“I’m prouder of this than any other book I’ve written,” Matt Haig says of his latest novel, The Life Impossible.
His first novel since The Midnight Library, which spent almost a year on the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists and sold more than six million copies, The Life Impossible is another work of magical realism, this time with a grumpy, depressed 72-year-old protagonist. Former maths teacher Grace, recently widowed and still suffering from the death of her young son years earlier, is bequeathed a house on the Spanish island of Ibiza by a colleague she hadn’t spoken to in decades.
At first, Grace thinks it’s a joke. But when she realises the gift is real, she travels to the Balearic island, where she finds Christina (the colleague) has left cryptic messages for her. Grace reluctantly follows Christina’s advice and seeks out former marine biologist Alberto, who takes Grace diving, and shows her “La Presencia” (the presence), a mysterious phosphorescent light that alters people who can see it. No spoilers, but for Grace, the encounter is life-changing.
Despite having written a deeply personal memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, an account of a breakdown in his 20s that saw him contemplate suicide, this book, Haig says, is his most personal.
“Partly because of the story but also because I’d given up writing, and I was only going to write again if I had the right idea,” he says over Zoom from Brighton in England where he lives with his wife and two children.
“For a whole year I didn’t write a single sentence. I’d gone through a little patch of depression and started drinking again, then I thought, ‘maybe I shouldn’t be a writer. Maybe I should do something in the real world’.”
Those “real-world” ideas were “the cliche of a bookshop” and a sober bar, “because I’m a male who stopped drinking”, he says. “I thought I’d do a place that was beautiful and hedonistic and not at all worthy or earnest.” He then realised, partly thanks to a recent ADHD diagnosis, that he wasn’t a “perfect multitasking business owner” type.
During this non-writing period, Haig took a trip to Ibiza - scene of the aforementioned breakdown - to “face up to his past”. “I went to the place where I tried to take my own life. I literally went to the cliff,” he says.
It was, he says, “intense”.
“But at the same time, it was just a scrap of land,” he says. “I felt like a very different person. The thing I remember about it from when I was suicidal was, how can I be in this … beautiful, magical place with this view of the Mediterranean and feel like this? When I went back, it was still beautiful. At the time, I thought I could never be a normal person and appreciate that. To be able to go back there and actually appreciate it as a ... normal tourist was very cathartic.”
It was during this Ibiza trip that the idea for The Life Impossible came to him. “It came out of this very personal transformative experience,” he says, “which is weird as it’s a totally weird science fiction-fantasy book.”
It’s also a book about new beginnings, grief, guilt, climate change and, possibly, extraterrestrial life. There’s a lot going on. “Years ago, I had the idea of a woman in her 70s narrating a story. But in that version she was a jewel thief,” Haig says. “I put that aside for years, but that’s the genesis of Grace.”
In Ibiza, he heard about the Posidonia Oceanica, an ancient seagrass that grows like an underwater meadow off Ibiza’s coast, which is an integral part of the story. That, and other supposed mystical elements of the Spanish island, appealed to him.
“I’ve lived there, I lost my mind there, and I … found my ability to heal again there, so I wanted to write this wild, weird novel,” he says. “The Midnight Library was quite an outward-facing novel, in the sense that I was very reader-conscious with it. I don’t see Nora as a singular character but as more of a way in for the reader to put themselves into the device of the library. But I feel like Grace is a real character, and she’s the opposite of the place she’s in. She’s this stiff, prim British retired maths teacher, who’s in this world of logic, and she feels hopeless and there’s no future for her.”
Taking his guilt-ridden protagonist to Europe’s most hedonistic place was, he says, part of the fun. But The Life Impossible is much more than a fish-out-of-water story. As well as veering into New Age mysticism, it’s about regret and ageing. “Losing people was very much on my mind when I was writing it,” he says; his dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer, his mum had just had open-heart surgery. “My son had also had a severe bout of illness, so everything felt very fragile, and I think a lot of that comes out. So it’s not just about fragility of the environment, but it’s about fragility of life in the broadest sense.”
Ibiza Town, part of the setting in The Life Impossible.Credit: Juergen Sack
Having a crotchety protagonist like Grace, a maths teacher wedded to logic, helps with the occasional incredulity that greets the reader as the book progresses; no spoilers, but suffice to say, things do get very magical.
“If she was a 25-year-old yoga instructor, it wouldn’t have been the same,” agrees Haig. “But if you add mathematics to fiction, it does interesting things because mathematics is almost the opposite of fantasy. So it was a book of balance.”
Haig might be best known for The Midnight Library, but he’s been prolific for years - as well as seven novels, he’s written 12 children’s books, seven works of non-fiction, and has been published in more than 40 languages. His non-fiction works - including 2015’s bestselling Reasons To Stay Alive - tend towards self-help, although Haig is reluctant to call them that.
“I get a bit bored by things. So I switch from adult fiction to children’s books, non-fiction and back again. Then those categories, I try and do something different with it,” he says.
He wasn’t prepared though, for the reaction to his deeply personal memoir. “Suddenly, I’m invited to events and panels where I’m meant to say profound things about mental health, and depression, and anxiety, and suicide, and all these heavy topics,” he says. “I was called a mental health activist or ambassador, and that was a role that wasn’t suited to me.”
Then, of course, came the backlash, especially after 2021’s The Comfort Book, which blended self-reflection with philosophy. The Spectator wrote an entire feature titled The Banality of Matt Haig, and critics - and anonymous Twitter users - accused him of churning out “tea towel philosophy”. “There’s a fairness to that,” Haig says, “because that’s almost what I was trying to do. And I definitely wasn’t trying to write a ‘book’ book with Reason To Stay Alive. I wasn’t writing an academic book - I just wanted to write a truthful one about my own experience, and if it helps someone, great.”
These days, Haig doesn’t use social media as much as he once did - he’s been embroiled in many online spats, including with broadcaster Piers Morgan - and he’s less bothered by what people think of him.
“The reviews so far have been good, but I’m expecting some bad ones. I feel like it’s a weird book that’s going to confuse a few people … but because it’s so personal, I’m not as bothered as I have been in the past about external opinions,” he says.“We’ll see - I might have a breakdown next week, but right now, I’m feeling a bit gung-ho about it.”
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig (Allen & Unwin) is out now.
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