Matt Haig on the importance of honesty and the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh

Friday 08 March 2019

With an expected sell out show coming up at the Guernsey Literary Festival this year, Matt Haig has sat down with Express, to talk about his long running best seller, Reasons to Stay Alive, which nearly didn't get made.

As an author of bestselling books about such disparate subjects as depression, Father Christmas and a very old man, Haig's writing has a wide-reaching appeal and an instant charm. His latest release; Notes on a Nervous Planet, assesses further the faults of a modern world not best aligned to our mental wellbeing.

Pick any vignette from one of his books and they will all appear perfectly formed, a balm for the soul. The words artfully thrown together in his 2016 number bestseller Reasons to Stay Alive especially, sound as contemporary and honest as a spontaneous over-sharing social media post -  in fact the book started out as a blog - but it's timeless and accessible, taking a considerable amount of time to get to print.

Pictured: An extract from Reasons to Stay Alive (over stock image). 

"It took me about ten years to actually start writing that book, first I just wanted to write it down and it took ages because I just wasn't ready. I was trying to send a message out to my 24-year-old self who was suicidal, teetering on a literal and metaphorical cliff edge, wanting to die and just trying to find the words," he said. 

The blog, Reasons to Stay Alive, was picked up by a publisher friend of his and eventually made it to print, in the way Matt intended it to be, in turn selling millions worldwide, its honest style clearly hitting the right notes. A better way to explain it would be to say that Matt's writing hits a nerve; when something written first hand has the ability to resonate so deeply with its audience it connects immediately. 

"My own publisher wasn't impressed with the idea I'd just written a science fiction novel they wanted me to do another novel so the publishers were like turn it into a novel write it as fiction. I just thought well there'd been quite a few books that year that had been about mental illness in novels but not that much in that space of lived personal experience and I thought if I was ill I'd want to know this persons gone through it I wouldn't want to read about a fictional character.

"I deliberately had all kinds of battles with my editors, they said we'll need to have more footnotes and give it more authority with this and say where your information's come from and I said no, lets just keep it as simple and straightforward as possible. It's very much a book not written by a doctor, it's written without all the answers," he said. 

Appearing twice this year at the Guernsey Literary Festival and in venues all around the UK, Matt is the ideal literary festival speaker, he's written varied and beautiful texts but he also speaks in a truly impassioned way about reading and writing and how in many ways it saved his life.

"When I was first ill with depression and anxiety in my 20's books were the way I recovered my own mental health to a large extent because I couldn't watch TV,  even music could be quite sort of triggering for me. Books were always my safe space. I think when I'm writing the books I'm very aware that when I was really stressed out and frazzled I found it very hard to concentrate I suffer from anxiety and when that's flared up I can't read at all really,"

Often Matt talks about his period of ill mental health in the past tense but also speaks frequently about how it has made him who he is, that it's "the price of feeling life" a price always worth paying. 

Pictured: An extract from Reasons to Stay Alive (over stock image). 

"I'm aware of that and with my books I include lots of lists lots of white space lots of short paragraphs which are all included for that reason very absorbable people don't even have to read it front to back they can sort of dip in anywhere," 

"My thing is I always go on about books but my thing is there's this idea that for a book to be intelligent it has to be difficult and I think that's a false thing there are books that are really really simple and easy to read but have a lot of work go into them.

"For instance children's books, when I was ill I reread Winnie the Pooh those sorts of things you can get so much out of yet they're incredibly easy to read . Winnie the Pooh is a great mental health book each character seems to represent a different condition, Eyeore was depression and so on. I think you can find wisdom in all kinds of places." 

As well as appearances focusing on his work about mental health, during his appearance at the literary festival Matt will be talking about his book The Truth Pixie, children's books were a way for him to cheer himself up, he said. 

Pictured: One of Matt's latest releases for children. 

"Kid's books are often harder in lots of ways because children are the least pretentious readers, they'll only read it if it keeps your attention and they will, it needs to totally make sense within the world that you're writing in. You've got to make everything clear, fill in all the gaps and at the same time not be boring for a second. There are common threads in my work but I do flip between genres, I think when you treat a book as if it's almost a debut novel then you become more creative and it's quite freeing," 

With a return to the topic of mental health, Matt said that he was concerned about writing Notes on a Nervous Planet and how it would be received.

"Reasons to Stay Alive meant quite a bit to people and because it was back in the mental health world and I thought people would think, "oh you're just cashing in doing a sequel," but I feel like I waited long enough for me to have something new to say and I was beginning to get frustrated that in Reasons to Stay Alive I hadn't put much about how the world affects our mind the modern world in particular how the internet and the overload of work and the stresses of modern life affect us."

Through the writing process for Notes on a Nervous Planet Matt discovered the fast pace of the world was affecting every aspect of our lives.

Pictured: Notes on a Nervous Planet, a "companion" piece to the author's debut. 

"I know it sounds obvious but even sleep, I didn't realise how badly I was sleeping, we don't talk about sleep very much because no-one makes any money out of sleep, we talk a lot about exercise we talk a lot about diet but I think even more important is sleep and I think we've got so much going on in life that it goes against sleep. For eg the head of Netflix said last year that Netflix's main competitor is sleep, because they can get people to stay up later and later into the night. It's true we do sleep on average an hour less than we did 50 years ago and also the quality of our sleep is a lot worse.

"People are very willing to take suggestions when they come from a real place of experience and understanding, it becomes frustrating when and it feels belittling when it's someone who doesn't know what you're going through and because it's invisible it's just as simple as slapping a smile on your face and changing your attitude all of that getting outside in the air and it's not that simple." 

It's so easy for self-help books to actually be incredibly destructive or overtly prescriptive, but part of what makes Matt's writing a joy to read is that he understands that advice can be trite and that if you're in the same boat as someone, putting the work in to bare your soul can make that person feel less alone, a huge step towards recovery. We're lucky to be able to welcome such a literary polymath to our island thanks to this year's festival organisers. 

Tickets are available from guernseyliteraryfestival.com. 

You can call Samaritans on freephone 116123 or email jo@samaritans.org (Guernsey 715515, call charges may apply).