I put Wheel of Time aside in late 2020 to read some other books. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig has been a divisive selection among my colleagues and friends: Some people really like it, and others really hate it. I facilitated a book club at work on this book in 2021. This letter spoils the whole book, so skip this post if you're planning on reading The Midnight Library. Also, trigger warning for talk of suicide.
Dear Robert,
My short hiatus from Wheel of Time has turned into a longer return to reading normal books! I realize I haven’t written to you in a while, and now it’s Thanksgiving eve. So I figured I’d write to you about The Midnight Library finally.
“The Midnight Library” is about a woman named Nora whose cat dies, then she loses her dead-end job at a music shop. She used to swim, and was competitive enough to be striving to swim in the olympics. After that, she was in a band called The Labyrinths with her brother. She had panic attacks, so she quit the band. Then, she was with a guy named Dan whose dream it was to open a pub in the English countryside. She was engaged to him, and broke off the engagement when her mother died of cancer. Her friend, Izzy, invited her to go to Australia and work on a whale-watching boat. Nora abandons those plans because she wants to tend to her parents’ graves, and her relationship with Izzy deteriorates.
Nora regrets everything about her life and decides she wants to die. She takes a bunch of antidepressants with alcohol and ends up at the Midnight Library, a place between life and death where people go to assess their regrets, try on new alternative lives, and determine whether they want to live or die. A woman who looks like her school librarian gives her different books, all titled “My Life.” Nora reads the book and is swept away to live the life written in the pages.
The first life she tries on is one where she marries her former fiance, Dan, and opens a pub in the English countryside with him. She thought that she would have been happier marrying him and regretted canceling the wedding. In this version of her life, she finds out that Dan becomes an alcoholic and opens a pub just to have an endless supply of free booze. He has cheated on her in this life, but wants to have a baby with her. She remembers Dan opposing her time in her band, and when her band was offered a record deal, he says their relationship would not endure her rise to stardom. He seems to take offense to her having self-worth and intelligence, and she takes issue that he never had to be flexible about her dreams. She returns to the Midnight Library no longer regretting her broken engagement.
At this point, the book kind of reminded me of “A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” where someone looks back on their life and re-examines their role in the world. My pre-guess at this point was that Nora was going to flout the expectations of this type of story and the story would end with her deciding she’d be better off dead anyway. My second guess is that she would whittle away her regrets one by one until she decided on the part of her life that was right for her, with the understanding that life would never be simple or perfectly happy, but that part of life is learning to cope with unhappiness in a healthier way. My more specific guess, given that Nora chooses to live, is that she would decide to rekindle her relationship with her friend Izzy and move to Australia.
The other note I had at this point is that I was really happy to be hearing Carey Mulligan’s voice reading this book. You might recognize her because she was in an iconic episode of Doctor Who called “Blink.” She’s a really good actress, and I really need to watch more movies she’s in. However, she tends to star in very sad movies.
Anyway, Nora does pick a life where she goes to Australia. Shortly after she gets there, Izzy dies in a car crash. At that point, there was nothing keeping her there, and Nora realized more than ever that she had a habit of latching on to the lives of other people and making their dreams her dreams. Nora lives another life where she commits to swimming, goes to the olympics and then becomes a motivational speaker. It’s the dream of her father, but it doesn’t suit her either.
The final life before the book goes off the rails is when she decides to go to Svalbard and study climate change as a glaciologist. There, she meets a man named Hugo who is what he calls a “slider,” someone between life and death who is experiencing different types of lives to determine what he wants. Hugo says his midnight library takes the form of a video store, where his dead uncle gives him videos to watch. He says he doesn’t want to pick a life because he is having too much fun living different lives. They talk about quantum mechanics and theories of multiverses before Nora is sent back to the library.
Nora then takes Hugo’s advice and lives every sort of different life imaginable, and not just the ones where she is successful and happy. After that, she realizes that in living all of these different lives, she’s losing sight of what she actually wants and refocuses her efforts on the task of finding a life worth living.
Her last life is where she marries a man named Ash, becomes a philosophy professor at Cambridge, has a daughter named Molly, and is extremely content and wants for nothing. She returns to Bedford, where she was living before she attempted suicide, and discovers that her elderly neighbor has been put into a retirement home against his will, the piano student she used to teach is in trouble with the police because he never pursued music, and the music store Nora worked at has gone out of business. Nora might be living her best life, but she feels like she hasn’t earned it, and all of the people in Bedford who benefitted from her presence there are living very differently because she was not in their lives.
Nora is returned to the library and becomes agitated because she thought she wanted to live that life. However, she realizes that she didn’t actually want to be there because she hadn’t felt like she earned her accomplishments by jumping into the life after she had worked hard for them. She decides she truly wants to live and the library bursts into flames. She is returned to her original life where she rushes to her elderly neighbor’s home and tells him to call an ambulance before collapsing. She reunites with her brother at the hospital and she begins to live her original life with the knowledge of all of the other lives she lived while in the midnight library.
This book really resonated with me because in the past year I’ve been thinking a lot about how my life would be different if I had made different decisions. I am curious about the other lives I might have if I had made different choices, but mostly I’m grateful to be living the life I have now.
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