A Boy Called Christmas

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Matt Haig’s Inside Story: “The idea came from my son Lucas. When he was about eight or seven, he said, ‘Was Father Christmas ever a boy? What was Father Christmas like as a boy?’ He was a very inquisitive child, so he always asked questions like that, awkward questions, and I didn’t have an answer. So I thought, ‘Oh, I should go away and write that answer as a book.’ Fun.
“I say fun, but when I wrote the first draft, because it was so soon after Reasons to Stay Alive, my editor said, ‘You’ve made Father Christmas a bit depressed.’ So on the second draft, I metaphorically gave Father Christmas Prozac and cheered the whole book up.
“It’s been made into a film which is probably going to be out at Christmas 2021. They built an elf village in Prague. It was pretty weird to go through this set and see something that was in your head come to life.
“I actually feel freer writing for children because I think imaginatively you can almost go anywhere. Obviously not sex and violence, but you can actually throw more stuff at a kid than you can an adult because a kid might know that trolls aren’t real, but they will go along with the imagination much easier than adults.
“With an adult book, you have to do a lot more work at making the unrealistic realistic. With a children’s book, you can almost treat it like a dream and go where you want to go. So I’ve learned more from writing kids’ books in a weird way than I have from adult books. Now, when I write an adult book, I almost pretend I’m writing a children’s book that just happens to be for adults. I try and get that same sort of imaginative freedom that I have when you’re writing more fairytale-type stories.”