Reasons to Stay Alive - Matt Haig

Synopsis from goodreads:

I want life.

I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it.

I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.

I hate depression. I am scared of it. Terrified, in fact. But at the same time, it has made me who I am. And if - for me - it is the price of feeling life, it's a price always worth paying

Reasons to Stay Alive is about making the most of your time on earth. In the western world the suicide rate is highest amongst men under the age of 35. Matt Haig could have added to that statistic when, aged 24, he found himself staring at a cliff-edge about to jump off. This is the story of why he didn't, how he recovered and learned to live with anxiety and depression. It's also an upbeat, joyous and very funny exploration of how live better, love better, read better and feel more. 

Published by Canongate

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'When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don't speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps. Words - spoken or written - are what connect us to the world, and so speaking about it to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves.'

I read Reasons to Stay Alive the same day it arrived in the post. 

I'd been looking forward so much to this book arriving.

Actually, both looking forward to it, and a bit trepidatious about reading it. 
For one thing, I thought, if I don't read it straight away, I might put it off and become more and more scared about starting it. So I opened the cover and just read it. 

It's not always easy to comment about something that deals with subject matter which relates very personally to you. 

But I want to try, because if ever there was an important book it's this one. 

Because, speaking from experience, depression can be an isolating, frightening, misunderstood illness, and if there's anything that's able to help with a sufferer feeling a bit less alone and bit more understood, then that 'thing', be it a book, a film, whatever, is worth shouting about. 

Words I would use to describe this book, for someone who doesn't want to read or can't manage to read a big long review just now, (based on my experience of desperately wanting to understand more about this illness but recoiling at the detail in some books that I just couldn't cope with on my own at times when struggling):

kind, understanding, honest, helpful, warm, positive, open, important, cheering, supportive, encouraging, straightforward, a friend.

This book helps because it grasps what depression is like, how it can take over your life and make you feel like you are not yourself anymore, the depression is you. How can the book do this with so much insight and comprehension? Because the writer has been there and knows.

Author Matt Haig describes his own personal experiences with depression and anxiety, the worst and lowest point he found himself at, what he has done to try and get better, how he has found ways that sometimes help him, and the things that he wants to live for. 

It was wonderful to read of how books, and then starting to write, have been so important in helping Matt. He recommends here some of the books that he read when he felt unwell. I find solace myself through reading as much as I am able to, and still want to try writing one day, so it was encouraging to read how these things helped the author.

He also discusses some of what he has learnt about the illness; I found the mentions of evolutionary psychology interesting and maybe one day I'll read more about this - has the world moved on too fast for our minds? I think that was the sort of idea, if I've grasped it correctly. 

The book informs, or reminds us, depending on your knowledge, that there is still a huge amount that is unknown about this illness:

'The more you research the science of depression, the more you realise it is still more characterised by what we don't know that what we do. It is 90 per cent mystery.'

In terms of my thoughts about the book, all I can say is what the book did for me, as I was reading it, and after I had finished. I hope that this is helpful.

For someone struggling with depression (and anxiety), this book could make a difference to you in these ways - these are some of the things I thought and felt about it as I read:

It will help me

It will help someone who loves me

It's kind and understanding and honest

It's easy to read, and well presented, decent sized decently spaced print and a manageable length, something that can't be underestimated when you're depressed

It's open and honest and it shows me that there is a chance to get through each day

It shows that I are not alone in thinking awful things, in thinking I might never feel better, and it understands - this is huge - it understands that sometimes doing the tiniest smallest things are terrifying, and they are major accomplishments. In particular I'm thinking of the part about going to the shop on your own when you are very low. 

It understands the battle to try and hold on to a positive thought. 

It offers me reasons to be hopeful, to be strong, and ways to look at things differently, positively.

I feel like someone else in the world understands me now. I feel a bit less alone, a bit less scared, a bit less guilty and anxious and burdened. 

It helps you understand that everyone's experience of depression differs, that there is no one size fits all approach or answer to it, but it offers things to try that have worked for the author.

Just to reiterate one of my feelings about it mentioned above - I think it will be helpful to read for someone who loves you and is trying to help you with this illness, to help them see it from the inside as well as the outside, it offers some clarity and insight that a person really suffering might not be able to put into words very well for themselves, - how do you explain depression? - and it will help them to encourage their loved one that they are not the only one who feels depressed like they do (a common feeling). 

There's a couple of pages headed up 'Things depression says to you'. I nodded at it all so I marked the whole pages. Things like...
'Why are you trying to apply for a job? Who do you think you are?.....
Why are you crying?
Because you need to put the washing on?
Look at the people walking outside....
Why can't you be like them?'
Those pages alone really helped me feel a relief that somone understood. And they might just help others without experience of it to gain insight. And to me, both of these things, the compassion given to sufferers and the understanding given to others, breaking down stigma, are really, really important. 

Many other words that struck a chord as I was reading, here's a couple of them: 

'...the sheer exhaustion of never being able to find mental comfort. Of every positive thought reaching a cul-de-sac before it starts.' 

'days contained thousands of tiny battles'

There are so many sentences I will revisit and re-read, that struck a chord with me and had me nodding in agreement, thinking 'yes, that!', or passages that had me in tears, or sections that felt like a comfort, like a virtual hand holding mine or a virtual friend offering understanding and kindness, and I think and hope I will be able to find encouragement in this book in any future times that I might need it.

It was great to see the quote from Stephen Fry on the book's cover, someone else in the public eye whom I like and admire for breaking down stigma surrounding mental illness.

I hope these thoughts have made some sense and it's not all too incoherent I just felt this was a brilliant book and I had to write about it.

Thank you Matt Haig for being brave enough to look back on his memories and experiences and write this book, thank you to the publisher Canongate for bringing it to us. 

The Crane Wife - Patrick Ness - guest review

Oh my word, Patrick Ness has done it again.  Like A Monster Calls and his Chaos Walking trilogy, The Crane Wife is a powerful and heart-stirring book with big themes.  It's both wise and funny, immensely readable and very memorable, this is one of those rare books that leaves me sad I've read it and don't still have it to look forward to.  I'm quite sure it will be one of my top 10 favourite books of 2013.

George, middle-aged and divorced, is woken in the night by an unearthly cry, "a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt." On going out into the garden to investigate, he discovers  a large bird, a crane, wounded by an arrow through its wing.  George does what any decent man would do and removes the arrow, leaving the bird free to fly away.  The next day at work, as George mulls over these strange events, the elegant and mysterious Kumiko walks into his life, a woman who, like the cry heard in the night, will lodge in his heart, changing his life forever.

This is the hauntingly beautiful opening to a multifaceted story that's about love, imagination and beauty, and about stories. Central to the book is the love affair between George, a man who represents "safety and softness and kindness and respite" and the elusive Kumiko.  In the middle of his mundane and ordinary life, George finds something utterly extraordinary in his love for Kumiko, a love that alters not only his life, but the lives of those around him as well; and the book has something to teach all of us about love, about its possessiveness and its capacity for forgiveness, about the way love can be both selfish and selfless.

At one level, then, this is a beautiful and timeless love story with all the elements of hope, drama and despair to make your heart ache.  As Kumiko puts it, it's about "the extraordinary [that] happens all the time... Life and happiness and heartache and love."  However, rooted in the Japanese folktale of the Crane Wife, a tale that is interwoven through the story of George and Kumiko, this is also a very artfully constructed story about stories, about the stories shared and private that make up the lives of all of us.  The novel is based on age-old fables and legends, with echoes of George and the Dragon and Leda and the Swan as well as the Japanese crane wife fable, and it's a glorious hymn of praise the eternal power of story-telling, and to the sheer physical beauty of books.  George "loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock... What was more perfect an object than a book?" Ness also points out how every character in every story (real or fictional), and indeed every story teller, will give a slightly interpretation of the tale and, more than this, will keep the story alive with every telling. As George says, for any given incident "there were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life.  A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew. "  Thus Ness himself not only keeps alive the various fables that weave through The Crane Wife, but he adds in something of his own in the telling to create a new tale.  "Stories shift. They change, depending on who is doing the telling."

Of course, the way a tale is told also matters, and Ness has a genius for telling a story that captures both the reader's mind and his heart.  His writing is acute and devastatingly sharp with hardly a wasted word; it's dramatic, tender and witty, and although there is just the occasional phrase that jars slightly, for me this just highlighted the near perfection of the rest of the book.  All the way through I kept trying in vain to work out quite how he creates such yearningly, achingly beautiful stuff from mere ordinary words.  It's a marvellously alchemical gift, rather like the talent George and Kumiko have for creating mesmerisingly beautiful art from mere feathers and the pages of old books.  Although The Crane Wife is anchored very firmly in the mundane real world of George's prosaic job and narrow life, in "real life with all its disappointments", it opens windows to a world that is magical, timeless and wonderful and it stirred my heart in a way that few books can.  If you've any interest at all in love, beauty and what makes us human, you should read this book and let it work its magic on you.

Reviewed by Penny Tattersall

Published by Canongate

Thanks very much to the publisher for a review copy of this novel.

Many thanks to Penny for reading and reviewing this novel for The Little Reader Library