Reasons to Stay Alive

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Matt Haig’s Inside Story: “I had no idea how this was going to be received. And what’s really funny now, people sometimes say, ‘Oh yeah, you wrote a book about depression to get rich,’ or something. Literally, that could not be a more ridiculous thing. I honestly thought it was going to kill my career. It was very much a passion project—I certainly didn’t think it would resonate with anyone beyond people who were going through that specific thing. But actually most of the people who contact me about it aren’t necessarily people who’ve gone through serious depression but people who know people who have gone through that.

“I wrote it wanting to take something that’s very invisible and make it visible, and to actually have something that people relate to. I remember when I was ill, I’d occasionally, when I was up to it, go to a book shop, I used to go to Borders in Leeds, and there were books about depression, but they fed into two categories. Either very dense academic books—probably brilliant books, but when you’re in that state, you’re not really up to reading dense prose that’s quite dark and depressing itself. Or you’d get very corny self-help books, which also don’t really speak to you.

“So I wrote it imagining I was writing it to my 24-year-old self—having that very specific reader in mind, to try to see if there’s a way to hack into that person’s brain and actually give them some sort of perspective, which is very hard when you’re in the middle of severe depression. It gave the book a real focus so I could forget about whether it was meant to be a memoir or a self-help book. I just sort of wrote anything: lists, tiny little sentences here, little complete chapters or things that are a bit more like essays—various things, but trying to shove in as much usefulness as I could to speak to that person.

“It’s also something I struggled with for a while when it became really big in paperback. It was No.1 for a while, and obviously I’d always wanted that as a struggling writer and it was great. But the fact that it was this specific book, this very personal book, very exposing book, which had my parents in it, my partner in it—I felt very exposed. I was getting a lot of emails from people who themselves were suicidal or knew someone who was suicidal or depressed and, at that point, I didn’t know how to answer those emails, so I found that quite hard for a while.

“People said, ‘Oh, mental health activist or mental health ambassador.’ I thought, ‘I’m someone who wrote about it. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a Samaritan.’ I struggled for a while and I felt a bit of a fraud because I started to get anxiety again. I thought, here’s people saying, ‘Your book really helped me,’ and it’s like, ‘Well, I can’t even help myself at the moment.’ So for a year, I was in a bit of an up-and-down state.

“Now, I don’t think it’s the best thing I’ve written, but it’s probably the book I’d keep out there in the world because it’s been useful to people, and it’s nice to feel useful because you don’t often get that feeling as a writer.”