl; science fiction, Ursula Le Guin. There are all kinds of people. 

GR: Any philosophers rise to the top?

MH: Some of the most interesting philosophers are also the most depressing philosophers. You've got your Schopenhauer—Schopenhauer is a pretty depressing person, but he’s very interesting. Sometimes my favorite philosophers aren't necessarily ones you agree with, but they're ones you disagree with but they start thoughts.

The interesting thing about philosophy, if you go back to ancient Greek philosophy, like Plato and Socrates, it was always conversations. It was like the world's first podcasts—they'd have dialogues. You'd have Socrates and Plato having dialogues. 

I feel like philosophy works best as a dialogue. It's often good to find a philosopher that you argue with. If I read Nietzsche, I'm generally not agreeing with Nietzsche, but he's very interesting to start your own little conversation with. It's bleak 19th-century German philosophers I like to argue with in my head. 

GR: That's awesome. What books are you reading now? 

MH: It's just been my birthday quite recently, and I was given a lot of nonfiction. The last fiction I enjoyed was Same As It Ever Was, by Claire Lombardo. It's not at all like how I write. It's very realistic, very domestic, very detailed American writing, almost like Jonathan Safran Foer. Claire Lombardo, she's very good. 

Alan Moore, the comic book writer, wrote a book called The Great When that I like.

I'm also reading nonfiction, which, that Japanese book, which has sold bazillions of copies, and it's called The Courage to Be Disliked, which is definitely a courage I've been working on since I ever started on social media. The authors are Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. 

As a writer, that's my big obstacle: to write what you want to write. That way you end up with more readers, because you're not trying to second-guess the market, or you're not trying to second-guess what readers want. That often is counterproductive, and you'll end up with less readers that way, because you'll be writing something that's not true.

GR: What do you think will ring true to readers with The Life Impossible?

MH: This book was kind of therapy for me, in the sense that it was about embracing life again, embracing the world again, dealing with your past.

I want them to feel like it's a book about possibility, I suppose, isn't it? 

A big impetus in my writing is hope and believing in change. And I want this to be a book where people don't necessarily have to believe the events in this book could be possible, but to believe that a new world view is possible, a new perspective is possible. It's a book, I suppose, in favor of having an open mind and embracing the world, embracing nature, and recovering from the past.