The Midnight Library

Welcome, friend! I rarely post reviews right after reading the book but this one is very special! I finished writing this review last week. So fresh from my writer’s desk, let’s talk about The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.

Matt Haig is a special author to me. I have known about his books for a long time now. I particularly remember The Midnight Library as being a popular read when it first came out but like most popular books, I didn’t pick it up then. Instead, my first book by Matt Haig is his non-fiction, The Comfort Book. When I was in depths of depression, that book kept me afloat. Recently, when I had too many options to read, I decided to give The Midnight Library a try. It was so good!! It took me 3 days to finish and I’m sure in another life, I would have read it in a day. Here is what it is about:

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The Midnight Library – Review

Nora is having a rough life. She is 35 years old. She doesn’t have any close friends and is estranged from her only surviving family, her brother. On the worst day of her life, life seems to deliver one punch after the another. Losing her job, being confronted by old regrets, feeling lonely. She has had enough when she learns that her cat has died. The one creature who she had adopted to take care of, she couldn’t save from harm. This leads Nora to take the step to end her life. Except she doesn’t die, she ends up at the Midnight Library.

She meets her long-time school librarian, Mrs Elm, there. Mrs Elm explains why she is at the library and why the books here are so special. She may have wanted to die but death hasn’t come yet and she has time to explore. Thus begins Nora’s adventure to find a life in where she could stay. A life which is better than what she had led. A life where the things that haunt her, the regrets she has accumulated do not exist.

Through the many lives of Nora, The Midnight Library blends quantum physics with the human experience. She starts off with visiting lives where a particular regret does not exist. There is one where she is married to the man she broke up with, one where she pursues swimming as a career and becomes an Olympic medalist, one where she follows her best friend to Australia, one where she is a glaciologist. She falls into each of these lives the way a reader falls into a good book — instantly.  The first few times, she is confused and has to investigate who she is in that life, who her friends are, where she is and why she is there. She learns that to undo one regret doesn’t mean everything else is perfect but most importantly, undoing a regret also does not mean that new ones never come up. Her life with Dan was a great example of one thing working out but down the road, things not being so good.

Nora becomes a traveller of her many lives. She meets someone like herself who is visiting other lives. Mrs Elm helps her branch out and imagine and experience lives she never thought she would live like owning a vineyard. I worried for Nora as she travelled more and more, farther and far away from her root life and my fears came true when she started to lose herself. Finally, she landed in a life she loved and wanted to stay in but in this very precious life, she felt like an imposter. What she had gained was something she never had to work for. She didn’t know her family and history like she was supposed to. And this is the point where Nora had to make a decision of whether she wanted to stay in this perfect life or go. But where from here when she was on the cusp of death in her life?

The Midnight Library is a thought-provoking book. It is beloved by so many readers! It has been rated by 2.2 million readers, with 9% of them (~200,000) taking the time to write a review. Doesn’t that say something? It came out 5 years ago in August. That’s 40,000 reviews per year. Wow. And after reading it, yes, it is worth the fame. I absolutely adored it.

It is a book for the reader who wants to go places and try out different lives (or books) but it is also a perfect book for anyone who loves their stories to give them things to think about. Through The Midnight Library, I reminisced about my past. Nora’s connection to Mrs Elm made me think about my own librarian teacher from junior high. I am so sad that I don’t remember her name but I will never forget the little non-fiction soft page books about oceans and fossils and dinosaurs that she would let me borrow from the library in addition to whatever I borrowed during the library period. I would go spend time with her whenever I had a substitute teacher. She had a huge role to play in the reader I became even though I didn’t realize this until I read The Midnight Library. That was such a long time ago now. I had a Mrs Elm.

Mrs Elm was the spirit guide that Nora desperately needed. Together, she could share openly about her regrets and with her help, see the beliefs she had built her whole life around. Nora once asked for a life in which her mom was alive. Mrs Elm told her that was not possible. Her mother’s passing was inevitable. Though there were infinite books in the Midnight Library, an infinite number of lives that Nora could choose from, she could only choose what she had influenced. She couldn’t have done anything to save her mother from cancer. This hit hard. Grief can sometimes sit with us like regret. We wish we had spent more time with someone but life doesn’t work that way. We only get the time that we get. 

In another request, Nora wanted her cat to not have died. Turns out Volts had the best life with Nora as she was. It was a lesson that everything cannot be perfect in life, no matter how much we want it to be. 

When Nora started to lose herself, alongside her I wondered what pieces and history of hers made her. Without the regrets and the sadness, she would not be Nora at the Midnight Library. She would be one of the Noras in the lives she visited. This made me wonder about the key events, likes and dislikes that make us who we are. In Nora’s case, her love for National Geographic magazine, music and animals shows up over and over in different ways. 

Ever since I had my daughter, I have become acutely aware of my childhood. As a parent to a baby, I am molding her life. Things that I do and say will stay with her and she will embrace them, take what she can from them, in ways I will hope for but not know for sure. I have thought about my childhood a lot and Nora’s story led her down the same path of how she was moulded by her upbringing. As hard as it was for her, I loved seeing this unfold. I gathered courage from the lessons she was learning.

I think about all the lives I could have had. One where I do not blog but instead chose to become an author. One where I pursued my teenage dreams of becoming an archaeologist and working at Drumheller. One where I moved back to India. One where I have dogs and not cats. Maybe there is one where I travel the world. And maybe I can still do most of these should I want to.

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At this point, you have read 1,328 words written by me and I hope that if you haven’t read this book, you’re convinced to give it a read. I will definitely be reading it again and sharing it with my daughter. I will end with the quote from Sylvia Plath that this book begins with:

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

This is an amazing book. Go visit The Midnight Library! Add it to your Goodreads shelf. And if you have ready, let me know in the comments what you thought of it.

A book I was reminded of: The Memory Collectors.