The Comfort Book

The Comfort Book

*Matt Haig*

The night before Matt Haig walked to the cliff edge in Ibiza, he could not sleep. Not regular insomnia -- not the kind where you lie there running your to-do list through your head. This was something else entirely. His heart hammered so hard he was convinced it would simply stop. He lay on the bed in a rented villa on the edge of the Mediterranean, a 24-year-old who had come to Spain for a summer and instead found himself unable to move, unable to eat, unable to believe he would ever feel different. The panic did not come in waves. It was constant, a white-wall noise that occupied every cell he had.

On the third day, he got up and walked outside. The villa sat near a cliff. The sea below was beautiful in the way the sea is always beautiful -- indifferent, endless, shining. He stood at the edge and looked down and felt nothing except a strange clarity: he did not want to exist anymore. Then, just as clearly, something else. He wanted to live. Not to be saved, exactly -- he would not have called it that. But some thread in him refused to be cut. He walked back to the villa. He eventually found his way home to his parents' house in Newark, England, where he spent months unable to leave the house, unable to read, barely able to speak.

That was 1999. Over the following two decades, Matt Haig wrote his way out -- novels, memoirs, children's books, essays. He built a Twitter following of hundreds of thousands of people who recognized themselves in his words about panic attacks and dark thoughts and trying to get through the day. He wrote "Reasons to Stay Alive" in 2015, which sat in the British bestseller charts for 46 weeks and changed something in the culture around talking about mental health. He wrote "Notes on a Nervous Planet" in 2018. He wrote "The Midnight Library" in 2020, a novel about a woman standing at the border between life and death and choosing, finally, to stay.