The midnight library (not a book review)

[image: the cover of The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig]

One of the best books I’ve read recently is The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. Here is a short description:

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

This, however, is not a book review. Rather, it’s about using Haig’s novel as a thought experiment to help us reflect on our own lives. Inevitably, this essay is going to read a bit like a personal memoir, so apologies in advance if you are not that interested in my life. But I invite you to try out the experiment and write down your own thoughts based on a hypothetical trip to the Midnight Library.

To get us started I need to add one more thing to the above description of the book. It’s a spoiler, but only a minor one. Nora, the protagonist, is aided in her quest by a librarian, obviously. As a way to orient Nora in the literally infinite library that contains all possible life paths she could have taken, the librarian hands Nora her personal Book of Regrets. This contains a list of the things she regrets not having done, decisions not taken, paths not explored. One way to investigate the alternative books of her life, then, is to simply undo some of the regrets and see what happens.

I will follow the same advice of the imaginary librarian, beginning with one of the defining aspects of my life: my choice of career. I made two crucial choices that could, theoretically, be open to regret. The first one was very early on, when I was still in college at the…