The Midnight Library and the dawn of a new day

The Midnight Library and the dawn of a new day

Book: The Midnight Library

Author: Matt Haig

Listened to on audiobook read by Carey Mulligan

In The Midnight Library, the protagonist attempts suicide at the start of the book. This is closely preceded by a number of things going wrong in her personal and professional life. Her cat dies. She loses her job at a music shop. She screws up the private piano lessons she was giving and loses that gig, too. She finds out her brother was in town but didn't want to see her. Even her elderly neighbor, whom she helps by picking up his prescriptions, doesn't need her help anymore because the pharmacist has moved nearby and can deliver the prescriptions himself. Her best friend doesn't text her back. All of these immediate experiences are in addition to hardships that have built up over the past couple of years. Her mother died. She broke off an engagement and has since been single. She dropped out of a potentially successful band. She was an elite-level swimmer in her youth but dropped out of the sport. So as the acute regrets in her life start to build, she more and more starts to question her decisions in the past, leading to a bigger and bigger pile of regrets and a sense of hopelessness.

Enter The Midnight Library — the place between life and death she goes after her suicide. The protagonist opens book after book to visit where she would be in life if she had made different choices. The new lives start at the moment where, in her core life, she attempted suicide. So what if she hadn't ditched her fiance, quit the band, or taken up philosophy? The rules are that she can visit a life she would have lived had she made a different decision, once she becomes dissatisfied with that life she will return to the library, she can never visit the same life twice, and, if she finds a life she likes, she gets to stay there.

What I love about this book is that it's one I could never write. I'm not sure I could write any book, but if I could it certainly wouldn't be this one. This is because the book takes a life lesson so simple that it could be written in a few sentences, and expands it into a whole novel. Not an overwinded pontification, but a simple message, repeated over and again through the experience of the protagonist. 

The lessons are just these:

It's easy to not be grateful for what you have and ignore your positive traits. Hope is one of the most important powers when you're facing hardship — believing in the possibility of things to get better, and that you potentially have the power to make them better. Human connection is one of the most important, but seemingly small, things. 

Despite the condensable lessons of The Midnight Library, I got so much more out of reading the book. Why? It's the difference between your parents telling you something and finding it out for yourself. This is how life lessons are learned. Not through being told, but by experience. Much of science you can learn by being told — much of history and math as well. But life lessons you can only learn by living — or, if you're lucky, via the shortcut of stepping into someone's life in a story.

The Midnight Library is a heartwarming book (despite the dark start) that delivers more than just surface-level feel-good vibes. It's worth reading twice, and in fact, I did read it twice. Almost within the same year.  

-G

Finished: Jan 23, 2023 (2nd read)

Would reread? Yes! (and did)