MY LIFE IN BOOKS: MATT HAIG
Matt Haig has written both fiction and non-fiction for adults and children. He is the bestselling author of The Midnight Library. His novel The Radleys has been adapted into a film starring Damian Lewis and Kelly Macdonald to be released later this autumn. His new novel The Life Impossible has just been published by Canongate.
The books by your bedside? Yoga by Emmanuel Carrere which I am loving. It’s quite bleak in places, and is not about yoga really at all. It is a memoir of depression and a very powerful one at that.
Your book of the year so far? I enjoyed Claire Lombardo’s
Same As It Ever Was greatly. It’s a finely crafted take on family and the secrets they keep. I was won over by the Talking Headsreferencing title and everything after that stayed as good.
Your favourite literary character?
Winnie-the-Pooh. I love all the characters in the world of the Thousand Acre Wood in fact. They are all perfect representations of emotions and mood states, a whole century before Inside Out.
The first book you remember?
Noddy Goes to Market by Enid Blyton. But actually the first things I can remember reading and loving were catalogues.
Specifically, catalogues for agricultural machinery. Up until the age of eight I lived in the countryside and my parents got a load of these through their letterbox because it was a big farming area. And I loved the act of turning pages and waiting to discover which piece of machinery was on the next page. I had a particular thing for combine harvesters, I remember. There was a big red one that mesmerised me.
The book that changed your life?
Books change your life slowly and in unseen ways but I will say that SE Hinton’s teen novel The Outsiders kept me reading at an age when I very nearly gave up.
The book you couldn’t finish? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson. I wanted to like this book. And I think as an entirely pretentious teenager I pretended to like this book. But I never actually finished reading it.
Your comfort read?
AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner.
The book you give as a present?
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
The writer who shaped you? So many. From Stephen King to AA Milne via Emily Brontë. But there is only one writer who gave me direct writing advice to me personally. Jeanette Winterson helped me out early in my career and told me to change the phrase ‘epiphanic moment’ to ‘moment of epiphany’ and ever since then I have tried to be unpretentious.
The book you would like to be remembered for?
I know it is a bit icky to say the book you have just written, but I am prouder of The Life Impossible than any other book I have written. By that I don’t mean everyone is going to love it. No. Not at all. It definitely won’t be for everyone. It has some very weird elements, and a good dose of science-fiction running through it. It’s not an idea you can easily sell in a sentence like, say, The Midnight Library. But what I mean is that I have personally never been happier with a book at this point. I wrote it for the right reasons, without thinking at all if it is the ‘right’ book in terms of my career or what had gone before. It was precisely the book I wanted to read but that didn’t exist. And that is always the best thing to aim for. I think it is just about the best I can offer, and so yes, it would be lovely to be remembered for this one.