I entered this story with some reluctance. Given the sensitive nature of depression, mental health and suicide, I was curious to discover how the author approached these heavy topics.  After finishing the book, I realize it’s not about how Haig portrays suicide, but the way he makes sense of life and the nature of existence as the protagonist’s journey unfolds. 
 
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Within the first 20 pages, the last few strings holding Nora Seed’s will to live come undone. Her cat, Voltaire, dies on the side of the road, she loses her job at the music shop, and the one person she gives piano lessons to fails to show up for practice. We also learn more about her life leading up to these consecutive hardships, the final straws that lead her to commit suicide. Her father passed away when she was young, she let down her dad by stopping competitive swimming, turned down a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make it big in a band she was part of alongside her brother, and she left her ex-fiancé the day before their wedding day. A trajectory of stagnancy ends nowhere, so Nora attempts suicide by overdose. Instead of dying, however, she enters the Midnight Library – a realm existing in the moment between life and death. In this extraordinary space, Nora encounters the form of Mrs. Elm, the librarian who gave Nora the news of her father’s passing and comforted her through her hardship. Mrs. Elm explains the rules that guide the Midnight Library. Each book in the library contains an alternate life, a possible existence in which she made a different choice. These either stem from ‘The Book of Regrets’ or from the infinite possibilities life itself offers as moments pass. Nora is given the incredible opportunity to undo every regret she ever had and explore other lives she might have lived had she made different choices. The moment she feels dissatisfied or out of place in any version of herself, she is transported back to the Midnight Library at the stroke of midnight of her last day on Earth (the day she attempts suicide). If she finds a life she enjoys and wants to remain in, the library will cease to exist, and she may live out the rest of her days in her chosen life. 

As Nora lives out different versions of herself, she comes to important realizations, the most important of which being the desire not to die. This epiphany arrives in a life where she explores Antarctica as a climate scientist and faces death in the form of a massive, hungry polar bear. Here, she also meets Hugo, a “slider” between worlds like herself. He teaches her about the quantum wave function, the phenomenon that allows different versions of the self to exist simultaneously, and the reason they are able to visit their different lives. Hugo’s “library” is a video store he used to frequent as a child in his root life while his uncle serves as his mentor. 

While visually different, both midnight realms represent the same function. In the liminal space between life and death, sliders have infinite opportunity to experience all the lives they could ever imagine. Guiding them is a figure comparable to a God- someone in their original existence who helped shape their character in some way, taught them important lessons, or provided a sense of security and comfort during moments of confusion or despair. The mentorship aspect of the Midnight Library is crucial to the story’s message: that no one ever lives in isolation. Every decision you make has consequences, not just for yourself, but other people, too. This is a fact that many people who suffer with depression often forget. No matter what, there will be someone who will listen, guide, and offer insight. No one lives in a vacuum. 

An interesting paradox occurs as Nora’s journeys add up. The more she experiences, the more lost she feels. Even if nothing disappoints her in a particular life, a gnawing curiosity about how things might be better overtakes her, transporting her back to the library again. This frustrating cycle comes to a climax when she enters a life in which she accepted her neighbor’s invitation for a coffee date. Love flourishes, they have a daughter together and are happy. She is certain that this is the life she wants to remain in for the rest of her days, realizing that love was the crucial piece missing in her original life:

“And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love … she felt the power of it, the terrifying power of caring deeply and being cared for deeply. Okay, her parents were still dead in this life but there was Molly, there was Ash, there was Joe. There was a net of love to break her fall.”

And yet, she slips back into the Midnight Library, but only for one last time. She returns, full of rage and confusion, which results in a shattering recognition that the reason she couldn’t live that life was because she wanted to live hers again. Her root existence. She wakes up, half dead from her suicide attempt, but fully alive again. She is given a final chance to live, and she embraces it with newfound power and strength.

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I appreciated this book’s powerful messages, but I can also see how other readers may perceive the plot as “wishful thinking” or unrealistic. Indeed, this is fiction. Nora Seed isn’t real and a Midnight Library where we can live lives of infinite possibility is a far-fetched fantasy. More real is the tragic fact that many people don’t survive their suicide attempts. Having a chance before death to physically experience the many ways life could be different is a luxury only possible in fiction. I think this story does show that it’s less about finding a life that “fits” perfectly and more about gaining an understanding that any life you envision is possible and the choices you make now may stem into infinitely more possible outcomes. 

In fact, the incorporation of positive psychology is effective in the context of a fictional story about suicide because it gives real people with these painfully real and debilitating struggles hope for a better future – one in which they are the conductor. Each of us has agency to make choices that influence the flow of our lives, giving us the resilience to handle the inevitable uncertainty life offers. Our power to acknowledge and handle pain while learning and growing from it is more of the messaging we need to hear. Some (not all) media involving suicide depicts the act as the only other option, an act of revenge, or one of martyrdom. While it has opened up the conversation and reduced the stigma around it, we need more stories of survival. If we continue to portray suicide without a solution (or worse, glorify it as a valiant escape from all that is bad), suicide will only continue at the staggering rates we see today. 

I want more stories like "The Midnight Library" – ones that show the reality of depression and suicidal ideation with a balanced perspective that fights against the nasty voice that tells people they’re better off dead. Of course, I understand that depression has roots in brain chemistry, too. This, along with external factors, are beyond a person’s control, but this doesn’t mean we surrender to it. If we want to prevent suicide, the media should show the power we all wield to transform our pain into an inexhaustible source of strength. We can both pay respects to those who’ve lost their battles and lift up and give voice to those who’ve chosen life. And the story of life is one worth celebrating. 

I think these few paragraphs near the end of the book sum up the journey of life so eloquently – a beautiful conclusion to a beautiful story:

“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 want you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it’s not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It’s 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 can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and it’s the happening we have to focus on.
Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies … 

We only need to be one person.

We only need to feel one existence.

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be be standing, the sky above goes on forever.”