The Humans

Matt Haig’s Inside Story: “It’s the first time I wrote feeling truly confident as a writer. My first books were sort of under-the-radar books. No-one had really heard of me in the early half of my career and I was trying to work out what sort of writer I was. With The Humans, I feel, I shook off a lot of my earlier pretentiousness and actually just really wrote what I wanted to write.
“I had my cake and ate it because it’s got humour in it, but it’s also got moments of darkness and moments of philosophising in it and it was a very self-indulgent book. I think people appreciated it because I was trying to be truthful and do something different but also be silly at the same time. It’s when I got the balance first right, largely.
“To be honest, The Humans was the book that was probably most edited [of all his titles]. The first version was very science fiction. The first chapter was set in space. It was me doing a sort of karaoke Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and it took me a lot of time while I was editing The Humans to actually realise that the heart of the book isn’t about space. It’s not about aliens. It is, as the title suggests, about humans. I was almost trying to do a David Attenborough, but instead of a David Attenborough about whales or sea turtles or gazelles, it was about humans. I almost imagined a David Attenborough of aliens writing about us. Going onto that idea of having an outsider as a narrator, I thought, ‘Well, you can’t get much more outside than someone who’s literally outside our galaxy writing about us.’
“I was trying to look at all the mundane things about domestic life and suburban life, but to treat it all as totally exotic and new. What we think of as normal life is only normal life because we’re used to it, and it’s sometimes really refreshing to try and actually see there’s something magical about it. I also took the challenge to put some maths in the novel and try and make it fun.
“I can just remember being happy writing it, and even my non-fiction books stem from The Humans because one chapter is just a list of advice that the alien gives to one of the human characters, 97 pieces of advice for a human—and one thing I had in my mind when I was writing Reasons to Stay Alive was that list because that list is a list of reasons to stay alive as well."