MATT HAIG
The bestselling novelist talks doubt, depression and success
Words by Jonathan Wright///Photography by Kan Lailey
EVEN CLOSE TO 20 YEARS INTO A CAREER that has garnered bestsellers and plaudits, Matt Haig says he still suffers from moments of doubt about his professional trajectory. “As human beings, we’re just prone generally to the grass-is-greener idea,” he says. “I know that with me, as a writer, I compare myself unhealthily to other writers. It’s just what we do.”
We also compare ourselves to imagined, hypothetical versions of ourselves - an idea that underpins Haig’s new novel, The Midnight Library. “Even during 2020, with Covid-19, we all play the comparison game of how we could be doing things,” Haig notes. “Oh, we could be learning the piano; oh, we could be doing this or we could be doing that. That’s quite a dangerous thing. We’re not really encouraged to accept ourselves as we are and to go with the flow.”