The Midnight Library

This is the first book I think I've ever read by Matt Haig, but this picture says that he's the international bestselling author of How to Stop Time, and I liked this book so much that I'm pretty interested in checking that one out too. Which does go ahead and reveal how I felt about this book- not only is it one of the best books I've read in a while, but honestly it gave me a lot of hope about life in general.

This was a library book for me, which I listened to in audiobook form via the Libby App, one of my prefered methods of consuming media. I heartily reccoment Libby, and honestly all aspects of using your local library and other community resources in the commons here in the United States, because they are constantly at-risk of losing funding, and that's a huge issue for me, as a person who wants a vibrant thriving community where citizens can share goods and services, and these resources are invaluable for that sense of community. It's also one of the few places left on the internet, where, like Neocities, there is no algorythem constantly advertising to you and cultivating your experience. You get to be a complete person on Libby, not a consumer. Because you're not pumping money into it, so what would be the point of that?

This is a book about a woman's journey through the multiverse to find the best possible version of herself, and I really think that you should read this book and go on this journey with her, so I'm going to try my best to be as spoiler-free as possible, but that doesn't come naturally to me, so enter at your own risk.

This book is about an Englishwoman named Nora, who works at a music shop, and gives piano lessons on the side to a boy. She was in a band at one point with her brother, but decided not to pursue getting signed by a label, because her then-fiance, Dan, was against the idea and she didn't want to put strain on the relationship right before the wedding. But, this caused a huge rift between her and her brother Joe, which led to her realizing that Dan was controlling anyway, and breaking it off 2 days before the wedding. At the time the book picks up, she is single, and doesn't seem to be happily single. She has a cat named Voltair, because she is interested in philospohy, and has a useless bachelor's degree in the subject.

As a scientist I tend to hate philosophy in general, and philosophers seem like they want to be scientists but won't put the work in, and just spout complete and total bullshit without testing it to see if any word of it is true, and that aggravates the shit out of me, and Voltair in particular just pissed a lot of people off and eventually his writings became the backbone of the Nazi philosophy with his uberminch bullshit, and we know he was completely wrong about everything, so this strikes me as a pretty fucked up name for a cat. I don't care for that. Eugenics is how you get inbred kids with arms growing out of their heads who were supposed to be the uberminch you genocided everybody else to shallow the gene pool for, and is, in general, not just unethical and evil, but in a practical sense, leading humanity to an inbred demise. So like... why would you name your cat after the inventor of this philosophy? But I mean, I'm fixing to adopt a cat, and I want it to be good at hunting, so I looked up the two greatest big game hunters in human history, and found that they were American Theodore Roosevelt, and in second place, Russian Catherine "The Great" Romanov, so if my cat is a lady I'll be naming it after someone also arguably responsible for genocide, so glass houses, I guess. But like at least I could explain the hunting thing, she named her cat after Voltair specifically because of his philosophy. A philosophy cats almost certainly do not share. Cats are famously indifferent to who they mate with. Cats are indifferent to most things. But she does love her cat, even if she's bad at naming him.

She lives in an apartment next to an elderly gentlman with a front flower garden who seems like a pretty cool dude, but he does have a lot of health problems and recently had to have hip surgery, so she's been taking care of his garden and picking up his medication from the pharmacy. Every day a surgeon jogs past as she's heading home from work, the same surgeon who worked at the hospital her mother and father died in. Her father died of a bad heart, and her mother had a long battle with cancer, the last time she actually had a civil conversation with her brother. Outside of these few people, she doesn't have much of a social life, and is suffering from situational depression, for which she takes psychoactive medication.

Because I'm a psychologist, I want to talk about situational depression, and her diagnosis and treatment plan in particular. Situational depression and clinical depression have the same symptoms, but are different diseases. Clinical depression is biological, and responds well to treatment. It's caused by a malfunction of the brain in the synaptic connection that cause the neurotransmitters dopamine, seritonin, or acetocoline to be in the wrong amount in the synapses, normally because the reuptake process is too fast, leaving too few of these neurotransmitters in the synapse. The way the medications work is by partially blocking this reuptake; so like, you might have heard of SSRIs, the most commonly prescribed depression medication. This stands for "Selective seritonin reuptake inhibitor". This prevents the seritonin that is supposed to stay in the synapse from being reabsorbed back in the the delivery neuron. This tends to work very well, and can be a lifesaver.

Situational depression is different. Situational depression is caused not because you were born crazy, but because something drove you crazy. In Nora's case, this seems to be chronic, because in her own words, she keeps "having new situations,". So her fight with her brother, the death of her parents, the dissolution of a relationship so strong she was about to enter into a marriage, all those things contributed to her low mood and lack of affect. There are certainly medications that can help with situational depression, but we know from the research that the best treatment plan for this is to meet with a therapist and a caseworker, to gain coping skills and resources to change the situation. This is the kind of thing you use problem-focused coping skills on. You learn things like radical acceptance to learn how to process and accept the things you cannot change- in Nora's case specifically, because she is a songwriter and does well expressing herself through music, I would suggest art therapy, that's an extremely healthy outlet and processing tool that will help her work through her low affect and raise her emotional intelligence back to the normal level she had before the depression, for example. I would give her resources that would help her go back to school, because she expresses interest in getting her master's degree, which would give her a sense of purpose and of moving forward in life. My point is that it is my opinion that medication alone is not going to be of much help to Nora, she needs therapy and case management on top of it, and that is true of most people with situational depression. But she's not getting that and I have no idea why. She doesn't even consider it. Nobody in the book says anything about her getting these resources. Just like I said in my review of LAIN, where I felt a patient was recieving inadequate care, a big part of me wonders if this is a cultural difference in the way that mental health is handled in different cultures. Here in the US, once somebody gets a diagnosis of situational depression, they are automatically referred to these services, but that might not be the case in England. I have no idea how they operate over there. But if it is true that this isn't what they would do, I would like to make a strong suggestion to any English readers that I might have that you bring it to the attention of your representatives- I assume you have those, like I know you have a monarchy, but I was under the impression that this was mostly ceremonial- that the research shows people with situational depression need these resources, and evidence based treatment demands that you provide them. I have heard some English therapists that I follow on Youtube say that it can sometimes be difficult to get a refferal, because of how the insurance works over there, but I don't know anything about that. I'm just saying that what happens to Nora could liklely have been avoided had her treatment been better, and the book gives absolutely no reason why it wasn't.

So what happens to Nora?

She's coming home from work and sees her elderly neighbor heading into his apartment. I love this old englishman. He just plesantly lets her know how much he apprecites her, and that the pharmacy is now going to deliver his medication so she doesn't have to go pick it up. Then, he heads into his house.

After this plesant, neighborly conversation, the jogger comes by, looking incredibly sad. Nora has, by this time, changed into her pajamas, and is distressed because she can't find her cat. But the jogger has it. Voltaire had, unfortunately, passed away on the road, and he found his corpse on his evening jog. This man, Ash, I think his name is, is nice enough to help Nora bury her cat in her garden, which I thought was really sweet because he does barely know her. He had bought a book once, some kind of sheet music, at the music store where she worked, and asked her on a casual coffee date, but she had turned him down because she was still in her relationship with Dan at the time, and he had worked in the hospital her parents went to, and that is the whole extent of their relationship. He didn't have to do that. He seemed like a pretty good dude.

The next day, Nora goes into work late, because she overslept in her grief, and her boss tells her that he simply can't afford to keep the store open anymore. They're just not making enough money to pay the rent. So she loses her job. She asks him what the hell she's supposed to do about money, and he asked her what she had always wanted to do when she was a kid. She tells him that when she was a kid, she was a competitive swimmer, but she doesn't want to do that anymore, and he basically tells her that he doesn't know, but he can't keep the store open.

So she wanders around in a 'my cat died' and 'I lost my job' and 'I am totally fucked' daze in the English rain, which I'm told they kinda keep over there, and just is depressed. She was already depressed and these new changes have caused it to worsen. She eventually wanders into some kind of buisness that sells newspapers and magazines, where she sees a friend that she used to be in the band with (The Labyrinths was the name of the band) and he lights the fuck into her and blames her for him not being a rockstar and having to do shitty pub gigs which pay poorly, and being in poverty, and basically is an asshole, blaming all his poor life choices on Nora, for seemingly no reason. She's in NO MOOD to put up with his bullshit, and they get into a fight, during which he tells her that her brother had come into town recently and didn't even talk to her or tell her that he was coming, because he also hates her about not signing the record deal, which upsets her so much that my redneck ass assumed she was gonna start beating his ass, but he leaves before she can do that and she's just standing there fuming, so the lady behind the counter starts trying to calm her down by talking about how they went to the same elementary school and she used to think she was such a cool athlete with her swimming, and how the clerk now has two children, which are cute and shit. This doesn't work and Nora is still upset. At least she doesn't have low affect anymore, but now she has an extremely negative affect. If she has PRN medication, now would be the time to take it, but she doesn't, instead she goes outside to wander around some more in a depressed fog, now fueled by a high energy emotion. This is a terrible position to be in. This is a combination of factors that can put people at-risk for behavioral outbursts, up to an including suicidality.

While wandering around, the mother of her client for piano lessons calls, asking where the hell she is, because they've been standing outside of her apartment for an hour trying to get in, and she's not answering her texts. Nora looks at her texts, and sure enough, there are a bunch of texts conveying that information to her. This lady is understandably pissed about this, and Nora offers no explination, because the thing she ws doing instead of teaching this lady's son was standing around in a magazine store not even with intent to buy anything, so she also loses the piano teaching gig.

That's the last straw.

The way that this all is written- this is the first chapter, btw, I'm giving you the set-up because I don't want to spoil anything- is extremely forboding, as well. It's written well, and the narrator is soooooo good at making it even more atmospheric and forboding. All these events are laid out in a timeline of, "x amount of time before Nora died, she did x." So you know that Nora is going to die. That's how the story is told.

So a few seconds before Nora dies, she goes home, after all this has happened and with no coping skills to process it, and takes her entire bottle of psychoactive medication. She passes out from the overdose.

And wakes up in the library. The titular Midnight Library.

It was midnight when she took the pills in her suicide attempt, and the library exists in a state of perpetual midnight. She learns from her middle school librarian, Mrs. Elm, who is in the library, that the Midnight Library is part of her, the part that links her to the multiverse, and that every decision she ever made in her life resulted in a new book on the shelves. And that every time she dies, she gets to go through the books, and if she finds one where she wants to stay, she gets to Quantum Leap into that life, and eventually she will forget all about the Midnight Library, or the life where she died, and will slowly regain the memories from that life, and it'll be like her death and the library were a dream she had one time.

The bulk of the book is Nora picking books off the shelves and living in those alternate lives. The decisions that cause new lives can be big things (signing that record deal) or small things (not letting Voltaire out of the apartment), and every book contains a completely new set of circumstances, a completely different life.

This is obviously based on the Quantum Immortality premise, a fun cooky idea that I never really thought much about, but this book got me to thinking on it. Because, like, fun fact, I've had a lot of near death experiences myself. And by the logic of the Quantum Immortality hypothesis, and therefore the logic of the book, every time I almost died, I died in another universe. And by the logic of this book, that me went into the Midnight Library and picked a new life to live in. That's an incredibly interesting premise. It's telling Robert Frost to go fuck himself with his "never knowing" what the other path holds.

I was born suffocating and writing in pain. I'm a caulbearer, which means that when the amniotic sac ruptured in my mother's womb, part of it hit me in the face and fused to my face. As a result, I was born suffocating and writhing in pain, because you are supposed to spit out and cough up the amniotic fluid as you travel down the birth canal, but I couldn't do that, because I had a piece of human flesh fused to my face like fucking Slenderman, so I didn't do that whole breathing thing, and I was born with my lungs and stomach full of fluid. The hospital staff immediately rushed me to surgery, cut the caul off, and pumped my lungs and stomach, so I was fine within a matter of minutes.

By the logic of this book, and by Quantum Immortality, there was a universe where they didn't. There exists a universe where I died within a few minutes of being born, from suffocating on the fluid in my lungs, or from an infection when they didn't get it all when they pumped it out. That scream that the medical staff told my dad to keep listening for- never happened.

There are countless times that things like this happened in my life, that was just the first one. I almost died when I was 8 from a bowel blockage that caused a massive infection because I have an iron sensitivity- I won't take iron to this day because of this. But that had happened before, when I was an infant as well, I had to be taken off breast milk and put on a special iron free formula. And this is a pretty common thing with iron, a lot of people get constipation, but I get actual bowl blockages, because my body won't absorb iron correctly through my intestinal walls, because I have stupid intestinal walls that don't know how to do that, so I wind up with a big ball of iron just like, chilling in my intestines. Which I then have to either pass or have surgically removed. I've had it thrice and I've not had to have the surgery either time, but I do not reccomend shitting out a spikey ball of iron. But if you don't do that, your literal poop builds up and posions your blood and you die. A terrible way to die. But in three different universes, that's how I died.

I'm not going to tell you every time that I almost died, I just want you to understand that this is true of all of us. Remember that time you almost died? This book says that in some other universe in the mutliverse, that was the time you died. Not the time you almost died, the time you died. That time that you're thinking about right now, when you almost died? It killed you. That's what this book is about, and books that are about something, some big theme like this, don't really leave you. They stay with you long after you've finished reading, and for me, it left me with a new gratitude for my life. As long as you are alive, you still have hope. That's the message of this book, and it is a powerful one.

I don't want to spoil it, because I want you to read it. I want you to experience it. I've kept myself to this first chapter, because that's the set-up for the theme of the book, and the theme is the real core of the book. It's thought provocing, it's well written, and it's beautifully narrated. I heartily reccomend it, especially if you're in a bad place emotionally when you read it. This theme of hope really resonated with me, and I'm going through some things right now in my personal life. I don't know that it would have hit as hard if I hadn't needed to hear it. So if you need some hope in your life, this is the story for you.