The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 Nineteen years before Nora Seed decided to die, the world was her oyster.  Mrs. Elm, her school librarian, was telling her, “A whole life in front of you”, “You could do anything, live anywhere”.  And the next thing you know her father is dead.  Fast forward 19 years, we can see how much of an impact her father’s death had had on her.  We learn of her mother’s cancer, her brother’s depression, friends’ rejections. Just when she thought it couldn’t get worse, her cat dies and she gets fired from her dead-end job.  Initially, I thought she was battling with regrets.  Maybe some.  But the events between the day at the high school library and the day she got fired just built up an arsenal of guilt.  Her fault that the band broke up, her fault that Volts her cat died, her fault her brother isn’t talking to her, her fault customers at the store are not buying anything, her fault Dan broke up with her etc.  She feels she failed everyone and no one needed her. “I have nothing to give”, she laments and overdoses herself with antidepressants.

Nora finds herself between life and death, in a library.  All the books on these sliding shelves tell her story. Opening them provides her a chance to live the life she regretted not living.  Here is Mrs. Elm again, helping her as she did all those years ago. She reminds Nora of her talents--her swimming, philosophy, glaciology, music --all of which she never pursued.  She urges Nora to try those lives and “undo” those regrets. And her journey begins. Although she enters a life with Nora in it, she carries with her the knowledge only from the root life. (We do not know where the other Nora goes.) Each life reveals some truth about her root existence, which gives her a better understanding of it.

Living those regret lives slowly erode her feelings of guilt. Because in these lives, she gains new insights into her family's character, and learns that those regrets were not really hers--they were the regrets of others which she was burdened with.  As she gradually begins to understand herself better, the library becomes insecure, there are “system errors”.  Total self awareness happens when she realizes that she can choose “choices” but not their outcomes.  So then, even when she is happy with Ash and Molly (and Plato) she knows that she had not worked for it and that life couldn’t be hers unless she was in it from the start. With this epiphany, Nora does not need the library anymore. 

It was tiring, waiting for Nora to find herself, watching (reading) her reject all those lives.  And there was a lot of sermonizing and everyone was doing it--Nora, Elm, the author.  There was nothing subtle in the book.  Nothing left to the imagination.  All loose ends were taken care of--even Mr. Banerjee who was such a non entity in the narrative.  It was like reading Dale Carnegie’s self help books, “How to stop Worrying and start Living”.  Moral of the story:  don’t have regrets.  You have to make do with the life you have.  Be happy.   There were clues towards the end that she would find Ash ultimately.  And even if she didn’t there was a happy ending.  She became more confident and wiser.  And the idea of several folks doing these quantum leaps didn’t appeal.  But yes, it was easy reading.

Haig, Matt. The Midnight Library. USA. Viking. 2020

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