HARD DECISIONS: Rock Demigod or Domestic Goddess?

A review of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig by Drew Bufalini as published on AoideMagazine.com.

Here’s a much-abbreviated version of my personal list of regrets:

• Playing basketball on bikes.

• Using a garbage bag as a parachute and jumping off the second story of the neighbor’s garage.

• Hitchhiking in Alaska.

• Being a Ye fan.

  
  

Printed and placed end-to-end, the list of my regrets would easily cross the state line from here in beautiful Ypsilanti, Michigan. (Yes, it’s a real place.) Everybody has regrets. But Matt Haig has written a novel with a unique purgatory that allows the near-dead to examine and sample their lives. Presenting…The Midnight Library.

Have you ever woken up on a dark, rainy morning and wondered who you pissed off to live such a boring life? Or perhaps you wonder what decisions you made in life that brought you to this presumably unhappy point? Perhaps you manage by hiding beneath your soaked bedsheets (sweat, I assume), counting off the things you could have or should have done to achieve the life you always wanted. Reality seldom works the way we want it to and rarely offers us a second chance at the critical turning points of your life that could make the difference in your becoming either a rock star or a garbage man. In The Midnight Library, Matthew Haig gives protagonist Nora Seed a chance to relive those critical decision points and sample that parallel reality, to witness how she turns out in other versions of herself.

Blending speculative fiction, magical realism, and a walloping dose of pop-philosophy, Haig crafts a narrative that is deeply universally relatable, if a tad predictable. At its core, the novel is an exploration of mental health, the burden of expectations, and the suffocating weight of personal regrets.

The Midnight Library gives readers the formula – and, hopefully, motivation, to examine their own regrets and consider that living with the consequences of their action just might make them better people. As a prime example of this hypothesis, Haig introduces readers to his protagonist…

Nora Seed

Nora is a woman in her mid-thirties living in Bedford, England with a major case of depression. In fact, when we meet Nora, she is drowning in a swamp of despair. In a single, relentlessly brutal day, she gets shitcanned from her job, finds her beloved cat (Voltaire) dead, gets a reminder of her estranged brother and his resentment toward her, and faces the heart-wrenching loneliness that reduced her decisions into a series of failures. She can do nothing right. Nora decides she has nowhere to go but out…and there’s no time like the present.

Instead of closing her eye lids in life and raising them to discover heaven, hell, the great void or even the giant spaghetti monster – Nora finds herself in an infinite library filled with green books of varying hues. Her watch is stopped a couple minutes before midnight. She is introduced to her guide on this strange trip between death and the afterlife: Mrs. Elm, her very own high school librarian. Mrs. Elm explains that Nora’s in a liminal space between life and death. Not to be confused with Catholic purgatory. Millions of books fill the infinite shelves and they’re all about Nora, each book offering her a chance to undo a specific regret and live out the consequences of her decision. The good news: if she doesn’t like that life, she’ll be yanked out. When she finds that perfect life, she gets to live out the rest of her days there as if she had never suicided.

The Big Book of Regrets

Like a card catalogue of centuries past, Mrs. Elm introduces Nora to her “Book of Regrets,” which is a single, thick volume filled with Nora’s regrets, single-spaced. She can trace the regret and the misstep she made, then find the book that will transport her to the time of that decision. They range from the mundane to the earthshattering, but each one comes with lasting consequences. Nora’s primary regrets:

• Not staying in her brother’s band

• Ditching her fiancé two weeks before the big day

• Not going to school to become a glaciologist

• Not replying to certain text messages

  
  

If

How do you express your regrets? Do you get angry? Do you attempt a do-over? Find a fresh solution? Do you allow yourself to be led in a different direction as you swallow a second helping of life? Obviously, most people don’t elect to take themselves off the board. They move on with life, hopefully making better decisions. Since there are no second chances, the most you can take away from the experience is knowledge and regret. Loss for what might have been. Some folks elect to live with them for the rest of their lives, perseverating over a single bad decision and losing their chance to make new, good decisions that would help redirect the course of their lives. Many become so obsessed, they lost sight of everything but the life they could be living if only they hadn’t said or done something wicked.

For those of us disposed to self-analysis, regrets can be as difficult to dislodge as a barnacle from a prehistoric hull. But they can be dislodged. They can be lost and long forgotten. They can be rewritten. With enough alcohol, anything is possible.

Then

Reading The Midnight Library, you can’t help but start wondering about the decisions you made in your life and how differently things might have turned out.

We’ve all made millions of choices in our lives with differing consequences. Sometimes even when we make the wrong decision, life has a way of turning out right – or sculpting you into the person you were meant to be by other means.

This is one of the very few places where I find fault with this novel: while regrets are universal, how people respond to them are unique. Acting on regret didn’t necessarily lead to negative outcome. It was akin to making a bad decision because of being too drunk. Usually, it’s forgivable stuff. Mostly. Sometimes the learning experience was worth the price of a bad decision and its consequences. For example, when I was seventeen, I moved to Atlanta to start my career as a world-renowned, award-winning, chap book record-smashing poet. That’s right, a poet. Obviously, the stars didn’t align. But in the year-and-a-half I lived in Atlanta, I got a year of college under my belt, continued and ruined an amazing relationship that began in Michigan, traveled the South so deep it felt like a foreign country, and wrote a novel that will forever remain unpublished. (I also took a side trip to hitchhike around Alaska, but that’s for different story.) I published exactly four poems to earn an enviable fee of two free copies of each magazine that published me.

While I failed at my attempt at becoming a poet, I succeeded in taking an oversized bite of the big, juicy, green apple of experience and learned more than I ever would in graduate school. I learned that I had zero desire to live in poverty but was convinced there was a path for me to write and make money. There was: advertising. It’s not for everybody, but it kept me writing with a roof over my head.

Alternately, a glass half empty type of person like Nora might write off those months as lost time, but what I had learned about myself was invaluable. It’s important to understand that Nora’s despair is not just born from her present bad circumstances or a chemical imbalance; it stems from the belief that she was actively sabotaging herself.

Sample a Reality

Mrs. Elm schools Nora on using the Library. To find a new and improved reality and a life worth living, Nora begins to travel through the books on the infinite shelves. Each time she opens one, she is dropped into a parallel reality where she has the agency to make a different choice from the decision she made the first time around.

In one life, she is a world-famous rock star, playing to sold-out arenas, a life her brother desperately wanted for them both. In another, she is a champion Olympic swimmer, fulfilling the dreams of her demanding father. She tries on life as a glaciologist in the freezing Arctic, and even a life where she simply stayed in her hometown to marry and run a pub with her ex-fiancé (who would become her fiancé again in the vignette).

Suffering through the decisions that she had thought would improve her life had things gone differently, Nora realizes that the perfect lives she imagined are fraught with their own set of tragedies, anxieties, and disappointments. In each life – even the ones where she supposedly makes the selfish choice – Nora is still making plans based on pleasing a loved one.

• Rock star Nora is plagued by addiction and the tragic loss of her brother.

• Olympic freestyle swimmer gold medalist Nora cannot fill the void of her father’s very conditional love.

• Housewife and bartender Nora living a life of domestic bliss with a partner who turns out to be lazy, controlling, and unsupportive.

• 
  

Haig brilliantly dismantles the illusion of her perfect life. Nora learns that sadness cannot be eliminated without also deleting the context that makes joy possible. Together, they reinforce the notion that people need to find more of what makes them feel purposeful and good.

Midnight

Decision time. Nora remains locked in her fantasy scenarios for a few seconds or for as long as, or what feels as long as, years. Despite finding herself dangerously close to true happiness, there’s always something wrong or slightly off about each life that eventually sends Nora back to The Library to sample the next reality. Mrs. Elm, ever the armchair psychologist, forced Nora to think through the lives she’s lived today. The only thing wrong was the way Nora viewed reality and the way she handled other people’s expectations. Her discovery? That the only place she wanted to be was the place she already existed. Making it perfect was up to her.

Morning

Haig does a brilliant job portraying a subject that can be extremely difficult to discuss in public. We all have regrets. It’s how we handle them that separates us. We can choose the muck and mire, the depression. Or we can choose to make forward progress. By Nora trying on new lives, she realizes that the only life that she could ever truly fulfill was root life. This time, she knew, she needed to show up, embrace the mess, and stop setting impossible standards for herself.

The Midnight Library is a warm hug of a book, a reminder that as long as we’re alive, there are still infinite possibilities both ahead of and behind us – some better than others. At the end, The Midnight Library urges readers to pen their own personal “Books of Regret” and start writing something new.

In Closing:

Just for shits and giggles, post your regrets on our Facebook page and tell our audience what you had to do to set your life straight again.

Here are a handful of mine:

• Marriage #1 All the stars lined up, except for the right woman. It was nothing a divorce couldn’t cure. I still miss the dog.

• Not getting my MFA I’m looking for an online program from a university that will allow me to do the whole degree remotely from my home office (I have a disability). In all likelihood, I’ll continue writing but not take the time to return to school to hone a skill I already possess.

• Spending the night in a Denver drunk tank. This is never to be discussed again. In fact, you didn’t read it here. Period.

• Skinny jeans Don’t fit since I expanded my horizons – erm, waistline.