On a restaurant terrace overlooking Brighton beach, one of the UK’s bestselling male authors is sipping a non-alcoholic cocktail.
In jeans, T-shirt and trainers, bearded and with his balding hair cropped, Matt Haig looks the very definition of an ordinary bloke – you probably wouldn’t glance twice at him sitting there enjoying the sunshine. I bet you know his books though.
He’s written 23, sold ten million copies in 58 languages and has several film and TV series in production, including The Midnight Library and How to Stop Time, the latter starring Benedict Cumberbatch. His hit children’s book, A Boy Called Christmas, was made into a film for Sky and The Radleys, based on an early book about ‘a bunch of middle-class, Radio 4-listening vampires’, hits cinema screens in November, starring Damian Lewis and Kelly Macdonald.
The 49-year-old shot to fame reluctantly in 2015, when his memoir-meets-self-help book, Reasons to Stay Alive (the story of his experience of coping with depression and anxiety disorder after a breakdown and attempting suicide aged 24, while living in Ibiza) was published to unexpected acclaim.
He followed it up with The Midnight Library, a novel in which 30-something Nora Seed discovers that if she goes to the Midnight Library she can experience lives she might have led if she had made different decisions. It was published in 2020, during lockdown, and spent 50 weeks in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Matt with his family, in Tokyo, this summer
But success was a double-edged sword, catapulting Haig into the realm of authors who find themselves on the receiving end of abuse simply for existing. ‘There are few authors who get written about in a way that’s beyond a bad review, it was a bad review of me!’ he says, of the 2021 piece in The Spectator that pilloried his ‘banality’.
On X, where he has 425k followers (there are a further 700k on Instagram), things got out of control. ‘I stupidly spent too long on the internet looking at what everyone said about me,’ he admits. ‘I was the very worst combination for social media: highly opinionated and highly sensitive. I watched YouTube videos about me that went viral, I got cancelled in Brazil for reasons I didn’t understand. A sane person in that position would switch everything off…’
Born in Sheffield, Haig moved with his parents to Newark-on-Trent (where they still live) when he and his sister Phoebe, two-and-a-half years younger, were small. His mum was a teacher and his dad worked in the town planning department, which qualified Haig as posh at his state school.
The relocation compounded a sense of not belonging that he’d had since he was little, something he puts down in part to his mum being adopted. ‘I think both my sister and I inherited a sense of uncertainty about where we belonged because my mum never felt she belonged. She still to this day doesn’t know who her parents were.
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‘I was a contradiction,’ he continues. ‘Shy, nervous and bookish on one side; on the other I was drinking, petrol-sniffing behind Blockbuster, going to raves, getting arrested for shoplifting at 16… I’ve always felt like I didn’t fit in.’
Imposter syndrome loomed large after the success of The Midnight Library and Haig began to descend into a spiral he recognised from his previous breakdown two decades earlier. ‘It’s hard to talk about because you look so ungrateful,’ he says. ‘I would not change it for the world; it’s amazing to have what you always wanted. But things you really want can come with a load of c**p, too.’
His confidence plummeted, his depression returned, and he could not step away from the social media that fed his insecurity. He turned to alcohol. ‘If you’re someone like me who struggled with self-esteem for a long time, you use it as your crutch, as something that you don’t have inside you.’
In 2021 Haig decided to step away from writing. ‘I didn’t like the public side of publication. I thought if that level of success couldn’t make me happy then no writing was going to make me happy.’
Matt’s 2015 breakthrough book
For a year he underwent therapy and looked for other things to do, considering opening a bookshop or a sober bar in Brighton, where he and his wife Andrea live with their two children Lucas, 16, and Pearl, 15. It was his therapist who asked if he’d considered whether he might be autistic. Haig hadn’t, but ironically, he and Andrea had often wondered if Lucas was. Several months later, at 46, Haig was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Shortly afterwards so was Lucas. Things fell into place. ‘I always struggled with jobs,’ he says. ‘I never managed a full month. It was the same with driving tests. I don’t drive. Not in a hippy eco sort of way. I want to but I always get six lessons in then have a panic attack and can’t do it.’
Haig and Andrea have been together for 30 years and married for 17 (they weren’t fussed about tying the knot, but did so in Las Vegas because they wanted children and her family are ‘old-fashioned’). The pair met at university in Hull when they were both 19, and Andrea has been his centre ever since. ‘The first time I had a breakdown, I couldn’t leave the house. Andrea was my carer, but intermittently, for over a decade after that, I would slip into three weeks here, three weeks there of not being able to do anything.
‘The challenge is to keep it as a proper relationship rather than a parent-child one. It’s a miracle that somehow we’ve kept it together. I think you get to a certain point where nothing can be as bad as what you’ve been through. You’re beyond boyfriend, girlfriend; you kind of are each other in a family sense.
‘I can’t remember before Andrea. We grew up together. I was late to grow up, not that I’m really grown up now, but she was there for all of it. It’s not like she’s this perfect person,’ he says hurriedly. ‘She cringes that in Reasons to Stay Alive I almost present her as some sort of angel.’
By most people’s standards, Andrea comes close, having seen him through breakdown, attempted suicide, depression, panic attacks and agoraphobia. He hasn’t drunk since his diagnosis. It’s not the first time Haig has given up drinking – after his breakdown in 1999 he abstained for eight years. ‘I was scared of everything, including alcohol,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t so much a conscious decision, more if I drink, it will give me a panic attack. But when I got better it was more challenging.’
His therapist also suggested he return to Ibiza where the couple had lived from 1997 to 1999. Andrea was office manager at a superclub and Haig was, by his own admission, ‘Mr Hedonist’. They hadn’t been back since his suicide attempt in September 1999 but decided he was well enough to try.
‘So in April 2022 we went for a weekend. It was almost exposure therapy, to go back to the places where I was suicidal and had so many horrific memories. It felt like going to a completely different place.’
While he was there he had the idea for The Life Impossible, in which 70-something bereaved maths teacher Grace is left a house on the island. It is both a voyage of self-discovery and what it means to be human (a recurring theme for Haig), as well as a love letter to the island he once thought would be the death of him. Joanna Lumley will read the audiobook; she says the novel ‘seized me and wouldn’t let me go’.
As Haig finishes his mocktail he tells me that, before The Life Impossible hits the bookshops, he and Andrea are taking Pearl and Lucas, along with the family dogs Lucy, a Maltese terrier, and Bruce, a golden retriever, to Ibiza for a family holiday. It’s the place where he experienced the worst moments of his life. Now he’s hoping to make it the happiest.
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig will be published by Canongate on 29 August, £20.To order a copy for £17 until 1 September, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
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