Matt Haig says the best decision he ever made was to live, because he very nearly chose to die when he was 24. The writer said he was in Ibiza and about to head back to London when a panic disorder descended, leaving him feeling as if he were trapped in a burning building.
He said the moment turned on one small choice: turning back toward the villa instead of continuing toward the cliffs. “That literal turning back towards the villa, not heading to the cliffs, is the decision I’m most pleased about,” he said. That decision, he said, let him keep going long enough to build a life that now includes books, marriage and children.
Haig’s reflections come in an interview tied to The Midnight Train, and they reach back to the experiences that shaped him long before he became a bestselling author. He said he grew up in Newark-on-Trent as a latchkey kid, spending time in the town’s new library, and described himself as a semi-goth whose first concert was The Cure. In 1989, he said, that show changed something in him: he realised there were other ways to be a boy or a man.
He also said childhood in a small town could be rough. Haig said he was chased for having slightly long hair, because long hair on a boy could lead to being beaten up. Later, he said, he was a very good drinker before developing a drink problem. He described his early and mid-20s as a blur of dead-end jobs, including one he hated so much — selling advertising space to people who were selling advertising space — that he walked out on a lunch hour.
Those years are part of the same story he tells about survival. At 24, he was still trying to work out what kind of life he wanted, and he said he wanted to do something with it, fulfil his ambition to write a book, and either fail or succeed without feeling bitter about not trying. The choice to keep living, he said, made that possible.
His private life has its own anchor. Haig said he met Andrea on her 19th birthday, when he was 19 too, and they have now been together for over 30 years. “We’ve been together for over 30 years,” he said. He also said that if he could go back in time, he would return to when his children were a baby and two and spend more time with them.
Haig also spoke about the present, and the way he lives now. He said he is still quite addicted to social media, but has narrowed his diet to pretty much Instagram, and considers his Twitter years and X years behind him. Books, he said, are a healthier cultural space. He added that the male decline in reading fiction and the male rise in listening to podcasts is affecting culture around men and masculinity, though he worries he has so much to say on the subject that any side in any argument could misread him.
What makes his account land today is its bluntness. This is not a neat redemption story and not a polished author anecdote. It is a reminder that a life can hinge on one turn back to a villa, and that the years after that turn can be filled with work, love, children and books. For Haig, the question of what saved him has a direct answer: he did.
