The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

(Penguin Random House, August 13, 2020)

Boston recommended Matt Haig’s 2020 novel The Midnight Library. At first, I was not particularly taken with the book, whose protagonist, Nora, is living in dreary Brandon, England, ready to give up on life, which was not exactly a great hook for me.

Before Nora is allowed to end her life, however, she must choose an alternative version of it at the “midnight library,” where Mrs. Elm, a convincing facsimile of her real-life librarian friend of the same name, presents her with several options. At first, Nora chooses the life where she goes through with the marriage to her fiancee. Soon enough, she realizes she is not happy . Next, Nora selects a life where she moves to Australian with her friend. When that doesn’t work out, she opts for the version where she pursues her father’s Olympic swimming vision for herself. Nora doesn’t care for that one either. In another iteration, she selects the version where she becomes a glaciologist, studying the rate of glacier melt during the time of global warming. That one doesn’t go over so well either.

Nora is a perennial student of philosophy, so this novel has plenty of snippets of Thoreau and David Hume, if you go in for that sort of thing. I didn’t pay much attention.

Packing up a home of six years, like Nora, I contemplated possible future outcomes. My current move, the big purge, consisted of endless odious tasks. Boston assured me that next time, absent all the detritus, moving will be much easier. I’m going to believe her.

I finished reading The Midnight Library a while back, and as is often the case, I cannot remember how it ended, nor do I necessarily remember the book’s theme. What I do remember is that it explores how we think about missed opportunities, which somehow goaded me on during the colossal hassle of a relocation’s downsizing and uprooting.

A Brooklyn friend, who moonlights as a life coach, tells me that this new chapter (no more teaching, lots of time for essays) involves shutting one door and crossing the threshold through another.

Meanwhile, during what occasionally felt like the death zone on my very own Mount Everest, I summitted, despite occasional snow blindness and teetering on a precipice with nothing but thousands of feet on either side of me. Ahead, lies the descent, equally fraught at times, but mandatory and satisfying, too.

Moving, purging, and changing jobs within a four week timeframe is not for the faint-hearted. It’s a taste of an alternative ending, filled with pitfalls and glorious tidbits, too.

Moving day forecast? Thunderstorms.

Strapping myself in.