An Evening with Matt Haig: Embracing Hope, Wonder and the Power of the Imagination (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti.

Matt Haig is one of Britain's most celebrated authors, best known for his internationally best-selling novel, The Midnight Library, and the critically acclaimed memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive. Matt joined us on the Intelligence Squared stage recently to discuss mental health, the affirming power of fiction, and his new novel, The Life Impossible. He was in conversation with broadcaster Bryony Gordon, live at Union Chapel in London. Let's join Bryony now with more.

Hi, everyone. Thanks, everyone, for coming here and not to Beyonce. I'm sorry if you made a wrong turning and you think Beyonce's coming. You are a rock star of books. I'm really not. You really are. We all love Matt Haig, don't we? Oh. Thanks. Thanks.

I love you. I think you're absolutely brilliant. Your books are like sweet tonic for my soul. Oh, Briony, that's nice. The Life Impossible... I...

chose you to... You were my top choice. Because Briony... How long have we known each other, Briony? I want to say kind of a decade. It's about a decade, isn't it? Because we both wrote mental health books roughly at the same... You were... Mad Girl. When was Mad Girl? Mad Girl was after Reasons to Stay Alive. But Reasons to Stay Alive was...

it kept me alive, actually, during some really dark times. And I think it was probably the success of that book that gave me the courage to be able to write about my experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. And so I'm really grateful for that. And you gave me a quote, and I couldn't believe that Matt Haig had given me an endorsement.

And here we are 10 years later and this is what happens when you speak openly about the darkness in your head. But also five years ago, I also had, well, during COVID, four years ago, I contacted you when I was in a relapse of depression because I thought, who's going to know a good therapist?

She'll have a lot of therapists. And you did know a good therapist and you put me in touch. That was the first time in my life I had therapy because everyone assumes I had therapy like 20 years ago and I didn't. I was never prescribed therapy, couldn't afford therapy at that time. And I was also agoraphobic so I didn't actually want to go to therapy. But then obviously COVID lockdowns happened and everything was suddenly via Zoom.

And I thought, oh, I can have therapy. And I tried lots of ones that I'd just found on the internet. You know, the therapists where they just have a form and you can feel them ticking off and asking questionnaires. And I was just like, this is...

And you were second guessing what they were saying. So I thought, I'll ask Brownie. And yeah, you put me in touch with a great guy called Tertius. And he, yeah, he was really good. He's still my therapist. Oh, is he? I'm going to see him tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah.

tell him sorry sorry? I just sort of like I got what I needed from him then cut and run but no it was a good year I think that's a testament to your mental health Matt because I'm still seeing him eight years on oh

Andrea keeps on telling me I need to see Tertius again. So I obviously, yeah. Well, if anyone else wants to see him, his name is Tertius Richardson. He's very good. He is very good. Right. We are here. We could talk for the rest of the evening about therapy. But let's talk about your books. It's intimidating, this event, isn't it? Because it's Intelligence Squared. Yeah.

And it's like, you feel like you have to come in at quite a cerebral, highbrow level. Yeah, and it's also, it's in a church. And it's in a church. I'm quite surprised I haven't burst into flames. And it's in North London. Yes. It's very trendy. Yeah, I know. And we're not Beyonce and Jay-Z.

Metaphorically. Thank goodness. But the life, okay, we will talk about the Life Impossible now, but your, what number book is this? What number book is it? If you include everything, including children's books and mental health books, and I was probably well in my 20s, it's like 25, 26 years.

Wow. I think. It's really like, gets a bit depressing actually when you, because you measure your age in the list. You know, you have, authors have a list of the books at the front of the book. And so it gets progressively longer. But you think, I wonder how much longer it's going to be before I die. It's probably not going to be that. I'm slowing down. I've probably got about

Four? Five? No. Death. No, you've got many more books in you, Matt. Can you tell us about The Life Impossible? The Life Impossible is a novel and it was the book I wrote after The Midnight Library and it's about a...

who's 72 years old called Grace Winters and she's a retired maths teacher and she's a widow and she feels like she's got her life behind her. She doesn't feel like she's got anything in front of her but she deserves anything good. She's got a lot of guilt issues. It's one of the few novels where she's not actually diagnosed with anything. She's not got a manhood

mental illness that's diagnosed but because she's got so much grief it's kind of a it's kind of me writing about depression and having no future as well anyway out of the blue she gets left a house in Spain in Ibiza and she goes over to investigate why she's been given this house by a former friend and what's happened to her former friend and then a mystery ensues and she discovers to sort of love

Life Again and the Universe. And I'd always wanted to write a book set in Ibiza because years and years ago in the year 2001 or 2002, I wrote a terrible novel set in Ibiza. It was around the time there was a lot of sort of like lad-lit gangster books.

And so I'd written this tale of cocaine and debauchery and pretentiously based it on a Shakespeare play, Henry IV, part one. And I'd sent it to agents and the very first agent I sent it to said, "I would rather die than read a novel set in a beefer." So I thought,

Okay, one day I'll write a book. Hang on, did that book ever see the light of day? No. So it still could? No. Why not? It's a terrible book, Briony. I want to see it added to the list of books. It was called The Sun Rising because I'd just finished a master's degree in English and had done a lot of John Donne and I thought... And also there's an old...

Balearic Ibiza track called The Sun Rising by The Beloved. So I thought that was clever. It was also about a son with his father's empire and he was rising up. So I thought there was lots of layers but it was really awful. It was a bad book. I don't actually think I finished it. I think I finished like, you know, I could send it off to an agent but

Anyway, so I then wrote 25 books before I dared set a book in Ibiza. But there's sort of an added resonance as well, apart from the first book that never was to Ibiza, in that that was where you almost took your life.

Yes, in the 90s. I mean, we worked there every summer from 1997 to 99. We had over a year there in total. And I think even going into a beefer at the age of 21, I was depressed, but I was masking it

through drinking drugs and so Abifa became the place I wanted to go to. And also me and my girlfriend, who's now my wife, Andrea,

At that time we were at university in Hull and the really remarkable thing about Hull is that it makes you really want to go to Spain. What is it about Hull that's reminiscent of Spain? I love Hull to bits but it's not Spain. It's on that northeast coast and so the wind would be so brutal and it was...

At university, you're just there in the winter, basically. You don't have summers. So I was just there for these long, whole winters doing these terrible jobs like dishwashing. And I was getting a low self-esteem because I couldn't get a... That was the only job I could get. I can remember going for a job at Blockbuster Video.

I didn't get it and I really liked renting movies. So I didn't understand why I wasn't eligible for that. So I was feeling like I didn't know my place in the world if I couldn't get a job at Blockbuster. And so yeah, Ibiza was where it was a sort of alternate world where

Andrea had a really good job, I had a reasonably okay job for me at that time. And we had the sort of two debauched years. And then by the third summer we were settled into sort of like an office life over there in Ibiza, albeit an office for a nightclub. But we were working properly, I was getting healthy and I went running and stuff. I was still drinking a lot.

But it wasn't, you know, people say you had a breakdown in a beefer and they get a different idea of what it was like. It was September. We'd been there for months. We were having quite a boring life. I'd gone running that morning and then at 11, later on that morning, I had a panic attack.

that didn't end. You know, you think of a panic attack as an event, an episode, but this didn't end. And when it did sort of fade, it just slipped into this sort of otherworldly depression. So I was just swinging between terror and depression and...

was at that point totally confused about what was going on and the confusion was making it worse. Went to the hospital in Spain, was prescribed industrial strength diazepam just to get on the plane. I couldn't face the airport or anything just to get on the plane home. I couldn't keep food down because I'd literally be vomiting everything up. And so I was in a proper physical, mental turmoil at that point and then went back to my parents' house

in Nottinghamshire and yeah, it took a long, long time. And as I say, I didn't have therapy at that point. I went to the doctor and they, it was a doctor, I had some warning signs. It was one of those doctors that has signs that can't see anyone who wants an abortion, can't see this. And she asked me this question about

have I ever taken recreational drugs? And I said, yes. I've had three summers in a beefer. It's the 90s. I'm a young idiot. And she didn't then want to deal with anything I had to say after that. Like it was my fault. And then that put me off going to doctors or getting help. And so I called hotlines. I think that was the thing then, you know, because the internet hadn't really become a thing. There was no social media. So I called some like,

mental health hotlines and I don't know if that did much and I somehow with a lot of luck and having people around me, you know, had support, I stayed around long enough to see a difference. Not long enough to magically get better but I think all you want at that real lowest point is the possibility, don't you? You want some fluctuation.

There's that song by U2 which had been out already at that point called Stuck in a Moment. And I used to have that in my head because that's what it felt like. You were just stuck in this eternal moment that didn't let you off. I just can remember wanting a second or a few minutes of not thinking about it, of not being totally, utterly aware of it. And I think, you know...

I've had a few physical things in my life, nothing too majorly serious or anything. But I think everything I've had recently, when it's a part of your body, like back pain or something, however horrible it is, you can kind of point to it and say that's where the pain is and then you're somehow separate to the pain. But when it's your own head...

finding that separation between you and the illness becomes impossible because you're so caught up in it and you're thinking about it is part of the illness. And so you don't know where reality starts and ends and what you should be worried about and what you shouldn't be worried about. You're just in this soup. And I know a lot of people are very cynical about the mental health conversation as it is now because it doesn't seem like you can sort of switch on daytime news

or go on Instagram or whatever without a celebrity announcing some new condition. But I think it's still a hell of a lot better than the situation in 1999 where I literally didn't know anyone

anyone in real life who was depressed. I obviously did, but none of my mates were talking about it. It was a very taboo thing. And part of it was that the famous people you knew about who were mentally ill were the ones who died. You had Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath, Hemingway. You had famous suicides in your head. And...

you didn't really have what we have now, famous survivors, famous thrivers from going through stuff. So I think, you know, obviously there's a hell of a lot that's wrong at the moment in terms of mental health and about social media and about the fact we haven't got mental health infrastructure and waiting lists are terrible. But that one good thing, I don't think we should be too cynical about it because it's not everything, but it's something.

that I think now when people, you know, within limits, you know, there's certain mental health conditions where the stigma is pretty much what it's always been. But with a lot and generally talking around mental health, it's easier to do that. So I think self-stigmatising becomes less because I can remember just the word depression.

depressed me. The idea of being depressed or as I saw it then being a depressive in the language of the time. I felt that was depressing and that made me more depressed simply because of that. Whereas I think now that stigma becomes less and people can

You can find people who have bouts of depression for two weeks and then they get over it. And I thought depression was like this life sentence and it ended with death, basically. Or the other thing was mental illness was the madhouse. It was lunatic asylums. It was one floor over the cuckoo's nest. So imagery of straight jackets and that sort of stuff.

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You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that.

Can you allow yourself to understand and acknowledge

what a huge part you have played with not just reasons to stay alive but also the way you talk so openly about mental illness on your social media. Can you ever stop for a moment and acknowledge that you're part of that change?

That you were a great, you were a big catalyst for it. Yeah, I mean, it's hard for me because I handled it really badly at the time. Like, 2015 was Reasons to Stay Alive. And genuinely, we weren't expecting many people to read it. I'd based on the track record of every book I'd written before then, which not many people had read. And then Reasons to Stay Alive was like a sort of side project. And...

I wrote it very honestly, partly because I thought it was going to have a niche but important readership of people who were in my exact situation, possibly young people, young men, suicidal, and it might help some people.

But then that book became quite viral quite quickly. I was on a radio show on Radio 2 or something and then it was suddenly number one on Amazon. It really just sort of organically just went big very fast. And so I'd gone from doing little sort of nervous book events talking about my novel and my made-up characters to suddenly doing talks about

mental health and being a spokesperson and being invited to Parliament and having all these sort of weird offers, most of which I turned down because I didn't know how to sort of like cope with it all at the time. Because I felt a little bit like, you know, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a therapist, I'm just a person who went through an experience.

And I'm sure you've had similar, Brian, when you talk about working out where you land in terms of the conversation. A lot of the time, certainly on social media, I kind of give what looks like advice or I give little philosophical bits. And often I'm not necessarily...

It's all from the heart, but I'm not necessarily doing that because I'm feeling it in that... It's often what I want to hear. Like there's a sort of authoritative voice inside me that I can sort of reach into, like an imaginary therapist, which isn't necessarily me. It's kind of my dream balancer or whatever.

And so, yeah, I struggled with all of that. So you're trying to sort of often, when you're saying things on Instagram, you're often trying to comfort yourself. Yeah, I often give the most sort of like... I wouldn't say wisest, but I would give the most sort of like meaningful statement when I'm at my worst point. But then you'd end up in a situation like I did with...

wrote a book called Notes on a Nervous Planet After Reasons to Stay Alive, which I thought was like broadening it out into society more so I wouldn't have to speak about myself more. But I found that really hard because basically I was on tour and it was a theatre tour. It wasn't like this where we're having a nice chat. I was like on tour at a podium giving what was effectively advice, not advice, but sort of like...

pseudo profound statements about things. And at the same time, I was feeling utterly shit. So I felt like, and that feeling grows because you feel like a fraud because you think, what am I doing

I haven't solved my own mental state. I haven't achieved my own personal nirvana, whatever that is. And so I'm here and like half my career is talking about this stuff and people expect things from it. And I'm very bad at, you know, if someone expects something...

Like the taxi driver today on my way here was a bit cross because it's not that far from St Pancras to here. And I was like, oh no, no, I'll walk, it's fine. And I'm that. In that moment I get really weak. And I was sort of doing that with my career. I was like, what do people expect me to be? And I want to be that person. So I was on that tour for Notes on a Nervous Planet and it was really...

and I was still drinking at that point. And it was a theatre tour, so they gave me a rider. And I thought, I'd only ever heard of people having alcohol in riders. So I had a bottle of Absolute Vodka in my rider. And then I thought, I'd better balance it out. So I had some hummus and...

Marks and Spencer's vegetable sticks. So I thought, you know, if you're having enough carrots and then you're having the swig of vodka, you know, there's a little bit of balance. I wasn't drinking the whole bottle before I went on stage, but...

It was more the fact, the symbolic fact that I didn't think I was enough to get on stage without having the crutch of alcohol, without having the taste of alcohol in my mouth. So I'd remind myself, "Oh, it's not really me, you're naturally sort of relaxed."

Because going back to your bifida days, that was always my superpower. I was known as the person who could hold their drink. On an island of drug takers, my power was alcohol. And so I could sort of drink. I couldn't drink. Obviously, it's a total myth about the person who can take their drink. But because I'm a masker, and I've since been diagnosed with autism, and I probably am an actual masker in that sense. But

But I was good at feeling drunk without acting drunk for a little while. And so I felt, in a weird way, I was good at it. It was something I was good at. And back to the person who couldn't get a job at Blockbuster Video, that felt like it was nice to be good at something, even if it was vodka and coke. So can I ask you now, because there was no vodka backstage. There was no vodka. Unless you were hiding it. This is...

This is rum, actually. Is it? This is Bacardi. No, it's not. It's water. But how are you? I need a crutch, though. You might have noticed this on the chair. What is that? This is two tennis balls and a sock. It's a TikTok hack.

for bad backs and I have a bit of a bad back. When I get stressed, my back tightens up. So this is now my vodka. I have two TikTok tennis balls. Does it have a name or anything? No, it doesn't have a name. I'm not that weird. All right. That's all it might. Yeah, my little snuggles. How does it feel? Because I always think this, as you say, you're diagnosed with autism at ADHD...

You've spoken openly about depression and suicidal thoughts. And yet, here you are speaking incredibly articulately on stage in front of 600 people. Yeah, I'm not looking out there. I'm just looking at you. And he's quite incredible, isn't he? APPLAUSE

It's actually, this is actually is one thing I'm not like, I don't go around with a lot of lists of things I'm not proud about. But I am proud of being able to get on stage sober because I did research, I actually thought about notes on a Nervous Planet tour and among British people's biggest fears, I think the number two biggest fear is glossophobia, which is the fear of public speaking.

And the number one biggest is that a loved one will die. And so the number two fear, public speaking, is a bigger fear for British people than their own death. That was number three. LAUGHTER

So what we're doing right now is worse than death, Brian. We are so fucking brave. We're the only country where public speaking is actually a fate worse than death. I don't think it even features on the list in America. You know, it's like...

It's so weird though, isn't it? Because when I was a child, the thought of going on stage and speaking at a school play would send me into absolute terror, but I fucking love it. Yeah, I know. Now? Yes. I know, I was like, well, Brian, he'll say yes, he'll do it, yeah. Let's talk about the... Do you actually never get nervous though now? No.

No, I do get nervous. What about when you're doing a talk at a podium? I don't do talks at podiums because I like having chats. But no, I'll tell you what it is. I feel I'm constantly, and I don't know if this resonates with anyone, I'm in a constant state of anxiety. From the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep, I feel in terror and anxiety. But when I'm doing this, I don't. Right. It's kind of...

Maybe I should be more anxious. Someone's leaving. Yeah, too far. They're off to Beyonce. It's kind of like weightlifting. Not that I do much weightlifting, but it's kind of like you have to focus on it, don't you? While you're doing it, you have to kind of focus. So it's kind of mindfulness. For people who can't meditate, who can't lie on the floor... We can lie on the floor. Please, no. No.

Also, I don't know if I actually physically could with my body. Oh, yeah, but not with the tennis balls. Okay, the life impossible. So, grace is...

this wonderful character, I wanted to read something that really... I did this when you came on my podcast, I just read bits of the book back to you. Oh, yeah. But they are things that really kind of landed in my heart. So there's a bit where Grace says, whenever I read an autobiography, Maya Angelou or Anne Frank or Richard Feynman or whomever,

I feel a kind of empathy where a tiny part of me becomes for a short while the person that I'm reading about.

I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one that you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion. All reading is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imaginable dream." Isn't that lovely? - That's amazing. - It's good, isn't it?

I don't even know what bit, I tuned out actually. I think your books, it's therapy through storytelling, which is quite remarkable. Well, I would say that stories are, you know, being cheesy about it, stories are by their nature therapy because...

I'll tell you why I think so. When I was talking about being stuck in the moment and that U2 song and how you feel like you're trapped in a moment, if you think about what a story is,

For a story to be a story, something has to change, a character has to change, a situation has to change. So by placing your faith or your mind in the realm of stories, you're placing it in the realm of change. So even if the change isn't good, when you don't believe in change at all, like believing in a story has a certain...

power and attraction. So I'd say just the simple, even the plot of the story can be a kind of therapy. And I feel like when you're writing as well, when you sort of follow the arc of a, there's something quite therapeutic about

healing a character. And I think you get it from reading as well, like a character who's been through stuff. Like you like to read about people who've been through what you've been through or even worse, that's better, isn't it? If someone's been... Ideally worse. Ideally a lot worse. Like if you're, yeah. I mean, you can go too far. I wrote a book

This was a terrible book. It did actually get published. But it's a long time ago. It's terrible not because it's... Well, I think it actually is probably one of my better written books. But it's just so depressing. Like, it's really depressing. I wrote a book called The Possession of Mr. Cave many years ago. And everyone... They love... These two, they're massive fans. You are sick. It's... Everyone dies. It's also got...

It's got the worst... What did you like about it? Just his search for... He was just trying to control his daughter. Yes, you liked that. He was trying to do the right thing all the time, but it was always the wrong thing. Yes, it was a sort of tragedy. But I was quite... I think it's weird, because you can't be objective about your own work, because you remember what state of mind you were in when you wrote it. So I was quite depressed when I wrote that book.

And so it very much... Whereas now if I get depressed and I'm writing, I'll try and sort of fix the depression through writing. Back then, and part of it was I felt like to be a serious writer you had to be quite dark and have unhappy endings. And so when I look back at that, it's like looking back at an old photograph of what I was like when I wrote that. It was 2007, I think.

and I was not in a very good place. So it's like a novel is kind of like a selfie of your mind at a time and you sort of like cringe at certain bits. So I always beat up on The Possession of Mr Cave but I'm still grateful when people like it. But it's one of the ones that I can't look at now because it's...

Yeah, I feel like I must be a weirdo for having written it. You know what I mean? Because it's so, so weird. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Leila Ismail and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad-free episodes and full-length recordings, consider becoming a member at intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership. And to join us at future live events, you can head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash attend.

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