‘Go to the dark place and find the optimism in it’

This is not Haig’s first foray into the children’s Christmas market; A Boy Called Christmas, published in 2015, was inspired by his son asking what Father Christmas was like as a child, and is the first in a sparkly seasonal trilogy. “Children’s books either tend to be totally happy, all rainbows and unicorns, or very self-consciously adult and gritty,” he says. “I think there is a sweet spot in the balance, where you can go to the dark place and find the optimism in it.”

A tale about Father Christmas seemed an unlikely next step for an author who had just found fame with what he describes as a “slightly misery memoirish book”, but written in the wake of Reasons to Stay Alive, this was exactly why it appealed to him. Was The Truth Pixie a response to Notes on a Nervous Planet?

“I guess so. I tend to write my mental health books in summer when I’m feeling quite good. I’m such a seasonal person,” he says. Although he’s “not too bad at the moment”, this is usually his most difficult period. “I struggle with the light. I’ll know before I open the curtains what the weather is doing because of how my head is feeling. When I had my first full-blown capital-D depression, I really noticed how just the sun sinking behind a cloud made me feel full of dread and woe. Whereas the day I realised I was going to be OK was the April after my breakdown, the sun came out and I almost felt a literal weight being lifted.”

Written in the same short, chatty chapters as Reasons, with headings such as “How do you stay human in a world of change?” and “The world is having a panic attack”, Notes on a Nervous Planet attempts to answer the slippery question of how we can “live in a mad world without going mad”. If it lacks the raw intensity of Reasons, it is because it is less personal. “I wanted to write a book about how you can look at the world as a singular psychiatric patient, as a case study,” he explains. “How so many of the problems that the world faces are parallel to what a depressed or suicidal or scared person would do if they were seeking rash solutions.”

After the unexpected success of Reasons, Haig found himself in the uncomfortable role of “Mr Depression” or “the Henry Kissinger” of anxiety, as he puts it, called on to give advice by newspaper opinion pages, charities and readers getting in touch with often extremely serious problems. “It was very flattering but also I felt quite vulnerable, all I had was my own experience,” he says. “I felt a bit of a fraud because I was getting a lot of emails from people saying, ‘Oh, it really helped me,’ or telling me their life story, but I was struggling myself. So I had to step away for a while.”

Why has he returned to the subject? “I didn’t want to do a ‘Reasons to Stay Alive Two’. I certainly wasn’t going to go back unless there was something I wanted to say.” But being “thrust into that world” taught him a lot about mental health, he says. “Also I had my own crisis. My social media usage was becoming a bit toxic, and I felt I was getting addicted to things that previously I had felt were totally harmless.”

The book’s overriding message is that in a world of ever-accelerating change and technological overload we need to slow down and “SWITCH OFF” (Haig’s capitals). “We are literally congested,” he says. “Whether it’s TV shows, news, we’ve got it coming at us from everywhere. We are in a major epidemic of distraction, we never have to be bored again, we never have to wait for anything, but that is making us lose ourselves.”

An accessible, unpreachy look at the perils of spending too much time on Twitter is clearly a good thing, but the reader can’t help but echo the advice of Haig’s wife Andrea (the undoubted heroine of both memoirs): “Matt, get off there!” There’s even a “Dr Seuss-style” ode to social media: “When anger trawls the internet, / looking for a hook; / It’s time to disconnect, / And go and read a book.” So why doesn’t he take his own advice? “Yeah, I know,” he admits. “I’m a total hypocrite.” World events have provoked a relapse, but he is more restrained these days: “I haven’t got into any big rows for a while. It hasn’t ruined my weekend.”

Self-deprecating and boyishly open, Haig is less earnest than his persona on Twitter, where his tweets on global politics or personal wellbeing seem to console and infuriate in equal measure. But he is not afraid to raise issues around masculinity and vulnerability, sometimes to his cost. He still feels that “men are a little bit behind women” in talking about gender. In a post-#MeToo world, “men do need to confess — not to horrible stuff, necessarily, but just stuff that they think is slightly wrong,” he says. “We absolutely recognise the need to be shamed, but I feel like there’s no space to do that because it is all or nothing.”

It would be easy to be cynical about his breezy blend of personal anecdote and common-sense advice (lay off the booze and caffeine, sleep, take up yoga), but Reasons was a blast of fresh air for those who felt they were struggling to take their next breath; few writers so truthfully capture the agony of a panic attack or the tyranny of relentless anxiety. He wrote it “almost as if no one were watching”, a conversation with himself back through time that would “possibly speak to a few people in that situation”. He was “very deliberately” not aiming for an update of Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon or Darkness Visible by William Styron. “They are great books, but they are already there. I was writing for my 24-year-old self, trying to see if there were any words that could have got me through that mess.”

This “little message in a bottle back through two decades” couldn’t have landed at a better moment. Even the language surrounding mental health has changed in this time: the term “breakdown” is no longer encouraged, but for Haig that was exactly what it felt like, as if “everything that had been the day before was just now broken, total system collapse.” The experience “very nearly killed him”, but it was also “the defining moment” of his life. “I wouldn’t want to relive it, but I wouldn’t want to undo it either, because it has made me a more optimistic person, it’s made me a happier person. And I think eventually, when I fully recovered, it changed how I was as a writer.”

Steeped in the contemporary fiction of his literature MA — “your Amises, your McEwans and your Rushdies, with some token Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson” — he was convinced that “bleak was highbrow”. He describes his third novel, The Possession of Mr Cave, written in bed, in long-hand “because I thought that’s how you should do it”, as his “embarrassing photo ... Me doing karaoke early Ian McEwan. It was so pessimistic.” His illness also made him “a different reader”. Returning to his parents’ home, with no bookshop or library close by, he had only his childhood books — Winnie-the-Pooh, The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders — to distract him. “At university, drowning in Derrida, you are taught to be suspicious of story,” he says. “But I was living in this sort of plotless, postmodern mindspace. I craved traditional story and structure.”

The obsessions with time and being an outsider that run through his memoirs recur in his fiction — from his first novel, The Last Family in England, published in 2004 (“a reworking of Henry IV, with dogs”) to The Humans (narrated by an alien professor) in 2013, and then last year’s hit How to Stop Time (with a 400-year-old narrator, Tom Hazard). “It’s all on a theme of mental illness,” he agrees. How to Stop Time was “as close as I’ve got in a novel to writing about depression”, taking an apparently healthy character with a condition he has to keep secret. “Depression makes time stretch for ever,” he says. “After three years, I felt like I was 439 years old.”

If, like Hazard, Haig could travel through time, he’d visit himself as a lonely boy living in the small market town of Newark in Nottinghamshire. His mother was a teacher, his father an architect for the council, and he “always felt self-consciously the posh kid, even though in the publishing world I don’t feel posh at all”. Bookish and not very sporty, he had “a horrible time” at secondary school: “I was downwardly mobile, to fit in. I got arrested for shoplifting.”

So when his son started having difficulties at school, he and Andrea decided to home school both their children, Lucas and Pearl, now aged 10 and nine, moving from York to Brighton, where it is “a ridiculously conventional option”. His memories were so painful, he says, “I just don’t want my kids to have to go through that.” One significant difference between Haig’s generation and children today is that, back then, even if you were having “a crap day at school, at 4 o’clock you go home”. Today “there’s no off switch”. Children, like adults, “feel they’ve got no time”.

He has a terror of not working — “I’d have a breakdown by lunchtime” — and moving between genres suits his “short attention span”. “It’s a cliche to talk about writing as therapy,” he admits, “but with anxiety you feel like you’ve got such intensity inside you, that if you left it, you would go mad. Writing is a place where you can park it without your head exploding. It’s a way of controlling things that I can’t quite control.”

His fear of slowing down is clear from the fact that he’s nearly finished another children’s book and is “itching” to get on with a new adult novel. How does he plan to tackle 2019? “It’s the easiest thing in the world to be bleak and depressing,” he says. “An interesting challenge is to start off with a miserable character or situation, and then go in and try to find some authentic hope and excitement.”

–Guardian News & Media Ltd