Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.
Katie O'Connor: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Katie O'Connor, and today I am excited to be speaking with bestselling author Matt Haig about his new novel, The Life Impossible. Welcome, Matt.
Matt Haig: It's very nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
KO: Of course. Thank you for coming. So, The Life Impossible is about Grace Winters, a widow who finds herself without much to look forward to in retirement. Her days and her weeks are monotonous until she's unexpectedly contacted by a lawyer, or solicitor. A former coworker, Christina, to whom she once bestowed a kindness over the holidays decades ago, has died and left Grace her home in Ibiza. Grace, quite uncharacteristically, books a one-way ticket to Spain, and the magic unfolds from there.
This novel is so much about second chances. For Grace, moving on from her grief, both new and old, and for opening herself up to the unknown when, as a former math teacher, she is so accustomed to dealing with certainties. You've said that you want this novel to convey a feeling of recovery. How did that influence your approach to building the narrative?
MH: Yeah, that's a very good question, actually. I'll start at the outset by saying this is a fantasy. This isn't a straightforwardly realistic novel. Although it contains elements of science fiction, magic realism, and all of that, at the same time, in a strange way, this is also the most, I wouldn't say autobiographical, but I suppose the book I put most of my own emotional truth into. I was someone who experienced severe depression. I've experienced severe depression in my life. When I was younger, I nearly took my own life with suicidal depression. And I was diagnosed with panic disorder for years. I went through all kinds of situations which I didn't think I would get out of.
I mean, one of the main symptoms, for want of a better word, of depression is pessimism and the belief that nothing is going to become better or improved. And same with panic and anxiety and panic attacks. I was convinced at a young age that things wouldn't get better for me. And when they eventually did, and I'm talking in the process of years later, life itself took on a kind of surreal dimension. I think it's hard to convey the experience of feeling the impossible in your own life and putting it into fiction. When you do that, when you translate the sort of regenerative experience of recovery, I feel like the best way to do that is through a fable, is through a fantasy, through sort of science fiction, through magical happenings in the ocean, through potential extraterrestrial elements and all of that. Because when you go through certain experiences in life, you yourself feel like an alien. And when you achieve things which you didn't think you'd achieve, the whole world can feel more vivid and strange and weird. When I used to recover from depression, I'd noticed even the grass seemed greener, the sky seemed bluer, things tasted better.
And by the way, this isn't a book about depression or mental health in any sort of straightforward sense. I think the closest I come to it, the main character, she's experiencing anhedonia, which is the sort of inability to feel pleasure or to enjoy music or to enjoy food. I've been in that situation before where you're kind of numb. I've had it from grief, I've had it from mental illness and all of that. And so it's not a straightforward mental health book. I'd say even less than The Midnight Library. It's not overtly about a character going through mental illness and recovering, but in terms of thematically, it's very much a story about transformation and recovery.
"I think it's hard to convey the experience of feeling the impossible in your own life and putting it into fiction. When you do that, when you translate the sort of regenerative experience of recovery, I feel like the best way to do that is through a fable."
I was trying to convey a lot of that feeling honestly. And sometimes, to be honest, you don't have to be realistic. Sometimes, to be honest, realism can be a kind of trap. It can be a kind of restraint or a straightjacket. And sometimes to actually be free with the sort of emotional truth, you find yourself going into fantasy. So, this is a book that starts off quite conventionally, quite realistically, starts off as this almost like quaint mystery story. And then around the halfway point, it becomes something else. It becomes this kind of magic-realist tale. But all the way through, it's a sort of journey, a slow journey towards weirdness, but also towards self-discovery.
KO: Yeah, you definitely lay the groundwork for more of the mysticism in that first half, early on, as Grace gets to the island and whatnot. And I think you do a really beautiful job, too, of describing that numbness that she's feeling to the listener. You've been very candid about your struggles with depression and with substance abuse as well. And thank you for that. I commend you for that. As you just mentioned, at one point you did get so down deep that you did consider taking your own life. And I recently read that that happened while in Ibiza, and that once you got better, you had vowed never to return to the island, but that ultimately you did with the help of a therapist. And that that trip is what resulted in an idea that, ultimately, became this novel. Can you talk to me about your relationship with the island now?
MH: Yes. It's very different. I mean, just to give the context, in the 1990s, when I was a young person, I went there, I was the crazy cliché, certainly the crazy British cliché of someone who goes to Ibiza, drinks a lot, takes drugs, doesn't sleep much, eats badly, doesn't look after themselves. I worked there for three summers with my partner, Andrea. My main problem was alcohol. I had a job where I was selling tickets in a bar, so I was drinking from 11 in the morning for the rest of the day. I had very low self-esteem at that point in life. I didn't have much to be proud of in my life. So, it sounds ridiculous, but being a young problematic man at that point in my life, having people think that I could take a lot of alcohol, it was my thing. It was like my superpower. And it's a pathetic sort of young man thing of feeling like you were tough for being able to take a lot of stuff, but in reality, I couldn't.
I'm giving myself in the worst possible light here, you know, I was also at the same time trying to learn Spanish. I was appreciating a lot about the island that wasn't the party side. I'd even set up an Ibiza book club. So, it wasn't fully the Ibiza cliché, but I was quite hedonistic and foolish. And then in 1999, it came crashing down when I basically lost my mind. That wasn't really to do with drugs. I had sort of given up the drugs a few months previously. I was still drinking, though, and I wasn't sleeping very well. And I was coming back to London to get a "real job," and I had a problem with growing up, and I had a problem of being a responsible adult at that point in my life. I wanted to be a writer, but I had no idea how I would ever go about doing that.
So, when I became ill in Ibiza, I left it behind. And it's much easier to leave a place behind, because when you see all your problems related to a place, you think, “Well, if I don't go back to the place, I will have progressed.” And, of course, that's not really the case. And when, years later, I had very successful therapy, which helped me when I'd relapsed into drinking again, it helped me sober up. I sorted out a lot of issues. I went back there in winter to the island. And not only was I a very different person, the island itself seemed very different, I think partly because it was, and partly because I was seeing it through different eyes.
It's a place of natural wonder and beauty that is often misunderstood and turned into a cliché. But there's a lot of incredible natural phenomenon related to the islands, and not least the sea grass, which is in the sea just off Ibiza. Potentially the oldest organism on earth is Posidonia seagrass, which makes the water very clear. It's more like the Caribbean than the Mediterranean. It's a very sort of turquoise sea. And it's beautiful. And it's a sort of bountiful place. It does have a problem with excessive tourism at certain times of year. It's got environmental issues, but that makes it quite interesting for a writer, because we're obviously in an age and a decade where we're thinking increasingly about changing weather and changing environment and our own sort of human footprint on the world. And you take a sort of fragile ecosystem like Ibiza set in the Mediterranean, and you've got a kind of microcosm of the problems of the world. And so that side of it was interesting too.
But, really, I wanted to write it as a kind of therapeutic exercise for myself. It was my own way of coming to terms with it. So, writing this story about transformation, I was able to put a lot of myself in it. It helped that the character clearly wasn't me, you know, this retired maths teacher, female, widow in her 70s, clearly not me, a 40-something male. So, in a strange way, that actually made it easier for me to sort of head into that emotional territory because people wouldn't think I was the central character. That sort of freed it up, if that makes sense.
KO: It does make sense. What is your writing process like? Take me through a typical day for you when you're working on a novel.
MH: I would love to say that I have a typical day, but in reality, I have periods of a year where I'm not writing, where I'm either trying to write or I'm just literally taking time off. I seem to be a kind of all-or-nothing writer. So, when I'm writing, like with Life Impossible and with The Midnight Library, actually, and a lot of my novels, I've binge-written them. It will take me ages to develop the idea. I'll be painstaking going through sentences at the start, and I'll write about two sentences a day. And then suddenly I'll turn a corner in the story, or I'll get something, and then it'll be like a rush to get it all down because I'm worried I'm going to lose it.
I'm not a great planner or note taker. I write little bits. I've got sort of open Word documents. My wife always jokes that my laptop is just so unbelievably messy, and she doesn't know how I can find my way. My daughter actually laughed the other day when she saw my phone. I've got as many tabs open on my phone as it's possible to have. I don't know if that's 500 or 5,000, but I've got a lot of tabs open.
KO: I was like, what is that number? [laughs].
MH: It's a high number. So, when it comes to technology and my working structure, it's a little bit chaotic. But I'm committed to the story. When it's going, and when it's on all cylinders, I become a bit consumed by it. You don't want, especially as you get older, you don't want to lose any of it to memory. You want to get as much of it down [as you can]. I actually don't think the process of writing is that different to the process of reading. Because in a way, when you're writing something down, you are writing the novel you are kind of reading in your head, you're writing the sort of daydream that's in your head, you're writing it down. So, the writing isn't the first part of the activity. The first is the story that's either in the ether or in your head somehow, it's like a daydream. And then the writing is just the translation of that, and the reading is another translation of that. So, I feel like writing and reading are quite merged together.
And yeah, I don't really have a pattern. I mean, there's certain things. I write better in the morning. I definitely write better in the morning. I write better when I'm healthy. Another thing, which was again, going back to the ’90s and my unhealthiness, which I can remember the unhealthy cliché about the sort of tortured poet—sorry, Taylor Swift reference. That sort of mythology of the hard-drinking writer, the Hemingway thing. I think Hemingway’s famous quote was, "Write drunk, edit sober." And I think that's really bad advice [laughs]. I think don't write drunk. Do it all sober, actually, otherwise, unless you're Hemingway, you're going to be writing some really bad stuff.
I honestly think as well, physical health and mental health are the same thing. So, if you are feeling really rundown or really hungover or really tired or sleep-deprived, you are not going to be on good physical form, and you're not going to be on mental form. Your brain's a physical thing. I often write after a run or after I've been to the gym or something. I tend to write a little bit better. I get tired during the day. I don't know if that's a neurodiverse thing or whatever, but I sort of shut down at about two o'clock or three o'clock and find it hard. But yeah, so I'm a morning—put it all in the morning.
"I think Hemingway’s famous quote was, 'Write drunk, edit sober.' And I think that's really bad advice [laughs]. I think don't write drunk. Do it all sober, actually, otherwise, unless you're Hemingway, you're going to be writing some really bad stuff."
KO: I think that's good advice for many facets of life. And I do want to transition, actually. This is a good segue because you have also been very open about your ADHD and autism diagnoses, which came fairly recently. In fact, I believe this is the first book, or at least the first adult fiction novel that you've written since you became aware of your diagnoses. At least in my own experiences, I think that neurodiversity and creativity can so often go hand in hand. In hindsight, or perhaps while you were working on this book, do you feel as though your neurodiversity augments your creativity as an author in some way?
MH: I think so, certainly in terms of what I write about. It's so strange, years ago I wrote a book called The Humans. It was about an alien in disguise as a human who is a maths professor at Cambridge University, and he was observing humans from a distance. And so many people with autism identified with that book and asked me if I had been diagnosed. This was going on for quite a while, and I was like, "What are you on about? I'm not autistic."
And it was only because we were getting my, well, two things were happening: I was having therapy for other reasons and going through my own sort of little existential crisis. And the therapist was noticing and picking up on things and saying I should possibly see a psychiatrist and get a diagnosis. At the same time, we were coming to the same conclusions with my son as well, who we got diagnosed too. And it started to make sense of things. I've always had a slight difference that's been observed. My teachers used to say I was special needs in certain subjects, but they, typical in the 1980s and ’90s, you were told you were special needs, but you weren't told what those needs were and weren't told what the “special” meant. They didn't know, and they didn't have the answers.
So, I grew up, like many people my age grew up, not knowing anyone who was diagnosed with autism or ADHD, didn't really know what those things were. You had the film Rain Man and you thought, “Well, I'm not that character, so therefore I'm not autistic.” And that's essentially it. It's something I only think about in certain situations. It's very hard when you get diagnosed at the age of 46 to suddenly see yourself in a different light. But with ADHD, especially, it's made me understand previous behaviors and previous issues, certainly relating to alcohol, certainly relating to the Ibiza years. When I was a teenager, I caused a lot of problems for my parents. I was a compulsive shoplifter. I got arrested at the age of 16. I don't think I was a nasty child. I was caring about people and worried about people and cared for people, but I had serious issues of compulsive behavior and things like that.
For years, I used to beat myself up about that, understandably, and for causing my mom a lot of hard work. Then in the early days of our relationship, I wasn't the perfect partner with Andrea either, especially when alcohol was thrown into the mix. There’s a lot of guilt and a lot of regret related to that. And obviously you don't absolve yourself by getting a diagnosis, and you can't change your past, but what you can do is you can, it's a very overused word, but mindfulness, it can make you more mindful. I used to, online, be very impulsive with, I don't know, let's say Twitter. I'd be one of those annoying people who would argue with people sometimes, or put my opinions out there and I wouldn't back down. It was very impulsive. So, it's helped me become, I feel, a better human with the people around me. It's also helped them sometimes understand me. So, it is a two-way thing.
It's helped me get to a point of self-acceptance. And self-acceptance, I think, is misunderstood. Because people think, “Oh, self-acceptance means you're letting yourself off the hook.” I don't think it's letting yourself off the hook. I think it's actually when you self-accept you are able to become a better person and sort of aspire to do better things and be a kinder human being by knowing who you are. When you don't know your own mind and you're acting from instinct to instinct or drink to drink, then that's not good for anything. I think awareness is key, and so it's helped me in that.
And in terms of the writing, a consistent feature of my fiction has always been an outsider, but not just an outsider, an outsider who doesn't necessarily look like an outsider, who fits into the group around them. For instance, I wrote a book called The Radleys, which was about a family of suburban vampires, and the children didn't realize they had the condition of vampirism. And The Midnight Library, in each of the lives that Nora finds herself, she's a fish out of water. I think it frustrates some readers of The Midnight Library that she doesn't always know everything about the life she finds herself in, and they want to have all the memories so it's a fair choice about which life to choose. And actually, I didn't write The Midnight Library with any sort of neurodiverse diagnosis, but I think that's kind of how Nora feels in each life. Sometimes I feel like that in my own one life. I'm still trying to work out the rules and who I am and what people think of me.
That might not be uniquely neurodiverse, but it's something I've always felt. I feel like, from the outside, it often looks like I fit into a group, and from the inside, I never do. I always feel like an imposter. I'm not knowing rules or I'm having to work hard to look like I know. And I think that's to do with it. Although, as I get older, I'm less worried about that. I'm less worried about knowing exactly how to act.
KO: Your new heroine, Grace, she is also very literally an outsider as she is coming to the island from England, and then in different ways becomes a little bit more of an outsider as different things happen in the course of the story. So, without giving too much away—you did touch on it a little bit earlier—there are supernatural elements in The Life Impossible. Do you personally believe in the supernatural, or do you think that believing in the supernatural could perhaps enhance your experience with the real world around you?
MH: Well, it depends what we mean when we say supernatural. I definitely believe science hasn't found everything out yet. I definitely believe we don't know everything about everything, and I don't think we're at the end of science or the end of understanding. The more I understand about science, and I was terrible at science at school, but as an adult, I really like reading nonfiction books about physics and all kinds of things. I think alien life or intelligent alien life is probable. I think it used to be that we used to think people were stupid to believe in aliens. Now I feel like it's almost the other way around. It's almost like you're stupid to imagine that we are literally the only intelligent form of life. I don't think we’re the only intelligent form of life on this planet, let alone the universe.
"You have to have a slight form of madness, I think, when you're writing a book... You have to believe what you're writing, which sounds ridiculous if you're writing fantasy stuff. But it's almost like a method actor, you have, in that moment, to kind of be in the role and you have to believe it wholeheartedly."
I don't necessarily believe in fire-breathing dragons and fantasy proper, but I believe there's all kinds of mysterious things that we're discovering about the world. It was only 100 years ago where the first marine scientists who said that the sea goes deeper than a few hundred meters, they were absolutely laughed at and ridiculed. And now we know there's this Mariana Trench and the sea goes down for miles, and there's all sorts of creatures that are essentially alien creatures down there that we haven't discovered. And I think relating to the ocean as well as this book about the ocean in lots of ways, there's so much we don't know about our own planet.
So, it's not a question of believing in the supernatural, necessarily. It's believing in the natural, but it's the natural that we don't understand yet, the natural that we are still being made aware of, I would say. I'm a very agnostic person, not just in the religious sense, but in every sense. I suppose I'm cautious and don't want to hedge my bets one way or the other, but I feel like ambiguity is a good place for a writer to exist in, to sort of be open to things and not come forward with all the answers in a very authoritative way. It's more about poking at things and sort of questioning.
KO: Yeah. Keeping that curiosity alive. Absolutely.
MH: Yeah.
KO: Well, as book lovers, we all have different things that we love about stories, and one trope in particular that us editors love is the epistolary novel. It would've been a very easy choice for you to just have made this a standard first-person narrative from Grace, but you chose instead to have it take the form of a story that Grace is telling to her former student, Maurice, via email, who is himself going through a hard time. What appealed to you about this approach?
MH: Yeah, this is another fantastic question, and I really haven't answered this yet, but I think I can answer it by saying that, actually, I felt it would be great for her to be talking to someone throughout the book because I know that one of my problems I have sometimes is I insert myself a little bit too much into stories. They always say, “show, don't tell.” Well, anyone who's read my books knows it's quite a bit of telling alongside the showing. And I felt like this legitimizes my bad habit of talking out and philosophizing and getting in the way of a story.
So, if she is literally a former teacher to the person she's writing to, that means it feels totally natural to have whole chapters sometimes where she's talking about theories of life on the universe and mathematics and all of this. It's a way to mix up genres a little bit easier, because obviously it's a fiction novel, but it also, because of this device, is able to have elements of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, it's a travelogue in some ways. It was a sort of way to bend the genres in a way that felt natural.
Although someone might think, “Oh, this is a bit of a strange device,” the fact that this teacher is writing a book-length letter, but it's more a metaphorical thing about her being a teacher and it's about what writing's about, you know? Every reader is as important as every other reader. And so she feels moved enough by this one person to share this story. I think it's nice that she's not writing it as a book or she's not writing it to a wide amount of people. She's writing it to this one person. And so it helped me as a writer, just to think about this one fictional reader.
And I like speaking out. I've written children's books and children, I honestly believe, are the best readers. I think they're better readers in many ways. I think we lose a lot of what we had as a child, in terms of a playfulness and in terms of fantasy, but understanding that the fantasy isn't real. It's not like children necessarily believe in unicorns, but they can go with a daydream much easier than adults can. To do that with an adult, to have fantasy in a novel, to have science fiction in a novel, you have to have the architecture around it, solid and explained. And you need to hold the adult reader's hand through a bit, quite a bit.
So, this helped me do that and helped myself believe in it, because you have to have a slight form of madness, I think, when you're writing a book. You have to, in the act of writing, when you're writing a sentence, you have to believe what you're writing, which sounds ridiculous if you're writing fantasy stuff. But it's almost like a method actor, you have, in that moment, to kind of be in the role and you have to believe it wholeheartedly.
So, there's a little bit of science in the book, you know, it’s like a challenge to see how far you can take a reader into weirdness. That was part of the fun of this. And being able to talk to this fictional student that she used to teach was a way that made that easier somehow.
KO: I feel like the door might be a little bit open with Maurice's closing letter for maybe more from Maurice one day, but I will just hold onto that myself.
MH: I will just say, I mean, you never say never to anything, but with this one it felt like I'd like to spend more time writing this because I had a lot of fun writing it. But it definitely is a standalone, but it's like, “Oh, I could do a short story.” I could do something with it. I don't know.
KO: Nice. Well, Joanna Lumley does a wonderful job in her performance as Grace. She conveys Grace's wisdom and her skepticism, and ultimately, her joy in this new life of hers. Have you gotten to enjoy Joanna's performance yet?
MH: I haven't listened to the whole thing chronologically, just in the same way I wouldn't read my whole book again. I've been given excerpts and files and even I saw a little bit of her reading it and she was just, you know, she was acting it as she read it, and she's just got the best voice and I love her. And, actually, I was the person who, because she was given the book as a reader to possibly endorse it, because she's famous, obviously. She's almost like national treasure status in the UK as an actress. And so she was given it not with an eye on the audiobook, just to sort of read the book. And then when she liked it and really gushed about it, I said to the publisher, "Oh, let's just ask her, because she's got a great voice. Let's just ask her."
"It was almost like being a debut author again."
I really didn't think she was going to say yes, and the fact that she said yes was fantastic. And she's also got that range. Because Grace goes on quite a journey from being this uptight British retired septuagenarian teacher to becoming quite wide-eyed about the universe, having her mind sort of brought out, fully Ibiza at certain stages. So that transformation, I think, was quite a hard ask for a voice actor, but she's such a pro that she does it so well.
KO: That's a wonderful origin story. I love that. My last question for you is that sometimes when I chat with authors, I will ask what they hope listeners will take away from the story. But you rather admirably said that you wrote this book for you, that you were less concerned than you had been in the past about the opinions of others. So, instead, I want to ask, what did you take away from the experience of writing this book?
MH: The first thing that comes to mind is, I'll say, it made me feel calmer. I don't know why, but I think it made me feel like come to terms with a lot of things. Because although we've been talking quite intensely and deeply about it, it's also, at its root, it's quite an adventure story. It's got moments of lightness in it. And it was quite enjoyable for me as a writer to write it. I relaxed into it. I didn't feel like I had much to prove with it. And so it was almost like being a debut author again, which I haven't been for over two decades. But it felt like I can choose to be plugged in to what other people expect or want, or I can just go with what I want to write. And it was a very enjoyable, pleasurable, and, ultimately, calming and satisfying experience.
Also, I wrote a lot of it in winter, so writing about the sunshine, writing about palm trees, writing about lizards, and writing about the Mediterranean Sea, it was a balm. It was a lovely thing. And I just hope readers experience some of what I felt writing it.
KO: Thank you so much. That was a wonderful answer and this has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time today.
MH: Well, your questions have been fantastic, Katie, so thank you very much as well.
KO: And listeners, you can get The Life Impossible by Matt Haig right now on Audible.
