The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig changed my perspective. Seriously. It’s always been in the back of my mind that we only have the chance to be in this moment once and to make each decision that comes across our paths but I never thought about it like I do now. This novel follows the main character Nora as she navigates through her “book of regrets” to understand and fix her life. In the form of a library, Nora finds herself trying on different lives that would have been a result of a different decision. After first reading the setting of her “midnight library”, I could immediately see shelves upon shelves filled with thickly-bounded books of all my regrets.

The day I read this book, I was not particularly happy. Knowing myself, I decided to read a new book to cheer myself up and I ended up sitting on my couch for three hours hungrily devouring this novel. That night, when I went to work, I couldn’t help but gush to anyone who would listen about how incredible The Midnight Library is. The line “the only way to learn is to live” was promptly texted to my mom, dad, best friend, and sister. It seems so obvious, but you do have to live to learn. You have to make bad decisions and you have to have regrets to live. A good life doesn’t exist without a big book of regrets.

The book plays with the multiverse, specifically showing that every possible version of the main character exists somewhere doing something else. I hope there’s another Ava out there somewhere in a different city with different friends and different interests. Hope she’s thriving out there. Maybe if I didn’t choose to go to my college or I had made a different decision at 10 years old I could be in a different place, and maybe I am, just in a different universe.

Nora Seed, the main character, tries out life after life and finds herself always coming back to her form of “limbo”; the midnight library, run by her old high school librarian. She begins as a depressed, suicidal, and hopeless character. At the end of the novel, she lives her life differently as a result of the midnight library. I learned so much from this book and it woke me up. I might not have a physical library in front of me with books of regrets but I am in control of my decisions. When reading the last page, a tear dripped onto the page because we are all here just trying to figure out what makes us happy, every single one of us.

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents and said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We want to tell if any of those versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”