Matt Haig

26 | April 2, 2015 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

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THE HEADLINER: CAMBRIDGE LITERARY FESTIVAL

Matt Haig has gone from writing about aliens to his own battle with mental health. As he gears up to speak at Cambridge Literary Festival, Ella Walker quizzes him on reading, writing and his bizarre toast preferences

Editor: Ella Walker email: ella.walker@cambridgenews.co.uk For breaking entertainment news for the city, visit cambridge-news. co.uk/whatson Follow @CamWhatsOn on Twitter

Matt

Cambridge News | cambridge-news.co.uk | April 2, 2015 | 27

POWER OF WORDS: Telling our own stories can be healing, says Matt Haig; the film version of his science fiction novel The Humans could soon be shot in Cambridge

Haig: “We live in a world designed to make uss feel we’re constantly missing out”

M

ATT Haig is in a maelstrom of self-promotion right now: local radio, national press pieces, BBC Breakfast, Cambridge Literary Festival . . . the list goes on.

He’s quite used to it though; the man is a borderline #humblebrag culprit on Twitter, where he’s also got a retweeting habit, and a knack for ranting.

However, the 37-year-old admits talking about his latest book, Reasons To Stay Alive, is a little different from usual: “This book is quite personal so it’s a little bit more exposing.” But he’s not complaining: “After having done nine books before with not that much reaction, to do a book that gets a reaction is nice.”

Born in Sheffield, Matt studied English and History at Hull University and set up a marketing company before becoming a writer for children and adults. Now based in Brighton, with his wife, fellow writer Andrea Semple, and their two children Lucas and Pearl, Reasons To Stay Alive is based on how, aged 24 and living in Ibiza, Matt suffered a nervous breakdown and tumbled into the lonely, blank heaviness of the clinically depressed.

“Depression is a terrible and horrible thing, but it’s not an unusual thing,” he says. “So many people have it and I find it quite therapeutic in a strange way to hear similar experiences, and I think other people do too.”

The book only came about because he was actually asked to write it. “It was hard for me to get to a point where I could write it because for years I wanted to write it and always put it off. I wrote nine novels en route, but I don’t think I would have ever got there if I hadn’t literally been asked by someone in the publishing industry to write it.”

Once triggered though, “it was the easiest, fastest, lightest (in some ways) book I’ve ever written,” he explains.

“I felt very different to the ‘me’ of the time I was writing about, I was writing

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it in summer time, the weather was nice, I was feeling really happy and I think I was in the right place to write it. Because one thing I didn’t want to do – I don’t know if I’ve done it – is write a book about depression that was automatically depressing.”

If the reviews and outpouring of support for it so far are anything to go by, Matt has managed to weave his usual mix of uplifting wit and thoughtfulness into the prose.

Does he feel a sense of responsibility to readers now he’s been “thrust into the role of depression expert”?

“There’s a limit to what I can say and what advice I can give because I’m obviously not a doctor, I’m not trained in anything, all I’ve got is my own experience,” he says, diplomatically. “I’ve got no insight necessarily into how other people’s minds work, but I think a lot of it is about listening. I think therapy has proven so successful because people like to externalise their experiences, they feel a literal relief just by talking about things.”

He describes how at his last reading a teacher stood up and said she’d been signed off work for a year with depression, but after seeing him on telly and reading the book, she’d got back in front of the whiteboard within a week.

“I don’t really know how to take that,” says Matt, sounding genuinely

puzzled. “Even though it’s called Reasons to Stay Alive, I myself don’t really like the term ‘self-help’ or don’t believe there’s any one perfect answer to our problems. I just think if you’re sharing an experience and trying to do it in an honest way, that in itself can be helpful.

“We’ve got such a long way in terms of stigma and understanding the science, at the moment all we really have is our own stories and we need to voice those stories.”

He adds: “The one thing that beats stigma is words.”

Between Twitter, his mental health issues crystallised in book form and an extensive web bio (a quick scan and you’ll learn he had a crush on Penelope Pitstop, likes motorways at night and worries about icebergs), is there a line he wouldn’t cross in his writing? Does he worry about oversharing?

“Haha, I probably should do! I don’t know. I think I’m slightly missing that bit of my brain,” he laughs.

“In real life face-to-face conversations I’m quite a shy person.

But when I’m writing I’m not shy at all, I don’t know why, it’s like my alter ego. I think I reveal a lot about certain things – I talk about my experiences of mental health because I think that’s useful to people, I talk about writing – but I don’t reveal much really about my family life, my children, things I get up to day to day.”

Since finishing Reasons To Stay Alive, Matt has burrowed back into fiction writing. “I went to the other extreme,” he says. “I wanted to write

Turn to page 28

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28 | April 2, 2015 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

THE HEADLINER: CAMBRIDGE LITERARY FESTIVAL

“If you’re lonely or angry and isolated and sort of lost to yourself, then the way back to the world – the way back to you – is through books”

From page 27 about b t the th mostt innocent i t and d childlike and wonderful thing I could think of, so I’ve written a book about Father Christmas as a young boy.”

“In some ways it’s freer writing for adults, but in other ways it’s freer writing for children,” he muses. “I’ve noticed with some of my novels, where they’ve had a slightly sort of fantastical element, some adults will immediately switch off as soon as there’s something nonrealistic in it. Whereas children have a broader definition of what real is and what interests them, and if they can imagine it, then it can be real.

“I love that about writing for children. You can kind of go anywhere.”

Haig has also just completed a screenplay of his funny, life-affirming 2013 bestselling novel, The Humans, which happily for us, is set in Cambridge.

“I’ve never walked naked round Cambridge,” Matt claims when asked if he’d done a nude recce of the city before writing the opening scene of the book, during which an alien commandeers the body of Cambridge University professor Andrew Martin, but not his clothes.

“You must have!” I wheedle.

“No! That bit was poetic; pure fiction.”

With a producer already committed, we should soon be getting “a proper Cambridge science fiction film”, one that would have to involve someone doing a naked ramble round the city. Cameras at the ready.

When it comes to the actual sitting down and writing bit of his job, Matt admits he’s “really disorganised”.

“I’m not one of these writers who sets a word count that they have to get to, or has any kind of routine,” he says.

“Basically I’m all or nothing, so I go through patches, like now, where I’m not able to work so well because I’m going

off doing promotion, and then I have other patches where that’s all I’m doing seven days a week. When I’m in novel mode, I will sleep, but I’ll hardly eat – and I’ll live on toast.”

While less whimsical and funny on the phone than he is in print, he’s got seriously controversial ideas about toast.

He layers on marmite AND peanut butter. Together?!?

“Yep. No-one understands that, but actually two savoury tastes . . . the peanut butter softens the marmite and it’s really quite nice.”

His reading habits are not quite so shocking; in fact his mantra is: “Books are our map.”

“It came from a blog I wrote.

It was in relation to depression actually, about writing and reading and how it helped me,” he explains. “It didn’t totally save me, it wasn’t some magical cure, but I do find that when, even if you’re not ill, if you’re lonely or angry and isolated and sort of lost to yourself, then the way back to the world – the way back to you – is through books.”

He’s pragmatic about how many – and which – books he’ll let furnish his mind though.

“I’ve never finished a Tolstoy book. I don’t read enough classics now, so I feel constantly bad about that. But we live in a world designed to make us feel we’re constantly missing out.

I think, in the Western world, Coleridge is the last human being to have read everything that he could read. And now we can’t even read 1 per cent of everything! We just have to give up at some point.”

So he doesn’t mind quitting a book if he’s not enjoying it?

“Not every book is right for every person. I think it’s kinda wrong to abandon a book, but it’s even more wrong to not find the books you were meant to read in the first place.

“It’s up to the books to hold you, not you to keep holding the book if you don’t want to.”