For a long time, Matt Haig didn’t believe he would make it to 25. At 24, while living in Ibiza and struggling with undiagnosed depression and panic disorder, he nearly walked off a cliff. That moment—the lowest of his life—became the beginning of a long journey back to himself. It would also become, years later, the emotional core of his breakout memoir Reasons to Stay Alive, a hybrid of personal reflection and pop philosophy that turned him into one of Britain’s best-known mental health writers.
Haig is 49 now, a father of two living in a bright, sea-facing townhouse in Brighton. The bookshelves of his home reflect the remarkable arc of his career: novels about aliens and immortals, children’s stories about Father Christmas, aphoristic essays on anxiety, and his mega-selling novel The Midnight Library, which has sold nearly nine million copies. “From that moment onward,” his agent Clare Conville told The New York Times, “it stopped being ‘a book by Matt Haig’ and started to be ‘a Matt Haig book.’ His name became the reason you wanted to buy the book.”
That wasn’t always the case. Early in his career, Haig was writing bleak, literary fiction—what he now calls his “karaoke Ian McEwan” phase. He was published by Jonathan Cape, a storied imprint, and burdened by the sense that he had to live up to a particular kind of literary seriousness. It didn’t last. Cape dropped him after he submitted The Radleys, a vampire novel set in the suburbs. “I felt: ‘No one else will ever want me now. Maybe I should never have been a writer,’” he recalled in The Guardian.
The novel was eventually published by Canongate and became a quiet success, followed by The Humans, the book that gave Haig confidence in his voice—equal parts earnest, fantastical, and philosophical. “It didn’t become a bestseller,” he said, “but it was the first optimistic book I’d written.” Then came Reasons to Stay Alive, and with it, a new public identity: the mental health ambassador, the open-hearted self-help writer, the author people stopped on the street to thank. It was overwhelming. “There was a moment when I would have pressed a button not to have written it,” he admitted to The Guardian. “Certainly not now. But there was a time when it was a bit too much.”
Since then, Haig has written in nearly every genre imaginable. His stories often share an emotional signature: a sense that redemption is possible, that despair is survivable, and that the smallest moments—books, dogs, sunsets—might just save you. His fiction is often about second chances, sometimes literally: in The Midnight Library, the protagonist explores parallel lives in a cosmic library between life and death. In The Life Impossible, a widow inherits a house in Ibiza and rediscovers herself in a plot that gently detours into telepathy, talking animals, and cosmic restoration.
For Haig, these stories aren’t just wishful thinking. They’re survival mechanisms. “A big impetus in my writing is hope and believing in change,” he told Goodreads. “I want this to be a book where people don’t necessarily have to believe the events in this book could be possible, but to believe that a new world view is possible.”
Matt Haig’s daily writing routine
Haig doesn’t write in a shed. He has a room set aside for writing, but he rarely uses it. “I have long fantasised about building a Roald Dahl‑style writer’s shed in the garden,” he wrote in The Guardian, “but I know, deep down, I would never end up going there.” Instead, he writes on the sofa in his living room, surrounded by two kids, a dog, and the buzz of domestic life.
His routine, if it can be called that, is more rhythm than structure. “I don’t know if I technically have a writing routine,” he said. “It’s more a ‘pattern.’” The pattern is this: stretches of floundering—browsing TripAdvisor, deleting paragraphs, spiraling into health anxiety—followed by sudden, fevered bursts of productivity. “Then, at other times, I am Philip K. Dick, minus the amphetamines, typing out paragraphs at the speed of light, and bashing out anything up to 6,000 words a day.”
He’s at his best in the morning. Sometimes, he wakes early and begins writing in the dim glow of his laptop before the sun is up, his wife still asleep beside him. “I sometimes do more productive work between, say, seven and eight in the morning than I do for the rest of the day.”
After that, he walks to the gym and runs on a treadmill. He prefers the monotony. “It is a free space, away from a computer screen or domestic duties, where I don’t have to think about anything,” he wrote. Plot breakthroughs often arrive mid-run. On good days, he follows that with a bit of yoga, then settles into writing for the rest of the morning. The afternoons are looser—emails, social media, or just time with the family. At night, once the kids are asleep, he reads.
Despite his success, Haig still finds starting a book difficult. “I go months without being able to write anything,” he told Good Housekeeping. “Then, when I get an idea, I could be writing 5,000 words a day.” He keeps several projects open at once, toggling between them. “The speed of ideas into my head—they’re not always good ideas—but the ideas you have to pursue, is quite fast.”
He edits rigorously. For The Humans, he cut 40,000 words and added 45,000 new ones. His editor, Francis Bickmore, called him the fastest writer he’s ever worked with, but also one of the most fearless in revision. “Something about that confidence means he holds his ideas with complete conviction, but also with kind of a light grip,” Bickmore told The New York Times.
Haig once dreamed of being a very particular kind of novelist—literary, serious, maybe even revered. Now, he’d rather be useful. “A pop song can save your life,” he said. “An episode of Friends can change your life. But when it’s in the world of books, it becomes this snobfest. I’m resistant to that.”
His books continue to be divisive. Some readers find his optimism and aphorisms corny; others say they’ve saved their lives. Haig doesn’t mind. “I’ll always be a hypochondriac,” he said. “I’ll always be a nervous wreck about certain things. But I’ve got to a point where I know myself well enough to know what’s good and what’s bad for me.”
It’s not happiness, exactly, that he’s after. It’s acceptance. “There’s never going to be a sense of completion, or if there is, it’s only temporary,” he said. “So it’s important to enjoy the journey rather than think about the destination.”
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