Introduction
When you think about the various possibilities of your life and different paths you could take, you can’t help but wonder, “what if?” What if you decided to leave that career and travel the world instead? What if you decided to break an unhealthy relationship with your best friend? What if you decided to go on that date with that person who caught your eye? What if you decided to end it all?
Nora Seed is a young woman who is struggling – mentally and emotionally. She has come to the unfortunate conclusion that there is only one way out of her strife – to commit suicide. There are just too many negatives she must deal with, and she is unable to see any possible solution.
The opening quote by Sylvia Plath (a woman who also took her own life) provides an idea into how Nora’s mind transforms throughout, but also to the theme of the novel:
“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.”
We meet Nora Seed 27 hours before she decided to die. Her cat has died (to which she is envious), she has been fired from a job she’s held for almost 12 years, and she learns that her brother came to town recently without visiting her. She described herself as a “a black hole. A dying star collapsing in on itself” (13).
The depression takes her down a literal black hole and she lost all hope – she felt there was no purpose left and no reason to keep on living. Her existence is worth nothing, her decisions have all failed, and now it is her time to die. “I had all the chances to make something of my life, and I blew every one of them. Through my own carelessness and misfortune, the world has retreated from me, and so now it makes perfect sense that I should retreat from the world. If I felt it was possible to stay, I would. But I don’t. And so I can’t. I make life worse for people. I have nothing to give” (23).
So many of us have felt this feeling of utter hopelessness; that feeling that you have tried and failed, to no avail. This is one of the reasons that Nora’s story is so compelling, yet understandable and relatable. You can empathize with her agony and cheer her on from the sidelines, to make the right choice in the end.
When Nora makes the decision to end her life, the reader is taken on a spiritual journey with Nora, through all the potential lives she could have lived; all of which will inspire her to understand the true meaning of her life.
My Review
I was thoroughly impressed with the idea behind this book – to imagine what life could be like if you had made different decisions is exciting – the possibilities are literally endless. I also appreciated the emphasis on mental health and how life is about living with the choices we have made and not worrying about regrets. These discussions need to be had to understand that mental health is just as important as physical health.
I can’t help but wonder why a male author chose to write from the perspective of a female; how could he capture the way that a woman might handle the situation or how she might feel? Why didn’t he choose a male character instead?
I didn’t absolutely LOVE it as much as I thought I would, but it was definitely worth my time, so it will be worth yours. I highly recommend reading this novel if you are struggling with depression, mental health, or thoughts of being unworthy, as I believe it will offer a ray of hope. Especially if you believe in the beauty of second chances.
Rating: 4/5
Drink Pairing: On the night she decides to die, she drinks a full glass of wine, drinking in the sweet taste to calm her nerves and her mind. In one of her lives she also owns a vineyard – how fucking cool is that?!
To honor Nora and her love of wines, here are some amazing suggestions for red wine that I gathered from my friends! If they love it, I am sure you will, too!
Michael David Red Blend Freakshow
If you’d like to give it a try (and support local bookstores), find the book here: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
If you’d like to check out the book on Amazon, find the book here: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Spoiler Alert: Summary and Guiding Questions
After an assumed death, she finds herself in an endless library with rows and rows of books. Mrs. Elm, her beloved school librarian, works there.
“‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’” (29)
She only thinks of all the things she hasn’t done right in her life, including dying. But now, she has a chance to decide how she wants to live (before death comes for her for good).
The Midnight Library is an “in-between. It is not life. It is not death. It is not the real world in a conventional sense. But nor is it a dream.” (32)
The first book she opens is the Book of Regrets and it is filled with ALL of the regrets she has felt since she was born; she relives the feeling of each as she is reading them and it becomes too much to bear. “Suddenly she was back feeling all this contrition, all that pain of letting people down and letting herself down…the power of all the regrets simultaneously emanating from the book was becoming agony.” (37)
She was meant to read this book first so that she could decide which regret she would like to undo. When she decides what life she wants to live, she will “stay as if you have always been there. Because in one universe you have always been there.” (39)
If she loses the will to live, however, the Midnight Library will cease to exist, and she will be dead forever. She says she doesn’t care and that she wants to be dead!
Q: How could she feel this way after being presented with multiple opportunities to save herself?
When and if she does decide to try on a new life outcome, she can leave the scene “as soon as disappointment is felt in full…if it never arrives, you’ll stay put, and you’ll be happy there.” (39)
She decides that she wants to choose the life where she is with Dan, the man she chose not to marry. She wants to live out his dream of owning a quaint little pub in the country.
When she sees Dan again, she remarks the attributes she likes about Dan and what she doesn’t. “A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like…but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.” (48)
Q: How would it feel to not have the memories of your “new” life, but of your old life?
In this new life with Dan, she’s quickly realizing the reasons she didn’t want to be with him originally; she acknowledges that “this was the life she had been in mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.” (56)
Afterward, back in the library, she says, “I still want to die. I have wanted to die for quite awhile. I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as a bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die….my life is a disaster…I am not cut out for living. And there is no point going through all this. Because I am clearly destined to be unhappy in other lives too.” (62)
The next life she chooses is one where her cat, Voltaire, is kept indoors – that way, he isn’t killed by a driver on the road.
Q: Do you get the feeling that the outcome will always be bad in each of her lives? That no matter the number of regrets she tries to undo, it will always end badly?
However, the cat still ends up dead; apparently, he has a medical condition that he can’t survive from, no matter what life she goes to. This means that her regret of not being a good cat owner wasn’t based on facts. “Sometimes regrets are just…a load of bullshit.” (67)
This time, she decides to choose the life where she goes to Australia with her best friend Izzy. Oddly, though, she asks Mrs. Elm if she is dead in this life she chose. This confuses Mrs. Elm, because she thought Nora wanted to die. She assures her that, “You won’t have died before you enter this life because this Midnight Library…is a library of possibility.” (69)
In this version of her life, she lives in a beautiful area, but a crappy apartment she shares with a flat mate who’s a bit…different. She also learns her best friend Izzy has been killed in a car crash, so this dream life doesn’t last long.
Mrs. Elm tells her, “it just shows…that you can choose choices but not outcomes.”
This time, she starts thinking about how she had given up swimming and greatly disappointed her father. She decides the best option now is to go to “the life where I did with my father wanted. Where I trained as hard as I possibly could. Where I never moaned about a five a.m. start or nine p.m. finish. Where I swam every day and never thought about quitting. Where I didn’t get sidelined by music or writing unfinished novels. Where I sacrificed everything else on the altar of freestyle. Where I didn’t give up. Where I did everything right in order to reach the Olympics.” (87)
Mrs. Elm doesn’t seem to like this option, “the straightforward is never quite what it seems.” (87)
In this fascinating new life, she is incredibly successful with swimming as her career. She made it to the Olympics twice and now has written a book, covered sporting events, and even had a TED talk.
She’s confident and encouraging in the speech, “If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming.” (93-94)
Surprisingly, she also discovers that her dad is not dead AND she gets to talk to him on the phone! She continues to read about herself on Wikipedia to learn more about who she is in this life.
During a swim, she has a revelation about her life and her father. “Swimming had been her only ticket to approval. Here, in this life she was in now, she had pursued a career to keep him happy, while sacrificing her own relationships, her own love of music, her own dreams beyond anything that didn’t involve a medal, her own life.” (98)
Q: But, in her own version of her life, she didn’t amount to anything of importance. So, isn’t this version better?
She is surprised to learn that she has a fantastic relationship with her brother, who is also her manager. She also had “a life without music. A life without reading the books she had loved. But also: a life where she got on with her brother. A life where she hadn’t had to let him down.” (107)
She’s pretty important in this life, though, as she is speaking at a conference with more than a thousand people. She starts speaking in philosophical terms, quoting Mrs. Elm about how “doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently” and “the only way to learn is to live.” (112)
When speaking of success, she says, “Too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure.” (112)
Q: What do you think is a better measure of success?
But then, she starts to derail the positivity train, “Life is frightening…it doesn’t matter which branch of a life we get to live, we are always the same rotten tree.” (113)
When she arrives back at the Library, something is going wrong; it seems that she is dying in her root life, so she is reaching the end of possibilities.
But then, Nora thought of “how good it had felt, swimming in the pool. How vital and alive. And then something happened inside her. A strange feeling. A pull in her stomach. A physical shift…the idea of death suddenly troubled her.” (115)
Now it seems that the system is back up and running, since she suddenly has a bigger will to live.
Mrs. Elm asked her what was good about her last life to help her get back on track. “I liked swimming. But I don’t think I was happy in that life. I don’t know if I am truly happy in any life…I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good.” (116)
Q: What do you think it will take to make her happy?
Her next stop on the life train is to Svalbard where she will be a glaciologist, just like her librarian suggested so many years ago.
The first thing she focuses on is the beauty of the landscape and how incredible it feels to be there. But then, as per her previous experiences in each life, she thinks of her unhappiness and how she might be happier doing something else. Even though this is what she asked for she thinks, “there were surely lives where she was sitting beside a swimming pool in the sunshine right now. Lives where she was playing music, or lying in a warm lavender–scented bath, or having incredible third–date sex, or reading on a beach in Mexico, [etc.]” (125)
“She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature…solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.” (126)
She goes on an excursion where her job is to watch out for polar bears and to alert the others if she sees one. When she does, she goes into straight panic mode, “LIBRARY! MRS. ELM! PLEASE SEND ME BACK! THIS IS THE WRONG LIFE!…I DON’T WANT ADVENTURE! WHERE’S THE LIBRARY?!” (131-132)
It was in this moment that she had the abrupt realization that, “in the face of death, life seemed more attractive.” (132) She discovered she wanted to live more than she wanted to die, and that was the most shocking of all.
Q: Do you think in these moments she’s finally going to learn the value of living? Will there be a chance to get her original life back?
“The problem with her root life had partly been its blandness. She had come to imagine mediocrity and disappointment were her destiny.” (135)
Q: She mentions that there was a long line of disappointment and regret in her DNA, so it was meant to be that she would fail. Do you believe this to be true? Do you believe failure and success are dependent upon your family’s history with either?
“Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt… acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered…maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.” (137-138)
Thankfully, in this life, she feels that she has purpose and that she is making a difference in the world. They are working to determine the speed at which the glaciers are melting to see how climate change is affecting the planet. THIS was true purpose and she felt more at peace that she was doing good work.
Hugo, a man she meets, notices she is not the same person he spoke with on a previous day. Then, he shocks and intrigues her, “I am like you, Nora. I visit lives that aren’t mine. I have been in this one for five days. But I have been in many others. I was given an opportunity…for this to happen. I have been sliding between lives for a long while.” (142)
For Hugo, his “library” is a video store. He also has someone helping him choose which videos he will live in as well.
Surprisingly, he has met other people going through the same “in-between” lives as he been doing this for quite some time. “We have a root life in which we are lying somewhere, unconscious, suspended between life and death, and then we arrive in a place. And it is always something different. A library, a video store, an art gallery, a casino, a restaurant…” (145)
“The other people I have met…all have had a deep desire to have done things differently. They had regrets. Some contemplated that they may be better off dead but also had a desire to live as another version of themselves.” (148)
He also tells her that he has lived nearly 300 lives. “I have been so many things. On every continent on Earth. And yet I have never found the life for me. I am resigned to being this way forever. There will never be a life that I truly want to live forever. I get too curious. I get too much of a yearning to live another way…I am happily in limbo.” (150)
“The thing you have to remember is that this is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. Dream big…You can be anything you want to be.” (151)
Q: How exciting would this opportunity be?!
Of course, after all the excitement of meeting another person in limbo like herself, they can’t help but feel something for each other. They kiss and it quickly leads to sex. It was however, a disappointment, and she quotes Camus, “I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.” (153)
Q: How would it feel to live in this limbo state? Would you prefer it or would you rather just one life?
The librarian is getting concerned, though, about her losing her root life and the library being destroyed. “I would err on the side of caution. I would try to think very keenly about where you want to be. You have clearly made some progress, I can tell. You seem to realize that life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist inside. But you don’t want that gate to close before you get a chance to go through it.” (156)
Knowing that music always brought her happiness, her next choice would be to explore her dream of becoming a musician.
While on stage, she has a moment of clarity, “she was capable of a lot more than she had known.” (160) “As she sang, she felt alive. Even more Alice than she had felt swimming her Olympic-champion body.” (162)
And wow, does she have FANS. Millions of followers on social media, a concert tour around the world, being adored by fans – this was the life she had dreamt of. “This, clearly, was the life she was destined for. She doubted she would ever go back to the library.” (173)
Fame comes with a price, like a “permanent bittersweet cocktail of worship and assault…being slapped and kissed at the same time.” (178) Apparently there is a long list of personal tragedies she has experienced as a high-profile music artist – both personally and professionally.
In response to the interviewer asking if she dreams of another taking another path in life she says, “There are no easy paths… Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.”
“It’s so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living…sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness…There is no life or you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever.” (179)
Q: How do you interpret her view of life regarding happiness and sadness?
But then, tragedy strikes. She learns that her brother suffered an overdose two years ago…and just like that, she is taken away from this life.
Back at the library, she wants to give up so badly, because she knows that life is pain and it’s impossible to live without hurting people or being hurt. Mrs. Elm reminds her of the polar bear incident and how much she wanted to live.
(I’m starting to get the feeling that the life she will ultimately need to choose is the one where she committed suicide. That she should stick with her root, real life)
She is taken to a memory where she was struggling to stay afloat in a river and she compares it to her life, “struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.” (190)
Q: This is so true of our lives — do you feel life is like this? Constantly making choices but worried it won’t be right?
Mrs. Elm helps her see that the lives she has been choosing are the dreams of other people and not her own. She needs to choose a life that might be ordinary – one that she hasn’t dreamt about but may still be a good life to live.
She tries on other lives — one in which she works at an animal rescue center and one where she has a vineyard with her husband. But yet, “she felt inside her a craving for other things, other lives, other possibilities.” (210)
Q: Will she ever be pleased with the life she chooses?
“You only stayed in a life for ever if you couldn’t imagine a better one, and yet, paradoxically, the more lives you tried the easier it became to think of something better, as the imagination broadened a bit more with every new life she sampled.” (211)
Life continues with her trying on a variety of different lives, quite fabulously. Some are deliciously engaging and fun, while others are lackluster or normal.
“At first it seemed that the more lives the she experienced, the fewer problems there seemed to be with the transfer…it was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn’t only be bad experiences. She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.” (215)
Q: Do you think it would get tiring to continue living this way – trying out different lives over and over?
Mrs. Elm explains to her that she needs to look at the process differently if she is meant to stop flicking between lives. “You are forgetting who you are. In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life. You are forgetting what worked for you and what didn’t. You are forgetting your regrets.” (219)
Q: Mrs. Elm says that she is within Nora – do you think this means that all the advice and answers she is receiving are coming from herself?
In this next life, she chooses to experience kindness – a life with Ash, a kind surgeon she met a couple times and who helped bury her cat when he found her on the road.
She wakes up next to Ash, whom she she is married to; there’s also a young child who comes to her immediately after having a nightmare. She feels disturbed-not because of the child but because it seems a betrayal. “Nora was her mother, but also, in another, more important way: she was not her mother.” (222)
Seeing this little girl, who was beautiful and looked just like her, made her melt on the inside. “She felt a swell of irrational love, a surge of it.” (224)
After spending some time with her daughter, Molly, and her husband Ash, she relishes in the joy of her new environment. “Maybe this was it. Maybe this was, finally, the life she was going to stay put in. The life she would choose.” (237) She has finally settled into a place where she has a good life and has a lot to be grateful for.
Nora discusses the idea of parallel universes with Ash and he believes they are possible, so she divulges that she has visited other lives, but has chosen this one. He responds, “That’s so cool, Nor. The thing I like about you is that you always make me feel normal.” (242)
“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality…and Ash only saw the Nora he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora she was becoming.” (242)
The weeks went by and remarkably, she started to remember aspects of her life that she had not actually lived in; she was finally settling into this new existence. She was in love with her family and they surrounded her with love.
“And yet she sensed deep down that it would all come to an end, soon. She sensed that, for all the perfection here, there was some thing wrong amid the rightness.…everything was right, and yet she hadn’t earned this…she began to feel a fraud.” (248)
Q: There is this idea that some people cannot accept happiness—that they feel guilty when they experience it. Do you believe this is what is happening to her?
She decides to visit her old hometown of Bedford to see her Librarian friend, Mrs. Elm, but she has died three weeks prior. She also finds an old piano student she had helped previously – one who she helped to keep out of trouble since he was getting more into music instead. However, in this life, he was into crime instead, and she blames herself for not being there to help prevent it.
These experiences – her jumping from life to life and truly seeing the beauty of life that she was missing before – has caused her to start appreciating it all a lot more. There’s a Thoreau quote that keeps replaying in her head, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” (259)
“This is the best life. I am staying here. This is the life for me…But she knew she didn’t have long.” (259)
Q: Why do you think she knows it won’t last long? Does she believe it’s too good to be true?
She races back home to say goodbye to Ash and Molly, knowing that her time was running out. She tells Molly how much she loves her and that everything will be okay. She keeps reminding herself too that, “Whatever happens, they will be looked after. They will be loved. And they have each other and they will be happy.” (261)
Q: Why doesn’t she get to stay in that life? Why can’t she live in that one?
Back in the Midnight Library, she is incredibly upset to have left the life she had wanted so badly. According to Mrs. Elm, the problem is that if her old life ends, then she may die too.
And it looks like it might be happening – the library is literally crumbling around her; sparks fly from the lights and the books rapidly catch fire! “It’s a chain reaction now. Those sparks aren’t random. The books are going to be destroyed. And then, just as inevitably, the whole place is going to collapse.” (264)
Mrs. Elm asks her if she really wanted that life. “Yes. I mean…I wanted to. I mean, I loved Molly. I might have loved Ash. But I suppose, maybe…it wasn’t my life. I hadn’t made it by myself. I had walked into this other version of me.”
Q: Do you predict she has to pick the life that she was in originally since SHE created that life?
There is one book that won’t be on fire, and she must find it.
“You came back here this time not because you wanted to die, but because you want to live. This library isn’t falling down because it wants to kill you. It’s falling down because it is giving you a chance to return.” (266)
Q: Can she be saved from this? Is it too late?
Mrs. Elm tells her which book to grab and she’s on a race to grab it. “She had to want the life she always thought she didn’t. Because just as this library was a part of her, so too were all the other lives. She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities…but she was still in some way all those people…it was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work.” (269)
All that she needed at the end of the day, was potential – to believe in herself and what she could accomplish. She finds the book with blank pages, her future life unwritten. She wrote “the one truth she had…a truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing…I AM ALIVE.” (271)
And with that, she awakens in her root life, alive.
She writes a soliloquy titled “A Thing I Have Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)” in honor of her discovering the true beauty of life and its existence. It’s a heartfelt way to positively look at life and be grateful to be alive; to not look at the regrets we have, but rather understand that we all have the potential to be who we want to be. “We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum…we don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.” (277-278)
“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.” (283)
“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.” (284)
Q: What part of your life would you redo if you could?
Q: How difficult would it be to merge into a new life and catch up to who you are?
Final Thoughts
An endless library filled with books that are based on YOUR life and you have the ability to experience each and every story?! How freaking exciting would that be? As a true bibliophile who is enchanted by the idea of living multiple lives for fun, I was delighted to see how her story would unfold.
I appreciated the author’s attempt at giving the perspective of someone struggling with mental health, especially since this topic needs to be talked about as often as physical health. After she “died” and tried out a few lives, I was surprised that she still wanted to give up on life, but she was just too distracted by her pain and couldn’t see the beauty of life. I appreciated her ability to learn the art of gratitude and its impact on self-worth and confidence building.
Of course, Nora wants to undo all of the wrongs in her life – which I believe most of us would want to do. All the should have/would have/could haves that plague our thoughts that we wish we could redo – to see how each decision would play out would really help to offer new perspectives. The pain of having to relive those experiences would be difficult, but if you’re like me and constantly question whether you’re making the right decision (the beauty of being a Libra), it would be helpful to see every side.
When Nora decided that life was worth living, that is when I took a big breath of fresh air – she had finally seen the proverbial light. It was in this moment that she had the abrupt realization that, “in the face of death, life seemed more attractive.” (132) She discovered she wanted to live more than she wanted to die, and that was the most shocking of all.
Therefore, the novel is a great example of the thought processes that should go through a person’s mind when they are considering suicide – there IS beauty and meaning to life…we just need to be able to see it.
When she found the video of herself speaking on how to be original and to love yourself, she became so inspired, as did I:
“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming” (93-94).
Instead of constantly worrying if we are making the right choices or if we are good enough, we need to focus on being PRESENT and happy with who we are. We need to embrace every molecule and celebrate the person we have become.
Just like she tells the interviewer on the radio, “we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.” There is no way that you can be truly happy with every aspect of your life – you must have unhappiness and sadness to truly understand the beauty of happiness.
When she went to live the life with Ash I wondered if she would stay in this life – it seemed absolutely perfect, and she seemed content. When she was sent back to the library, I was so disappointed, but then I realized that the theme of the novel was to get Nora to realize the value of her root life. It was to encourage her to see the beauty within the life that she was already living – and that these different lives could be added to enrich her life.
As she progressed through each life, I did get the feeling that she would ultimately choose her root life, the one in which she committed suicide, and I wondered if she had survived. Was she on the brink of death while she was galivanting through each of these lives? Would everything she had learned be for nothing?
In the end, I wasn’t afraid that she would die. I read quickly during the final “earthquake” scene, hoping she wouldn’t. It was such a beautiful ending…the way she finally decided that life was meant to be lived. All that she needed at the end of the day, was potential – to believe in herself and what she could accomplish.
Her soliloquy titled “A Thing I Have Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)” should be something we read every day; to motivate us to believe that we are ENOUGH and that we our existence is valuable. It’s a heartfelt way to positively look at life and be grateful to be alive; to not look at the regrets we have, but rather understand that we all have the potential to be who we want to be. “We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum…we don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.” (277-278)
“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.” (284)
Life is a mystery, but living is always the answer.
If you’d like to give it a try (and support local bookstores), find the book here: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
If you’d like to check out the book on Amazon, find the book here: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig