ALSO BY MATT HAIG
The Last Family in England
The Dead Fathers Club
The Possession of Mr Cave
The Radleys
The Humans
Humans: An A–Z
Reasons to Stay Alive
How to Stop Time
Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Matt Haig, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Excerpt from ‘The Waste Land’, The Poems of T.S. Eliot Volume I, Collected and Uncollected Poems © Estate of T.S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpt from The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956 © Estate of Sylvia Plath. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpt from The Wizard of Oz granted courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 269 0
eISBN 978 1 78689 268 3
For Andrea
Contents
1A stressed-out mind in a stressed-out world
18Everything you are is enough
‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’
—Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz
1
A STRESSED-OUT MIND IN A STRESSED-OUT WORLD
A conversation, about a year ago
I WAS STRESSED out.
I was walking around in circles, trying to win an argument on the internet. And Andrea was looking at me. Or I think Andrea was looking at me. It was hard to tell, as I was looking at my phone.
‘Matt? Matt?’
‘Uh. Yeah?’
‘What’s up?’ she asked, in the kind of despairing voice that develops with marriage. Or marriage to me.
‘Nothing.’
‘You haven’t looked up from your phone in over an hour. You’re just walking around, banging into furniture.’
My heart was racing. There was a tightness in my chest. Fight or flight. I felt cornered and threatened by someone on the internet who lived over 8,000 miles away from me and who I would never meet, but who was still managing to ruin my weekend. ‘I’m just getting back to something.’
‘Matt, get off there.’
‘I just—’
The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.
‘Matt!’
An hour later, in the car, Andrea glanced at me
