On regret, possibility, and being brave enough to live the life in front of you
Book Details
Title: The Midnight Library
Author: Matt Haig
First Published: August 13, 2020
Format: Paperback
Themes: Regret, depression, alternate lives, fear, possibility, self-worth
The Premise
Nora Seed is exhausted by her life and convinced she has made all the wrong choices.
Then she finds herself in the Midnight Library, a place between life and death where every book contains a different version of the life she could have lived. Each one offers her the chance to step inside a path she didn’t take and see what might have happened if she had made a different choice.
What follows is less about finding the “perfect” life and more about understanding what makes any life worth staying for.
My Review
I read The Midnight Library in one day. I cried at the ending. And somewhere along the way, it became one of my favorite books.
I connected with Nora Seed almost immediately, especially with the idea of being so afraid of life that you start backing out of it before it has the chance to happen. The book calls it a kind of “life fright,” and that hit me harder than I expected.
There is a very particular kind of fear that comes from the unknown. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of what people will think. Fear of committing to a path and discovering it wasn’t the right one. Fear of truly living because living means risking disappointment, embarrassment, loss, and change.
I have absolutely known that feeling.
And I have also known what it feels like to be in such a dark place that you cannot imagine a version of your life where things feel different. That made Nora’s journey feel less like a clever speculative premise and more like something painfully recognizable.
The alternate lives are the obvious hook of the story, but what stayed with me more were the smaller realizations Nora has about the people and choices she has spent years romanticizing. Dan, especially. Dan gave me the ick almost immediately.
It’s funny how easy it is to remember the good parts of an old relationship and soften the things that actually made it wrong for you. Dan reminded me of an old relationship of my own; the kind of person who appears supportive until their support requires you to become smaller, easier, or more convenient for them.
There’s a good reminder in that: take people for who they repeatedly show you they are, not for the version of them you think they could become. Sometimes we don’t miss the person. We miss the imagined future we attached to them.
My one frustration with the book was the way Nora enters each possible life with almost no knowledge of what is happening in it.
I understand why it works narratively, it allows Nora and the reader to discover the life together, but it also made me wonder how fairly she could really judge any of these possibilities. If you were suddenly dropped into another version of your life with no memory of your relationships, work, routines, or history, of course you would feel disoriented and probably make a fool of yourself.
It sometimes felt like she was being asked to “try on” a life without actually being given the tools to inhabit it. But that ultimately didn’t diminish what I loved about the book.
One of the ideas that stayed with me most, “Life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist inside of.”
That line initially sounds like the answer is somewhere out there; a single correct version of your life waiting to be discovered. But I think the book ultimately argues the opposite.
Life is full of possibilities. You choose a path. You take the fork in the road. You change direction. You backtrack. You realize something isn’t right and choose again. There isn’t one secret route you were supposed to find. You just have to keep moving through the one you’re in.
And then there’s regret. Nora eventually realizes that so many of the regrets she has carried for most of her life were wasted ones. That might be the part I needed most.
My therapist has told me that guilt is a throwaway emotion, and I think regret often works the same way. There may be something useful inside it; a lesson, an apology, a change you need to make; but endlessly punishing yourself over a road you didn’t take doesn’t change where you are now. At some point, you have to stop living backward.
Overall, The Midnight Library was one of those books that reached me at exactly the right moment. It’s hopeful without pretending life is easy, and it doesn’t ask you to believe that everything happens for a reason. It simply asks you to consider that maybe there are more possibilities ahead of you than you can see from where you’re standing.
Five stars. And very firmly on my favorites shelf.
