📝 Matt Haig’s Writing Routine

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For a long time, Matt Haig didn’t believe he would make it to 25. At 24, while living in Ibiza and struggling with undiagnosed depression and panic disorder, he nearly walked off a cliff. That moment—the lowest of his life—became the beginning of a long journey back to himself. It would also become, years later, the emotional core of his breakout memoir Reasons to Stay Alive, a hybrid of personal reflection and pop philosophy that turned him into one of Britain’s best-known mental health writers.

Haig is 49 now, a father of two living in a bright, sea-facing townhouse in Brighton. The bookshelves of his home reflect the remarkable arc of his career: novels about aliens and immortals, children’s stories about Father Christmas, aphoristic essays on anxiety, and his mega-selling novel The Midnight Library, which has sold nearly nine million copies. “From that moment onward,” his agent Clare Conville told The New York Times, “it stopped being ‘a book by Matt Haig’ and started to be ‘a Matt Haig book.’ His name became the reason you wanted to buy the book.”

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