Reasons to Stay Alive

"When you are depressed, when you are experiencing mental illness, you find it very difficult to read. Any kind of enjoyable cultural activity becomes hard because your concentration tends to go. So if you are confronted by a doorstop [of a book] you just want to take a diazepam and go back to sleep. And if you can’t even bring yourself to pick up a book and read because you are so lost in your own head, then they’re not going to help you. The great thing about Reasons to Stay Alive —apart from the fact that it is brilliantly written, and apart from the fact that it is a really amazing portrayal of being suicidal, and apart from the fact that it is a book that really chimes with people—is that it is an easy book, in a depressive state of mind, to dip in and out of, and find that solace. Matt’s book came out in 2015, and I was just starting to write about my own mental illness at the time, and I felt that the book gave me the courage to talk about my own stuff. I keep it on my bedside table. You know how they have the Bible in all hotel room drawers? Well they should have Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive. The thing for me that really resonated was the part where he is on the beach in Ibiza with his girlfriend. He just suddenly finds himself more… well, it really captures how these feelings can just come out of nowhere. What I really admire about Matt, and about all of these writers, is that I find with these very painful times, that—a bit like child birth—I will have whole months of my life that I just don’t remember because I was in a kind of fug of mental illness. So it’s very difficult to pick those moments out of it. And he’s done that so brilliantly and with such clarity. It is life affirming and important. Really important. He was one of the first people—although, actually, Emma Forrest’s book came out before—who put everything out there, basically."