Life that is truly ours

Dear St Andrew’s,

Over the long weekend I read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. Published in 2020, it became a worldwide bestseller and has sold more than ten million copies. Its heroine, Nora Seed, reaches a point where she no longer wants to live. Instead of dying, she enters a mysterious library in which every book contains a different life she might have lived had she made other choices.

Its popularity is easy to understand. It is imaginative and uplifting, capturing our age’s preoccupation with regret, possibility and authentic living.

Nora tries many lives. In each, she achieves something the world calls success. She becomes an Olympic swimmer and motivational speaker, a global rock star, a glaciologist saving the planet, an animal-refuge worker saving dogs, and the landlady of a country pub married to her old boyfriend. Yet these lives bring unforeseen—and sometimes disastrous—consequences for others.

Eventually, Nora discovers an apparently perfect life: married to a good man, mother to a lovely daughter, and teaching philosophy at Cambridge—although Oxford would have been better 😉 Yet even this does not make her happy, because it is not truly her life. It belongs to another version of Nora, whose place she has temporarily taken.

At last she reaches two conclusions: she wants to live, and she wants to live her own life. Why? Because it is hers, and it still contains possibilities—not chiefly fame, achievement or fortune, but loving relationships. In the closing pages these begin modestly: a kindness to an elderly neighbour and a renewed friendship with a former teacher.

There is much to appreciate, even if the novel’s multiverse mechanism is questionable. Haig, drawing on his own experience of depression, stresses the sheer value of being alive. He also sees that what gives life richness is not achievement but reciprocal love—friendship and family, not merely romance.

Because the novel deals so directly with depression and the desire not to live, it is important to be clear: depression and other forms of mental illness are not signs of deficient faith, nor are they necessarily healed by faith alone. They often require professional medical care, counselling and sustained support, alongside prayer and Christian community. If this touches your own experience, please speak to one of our pastoral staff. We would be glad to listen and help you find appropriate support.

That said, the book’s final basis for contentment is less convincing. The recurring image is a chessboard. In her ordinary life Nora feels like a pawn, but in other lives she has been metaphorically a bishop, rook, knight and even queen. Knowing that she could have been all these things enables her to accept that she is none of them.

But that comfort is unavailable to most of us. Nora is intelligent, athletic and musical. Most of us could not have won gold, fronted a stadium-filling band or become a distinguished academic, whatever choices we made.

For Christians, there is also a firmer basis for our identity, contentment and ultimate hope. Our life has value not because of all we might have become, but because God made us, Christ redeemed us, and God has adopted us as his children. Our deepest identity is not something we achieve by fulfilling our potential. It is something we receive from God by grace. Our lives are not failed versions of other possible lives. They are the lives God has given us in which to know him, love others and serve his purposes.

We do not need another life. In Christ, this life is truly ours—and full of eternal possibility.

Blessings,
James

If you are experiencing a personal crisis or thinking about suicide, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 000.