Donia Moeini / Staff reporter
The midnight library by Matt Haig is a book about the endless decisions and possibilities we could have experienced in a life based on the choices you make. This book involves the main character, Nora Seed, who is a woman in her thirty’s who feels that her life isn’t good enough and feels that she is impacting everyone she encounters and knows in a negative way, and then decides to end herself.
In the beginning of the book, it starts off by describing how Nora felt while stating the hours before her death, it portrays all her encounters with the people in her life and how she feels that nobody wants her or needs her to be living. Then, it transitions into Nora being at the so called “midnight library”, where at midnight she was in a library with tons of books that were scattered on the shelves that were all about Nora’s potential lives that she could have lived, since she felt that her life wasn’t good enough. There was also Mrs. Elm who was the librarian at this library and also happened to be her librarian at her school when she was younger.
Since Nora felt that way, she would ask Mrs. Elm what her life would’ve been like if she would have been her almost paths that were to be a competitive swimmer, married her ex-fiancé, successfully formed a band, became a glaciologist, or moved to Australia with her best friend. All these things that she spent in her real life worrying about all turned out to be lives that were disastrous and not relaxing and comfortable at all. She was still searching for a life that belonged to her, or so seemed like the perfect life, which she later on found.
Her perfect life that she later on lived through was the one where she agreed to go on a date with this guy Ash who actually asked her in her real life but Nora never responded. In this life she has a whole family and seems really happy and much more relaxed and comfortable. She is also very happy too, and it turned out to be the first life that felt very familiar.
All of these lives that Nora went through made her realize that all of these lives that she was worried about actually turned out to not be the happiest lives and it was actually the face that she didn’t need a new life, it was already there for her.
In conclusion, this book showcases that if one ever feels that their life isn’t good enough, sometimes patience and time will come. It can be difficult of course, but everything is destined and has a time and place.