Michael: Alright Kevin, we’re talking about a book that has sold over ten million copies. I want your five-word review, right now. Go. Kevin: Oh, I like this game. Okay, my five words are: "Cosmic therapy feels a bit… convenient?" Michael: That is perfectly skeptical. I love it. Mine would be: "Regret is a prison. Choose life." Kevin: Wow. Okay, so we have the philosophical and the practical clashing already. This is going to be fun. What are we diving into? Michael: We are diving into the phenomenon that is The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. It won the Goodreads Choice Award, spent a full year on the bestseller lists, and it seemed to land at the exact moment the world needed it most, right in the middle of the pandemic. Kevin: That timing is wild. But what I find even more compelling is the story behind the story. Matt Haig has been very open about his own history with severe depression and a near-suicide experience in his twenties. Knowing that, the book feels less like a whimsical fantasy and more like… a letter from a survivor. Michael: That's the perfect way to frame it. Because the premise, while magical, is born from an incredibly dark place. It starts with our protagonist, Nora Seed. Her life is unraveling in the most brutal, mundane way. Her cat dies, she gets fired, she feels like a burden to everyone she knows. Kevin: I think we’ve all had days, or weeks, that feel like that. A cascade of failure. Michael: Exactly. And for Nora, this cascade leads her to decide her life is over. She writes a suicide note, takes an overdose, and then… the clock stops. At exactly 00:00:00. She wakes up not in a hospital, not in an afterlife, but in a building that turns out to be a library. An infinite library, with her old school librarian, Mrs. Elm, waiting for her. Kevin: Hold on, her school librarian? That's such a specific, comforting, yet slightly weird detail. Michael: It's her personal guide. And Mrs. Elm explains the rules. This is the Midnight Library, a place between life and death. Every single book on these endless shelves is another life Nora could have lived if she had made a different choice. And she gets the chance to open any book and try that life on. Kevin: It’s like a cosmic 'try before you buy' for life choices. The ultimate "what if" machine. So what's the first thing you do when you get a chance to erase your biggest regrets? You must go for the big one, right? The one that got away. Michael: You go for the big ones. And that kicks off what I like to call Nora's 'Great Regret-Fixing Tour,' where she tries to find the perfect, pre-packaged life waiting for her on a shelf.

Kevin: I can just imagine the list. The guy she shouldn't have broken up with, the career she should have pursued. Where does she start? Michael: She starts with a major regret: breaking up with her fiancé, Dan, two days before their wedding. They had a dream of opening a country pub together. In her mind, this is the idyllic life she threw away. So, she opens that book. Kevin: And she finds herself in a cozy pub, happily married, pulling pints? Michael: She finds herself outside 'The Three Horseshoes' pub, yes. She’s wearing a wedding ring. But the dream quickly sours. Dan is stressed, a little drunk, and he’s been cheating on her. The pub is a financial nightmare. The life she imagined as a cozy escape is actually a trap of resentment and failure, just a different flavor of it. Kevin: Wow. So the first attempt is a total bust. That’s a rough start to your cosmic redemption tour. It proves that changing one decision doesn't magically fix the people involved. Dan was still Dan. Michael: Precisely. The disappointment is so sharp she immediately bounces back to the library. So for her next attempt, she goes for something even bigger. One of her deepest regrets was quitting her band, The Labyrinths, right when they were on the verge of getting a record deal. It was her brother Joe’s dream. So she decides to live the rock star life. Kevin: Now we’re talking. This has to be better than a failing pub with a cheating husband. What happens? Michael: She lands on stage in São Paulo, Brazil, literally as the band finishes a massive stadium show. The roar of tens of thousands of fans is deafening. She’s famous, she’s wealthy, she’s adored. She looks at her Wikipedia page and sees a string of platinum albums. She’s done it. She’s a global superstar. Kevin: Okay, this is the one. She’s found it. What’s the catch? There’s always a catch. Michael: The catch is devastating. As she’s doing a post-show podcast interview, the host casually mentions the band’s tragic backstory. And that’s how Nora learns that in this life, her brother Joe—the one whose dream this was—died of a drug overdose two years earlier. Kevin: Oh, man. That is brutal. Absolutely brutal. The life she chose to honor his dream is the one where he doesn't survive to see it. Michael: The success, the fame, the money… it all became meaningless in that instant. The life was built on his ghost. She realizes this glamorous existence is filled with feuds, rehab stints, and profound loneliness. She had everything she thought she wanted, and as her rock-star self once tweeted, "You can have everything and feel nothing." Kevin: That’s a powerful illustration of the theme. We fantasize about these alternate lives, but we only imagine the highlight reel. We never imagine the alternate tragedies that might come with them. Michael: And Haig just keeps hammering this point home. Nora tries another life, one where she pursued her father’s dream for her to become an Olympic swimmer. She wakes up as Nora Seed, OBE—Order of the British Empire. She’s a gold medalist, a celebrated motivational speaker. Kevin: That sounds pretty good! No dead relatives, I hope? Michael: Well, it’s complicated. She discovers her father is still alive in this timeline, which is a shock. But the trade-off is that her mother died much, much earlier. And she learns her father had been having an affair. So even this life of peak physical achievement and public adoration is riddled with private sorrow and compromise. Kevin: It seems like a stacked deck. Is every single 'successful' life in this book secretly miserable? It feels like the book is saying 'don't even bother trying to be successful.' Michael: I see why it feels that way, but I think the point is more nuanced. It’s not that success itself is bad. The point is that our fantasy of a perfect life, which we build by imagining we can just swap out one bad decision for a good one, is the real illusion. Every path, no matter how shiny it looks from the outside, has its own unique texture of joy, pain, compromise, and sacrifice. There is no life without a cost. Kevin: Okay, that makes more sense. It’s not an anti-success book; it’s an anti-fantasy book. It’s dismantling the idea that there's a single 'right' choice that would have solved everything. Michael: Exactly. And this realization, after trying on all these supposedly perfect lives and finding them ill-fitting or heartbreaking, is what triggers the entire second half of the book. She stops asking, "Which life is the best one?" and starts asking a much deeper, more important question.

Kevin: So if she's done with the 'Greatest Hits' tour of her regrets, where does she go next? What’s the new question? Michael: The new question becomes something like, "What makes a life feel authentic? What makes it feel mine?" This leads her to what is, on the surface, the most perfect life of all. She chooses a simple, seemingly minor regret: not going for coffee with a kind man named Ash she’d met once. Kevin: A coffee date? Compared to an Olympic career and rock stardom, that’s a tiny choice. Michael: A tiny choice with huge consequences. She wakes up in this life in Cambridge. She’s married to Ash, who is a loving husband. They have a wonderful daughter named Molly. She’s a university lecturer, writing a book on her favorite philosopher, Thoreau. Her dog is named Plato. Her brother Joe is alive, happy, and in a great relationship. It is, by all accounts, the jackpot. Kevin: This is it. She has to stay. A loving family, a fulfilling career, a happy brother, a dog named Plato… you can’t ask for more. Michael: For weeks, she thinks so. She falls deeply in love with her daughter, Molly. She feels a genuine connection with Ash. But a nagging feeling starts to grow. A feeling of being an imposter. She didn't earn this. She didn't go through the ups and downs with Ash, she didn't endure the sleepless nights with a newborn Molly, she didn't write the chapters of her book. She just showed up for the happy ending. Kevin: That’s a fascinating distinction. It’s the difference between inheriting a beautiful house and building it yourself. The house is the same, but the feeling of ownership, of it being truly yours, is completely different. Michael: That's the perfect analogy. She realizes, in a heartbreaking moment, that "every life she had tried so far… had really been someone else’s dream." The pub was Dan's dream. The Olympics were her father's. The band was her brother's. And even this perfect Cambridge life, as wonderful as it was, felt like she was an actor playing the part of another Nora. It wasn't authentic. Kevin: So even the 'perfect' life isn't perfect if you don't feel like you deserve it. That’s a heavy thought. Michael: It’s the core of her transformation. And it’s where the book gives us its most powerful metaphor. At the beginning of the story, Nora feels like a 'black hole'—a dense, collapsed star of despair, sucking all light and hope into it. But after all these experiences, she has a revelation. She thinks, "I am not a black hole. I am a volcano." Kevin: A volcano. What does that mean? Michael: A volcano can be destructive, messy, and unpredictable. But it’s also a source of immense power and creation. It forges new land. It creates fertile soil. She realizes she can't run away from herself. She has to stay and tend to the wasteland inside her, and she can plant a forest there. She has potential. Kevin: I love that. Moving from a symbol of consumption to a symbol of creation. But this is also where the book gets some pushback, right? This beautiful internal transformation happens, she decides she wants to live, and that choice effectively 'cures' her suicidal despair. Some critics have argued that it feels too neat, that it risks trivializing the brutal, clinical reality of depression. Michael: It’s a very valid critique if you're reading the book as a medical textbook or a therapeutic guide. But I think it’s crucial to circle back to the author, Matt Haig. He’s not a clinician; he’s a survivor who found his way back through stories. The book feels less like a prescription and more like a modern fable. Kevin: So it’s not a 'how-to' guide for getting better, but a 'why-to' guide for staying alive? Michael: Exactly. The Midnight Library isn't the cure. The library is just the catalyst. It’s the thought experiment that allows Nora to strip away all the layers of regret and self-loathing until she finds the one thing she thought she'd lost forever: a genuine, unforced will to live. The library starts collapsing the moment she truly wants to return to her own messy, imperfect life. Her choice to live is what saves her.

Kevin: So the ultimate lesson from this infinite library of lives is surprisingly simple. It’s not about finding a better life on some other shelf. Michael: It’s about realizing that the potential for a meaningful life already exists in the one you have. The book’s argument, beautifully summarized in a social media post Nora writes after she returns to her body, is that the real problem isn't the lives we regret not living. The problem is the regret itself. That’s the poison. Kevin: And the only antidote is to fully commit to the happening you can actually control: your own life, right here, right now. Mess and all. You have to choose to tend to your own volcano. Michael: When she finally wakes up in her original life—vomiting, in pain, but fiercely alive—she doesn't magically have a perfect existence. She still has to deal with the fallout. But now, she sees potential everywhere. She reconnects with her brother. She decides to start teaching her piano student again, realizing her positive influence. She sees possibilities for connection and growth where before she only saw failure. Kevin: She’s looking at the same world, but with entirely new eyes. The circumstances haven’t changed, but her perspective has, and that changes everything. Michael: It’s a profound message of hope, grounded in the acceptance of imperfection. It’s not about erasing the past, but about realizing the future is an unwritten book. Which I think leaves every reader with a powerful, reflective question. Kevin: What’s that? Michael: It leaves you asking: what small, imperfect potentials are waiting in your own 'root life' right now? What little patch of soil could you start tending to today? Kevin: That’s a powerful thought to end on. It’s not about making a grand, life-altering leap into another universe, but about taking one small step in this one. We’d love to hear what resonated with you all. Find us on our socials and share the one 'alternate life' you've always wondered about. It’s a fun, and maybe revealing, thing to consider. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.