After Years of Depression, a Best-Selling Author Confronts What Haunted Him

As a young man suffocating under the weight of his depression, the author Matt Haig almost walked off a cliff.

Now, 25 years later, Haig is an internationally best-selling novelist, and he has set his newest book in the very place where depression almost overcame him: Ibiza, Spain. The novel, called “The Life Impossible,” is about finding joy after heart-rending loss, which he tells from the perspective of a 72-year-old woman.

Over the course of his ferociously productive career, Haig has written fiction, nonfiction and children’s books, including books about aliens, Christmas stories and a novel about man who lives for centuries. “The Midnight Library,” a novel about a magical library that allows a woman to enter alternate versions of her own life, has sold nearly nine million copies since it was published in 2020.

Haig has also written a memoir about his struggle with mental health in “Reasons To Stay Alive,” and now, he has written about a place that very nearly undid him.

“‘The Life Impossible’ for me is so personal,” Haig said. “That was reclaiming my past a little bit — from a very different perspective.”

The book follows a retired English woman who has lost her husband and, many years before, her young son. Her small, closed-fist of a life could easily have petered out quietly in her living room. Instead, she goes to Ibiza on an adventure that we will not spoil here, except to say that it involves telepathy.