Author Matt Haig.PETER FLUDE/The New York Times News Service
Let’s just get this out of the way: Yes, an alien lifeform is one of the central characters in Matt Haig’s new book.
La Presencia, as the otherworldly thing that exists in the waters off Ibiza is known to believers, might come as a shock to those who might know Haig best for his radically life-affirming non-fiction such as his bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive or Notes on a Nervous Planet, which The Guardian praised as a “not smug self-help book.”
If you know Haig as the author of TikTok-sensation, No. 1 international bestseller The Midnight Library (10 million copies at last count) you’ll be more primed for his particular brand of speculative fiction where fantasy meets philosophy.
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Still, Haig is the first to acknowledge that aliens can be a hard sell to readers.
“People can take vampires, ghosts, libraries in the afterlife, but if you say, as a lot of scientists do, that it’s very likely that we’re not alone and there’s some other intelligent life,” he says, “suddenly that makes you a weirdo.”
As he points out: The arc of human history bends toward humans realizing that we actually aren’t the centre of the universe.
“We used to think the sun revolved around us, that we were the only animals with thoughts and feelings. Now we know those things are wrong,” he continues. “In the future, I think we’re going to find out that we’re not as alone as we thought we were. That could be fantastic in an E.T. sense, or it could be horrible in a Ridley Scott sense, but I totally believe in aliens.”
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The Life Impossible, Haig jokes, is the book where he’s allowing himself “off the leash,” embracing his early love of science fiction such as Cocoon. The first draft, in fact, had even more aliens.
During his latest visit to Toronto, The Globe chatted with the bestselling Brit about finding success later in life, listening to reader feedback and ignoring the cynics.
What is your relationship to the phrase “bestselling author,” especially at this point in your career?
I’ve had quite an old-fashioned career trajectory, in the sense that I’ve built a readership slowly – too slowly for my liking at the start. Interestingly, Canada was the first place that I started to attract a strong readership, even before I became a bestseller. I wrote a book called The Humans, and I had quite a strong core of Canadian readers spreading the word.
The good thing about my career, even though at the time I wanted to start off going on the bestseller list, is that it’s built organically. That means I really understand how precarious a career in writing is, and how rare it is to have a bestseller. I have zero expectations every time.
[Being a bestselling author] is lovely, in the sense that you’ve got a lot of people reading your books. It’s why you write in the first place – to be read. I want to be a popular storyteller.
That said, when you’re writing a book – as with thinking about reviews or Goodreads – it’s a thing you have to put aside. You can’t write from the outside in.
Having had a bestseller, is there ever a temptation to reverse engineer your next book based on what worked in the previous one?
It’s almost the opposite. After The Midnight Library, this one felt like, I’ve got a licence now to write a really personal, weird story. I’m not going to lie: In the past I have had that slight self-consciousness where you try and figure out what worked. With this one in particular, it gave me the confidence to not think like that. For me, it’s not just having a lot of people read a book, but having people read the book I want to write. That said, it’s always interesting to know what readers think, and even the negative opinions are sometimes valid. You can take them on board and learn from them.
Is there anything specific you can think of where negative feedback influenced a choice you made?
As readers of my books will know, I like to put a bit of philosophizing in. In the past, that’s felt a little shoehorned in. With my new one, The Life Impossible, the whole framing device is a teacher talking to a former student, trying to help him with his life. That was responding to feedback from people who say I do too much talking out to the reader. I love talking to the reader, but there is a valid point there where it has to feel natural to the voice and the story.
This book explores a lot of big ideas. Are these things you’re working through yourself as you write them, or are you using the vehicle of fiction to share a perspective?
It’s a bit of both, but more the first. With fiction, you’re working things out for yourself. This is why, even though I’ve written non-fiction books, I think I’m more of a fiction writer. I don’t feel like someone who has the answers. I do feel like my mind is quite chaotic, and there is a better way of being than the one I have. I shy away from non-fiction, where people are looking to me to have the answers. I like fiction for the fact that it’s not as solid. You’re philosophizing but there’s never a finish line to it.
Also, because I had depression and anxiety for a long time, and I do still experience anxiety, often that voice I have in my fiction and non-fiction books – that kind of authoritative, guiding voice – is not necessarily my voice. It’s the voice I want to hear myself. I’m trying to be my own guide at the same time.
I’m someone who went through an experience and nearly died. I’ve recovered, so I’ve got a story to tell and things to say about that, but I’m still very much a work-in-progress. What I’m trying to do is make people feel less alone, and what I can do in fiction is to articulate emotions that some people might have trouble articulating.
One thing that strikes me about your work, and which I think is tremendously brave, is that it’s very sincere. We live in a world where it’s cool to be cynical, and sometimes there’s a vulnerability in, say, spending time thinking about aliens. Does it feel that way to you?
I’m British, so I’m from a culture where people are suspicious of happy endings, optimism, self-help, all the things I’ve dipped my toe into. The way I see it is that when I was depressed, I had nothing but cynicism and pessimism, and that was ultimately wrong. I was convinced that I would be dead by the age of 25. I’m now 49. I was convinced there was nothing good ahead of me, I was a burden, I had nothing good to offer the world. Time has disproved 99 per cent of the things depression was telling me.
Yes, optimism can sometimes be hollow, but I think it’s a challenge to go out there and find a true, earnest hope. Why not try to put out something that’s of use to people, and has something that will help people within it, and be direct about that? Especially in the British book world, there can be a lot of cynicism around that, and I used to get a bit affected by that. Now, I get strength from knowing that I’m writing honestly to myself. If you’re writing for the right reasons, and you’re connecting with readers, what else is there? Everything else is just noise.
And it’s easier to block that out because I used to be that cynical person. I know often that cynicism is a defence against feeling, daring to hope.