Matt Haig: Author returns to former home of York for Grand Opera House discussion of new book The Mightnight Train
Matt Haig will talk about his new book, The Midnight Train, at an event in Yorkshire. It is the region where, he tells John Blow, he got well and started his career.
The idea of life flashing before our eyes as we die has always fascinated Matt Haig.
“I think it’s a good thing to remind ourselves of while we’re alive,” says the bestselling author. “What are we going to think when we’re older, looking back?”
That interest deepened when he saw a news story about the science of it, suggesting that our brains keep going for minutes after our heart stops beating.
"The part of our brain that lights up all the past, to do with memories and dreams,” says Haig. “So that’s led to more speculation that our life really does flash before our eyes.”
A novelist is not going to simply sit on that information. And so Haig’s upcoming book, The Midnight Train, is about a man who has succeeded materially but at the end of his life feels a lot of regret. In the afterlife, he boards a train – modelled after a childhood toy – and goes on a journey to key moments in the past.
Its main characters are from Sheffield, the city where Haig’s mother went to teacher training college in the 1960s and met his dad, who was there studying architecture.
“When we think of the swinging sixties it always tends to just be London when you see it in novels. My mum and dad had always talked about Sheffield as this place of the art college, the culture, a lot of multicultural things going on. My mum’s best friend is from the Caribbean and she was there in Sheffield in the 1960s,” says Haig. Malcolm X came to talk there, so it had this radical stuff going on. I thought it would be good to document that a bit as well because it’s not necessarily the cliché people have of Sheffield, certainly historic Sheffield.”
It was also the place of Haig’s birth before he was raised in Nottinghamshire. He went on to study English and History at the University of Hull before moving to Leeds, then York, and now lives with his wife Andrea Semple and their teenage children Lucas and Pearl – alongside golden retriever Bruce and Maltese terrier Betsy – in Brighton, Sussex.
It was in West Yorkshire where life started to improve for the author after struggling with mental illness. His experience of depression and anxiety is well-documented but, in short, he explains, he had a breakdown aged 24 when living in Ibiza.
He moved back with his parents for a while and was still poorly when he and Andrea moved into a basement flat in Hyde Park, Leeds – he was agoraphobic and suffering panic attacks – and then to a first floor flat on Park Row, opposite Greek Street.
But, says Haig, now 50: “I got better in Leeds.” The couple established a routine of walking in relatively peaceful environs each night, where they would talk things over. He says: “I have really fond memories of Leeds because I literally was feeling better every day as time went on, and it’s where my life and career started.”
He started writing in earnest. They lived in the city from 2000 to 2007 and he wrote about six books in that time, with his debut The Last Family in England coming out in 2004.
It is a famously competitive industry, but Haig says: “I think I only became a writer because I ran out of other options. Obviously when I was ill, and we’re talking over 20 years ago when we didn’t have the working from home options that we have now, the only thing I could do was work from home.
"And within that, I couldn’t design websites or anything, so writing became my most likely option. It was almost like a process of elimination that I started on it.”
In 2015 he released Reasons to Stay Alive, an account of his breakdown and recovery, and his first official bestseller. It was his first work of non-fiction but was already some 10 books into his career as an author.
“The thing that made it strange was that my breakthrough happened talking about mental health, so I suddenly became a spokesperson for mental health, unwittingly, so every event from that point on would just be questions about mental health. I’m not a professional therapist, I’m not a doctor. That transition was a little bit hard but, eventually, I was very lucky because my publisher let me do different things.”
Later, The Midnight Library in 2020 was an instant number one in the Sunday Times and New York Times Bestsellers lists, remaining in the UK and US top ten for months and has sold 12 million copies.
Dolly Parton was a fan – Haig was thrilled to discover that she said in an interview that it was on her nightstand, next to the Bible.
Meanwhile, film adaptations of his work include The Radleys starring Damien Lewis, released in 2022, and A Boy Called Christmas which was put out on Netflix in 2021 with a cast that included Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins and Toby Jones. Alongside his novels and dozen children’s stories are his other meditations on mental health, including Notes on a Nervous Planet and The Comfort Book.
The Midnight Train is not really a sequel to The Midnight Library but resides in the same literary world.
On May 26, at an event organised with Topping & Company Booksellers, Haig will discuss his new novel at the Grand Opera House in York, around the corner from where he used to live.
Family will be in the audience for a night that will feel like coming home – after all, Yorkshire is, says Haig, “the part of the world that I know best”.
The Midnight Train, published by Canongate, is out on May 21. For tickets to the talk at York’s Grand Opera House at 7pm on May 26, visit www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/york/matt-haig-midnight-train/