By Julie Sara Porter
Spoilers: Wow, 1,000th blog post! 9 years! It has been quite a ride! I have been a Book Reviewer longer than I have been anything else and I love it!
There have been so many authors, so many books, and so many stories that I shared. I feel like I have lived thousands of lives vicariously. So it is fitting that my thousandth review should be The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, a Contemporary Fantasy novel about a library that tells of several potential lives of one woman.
Nora Seed attempts to take her own life. When she wakes up, she finds herself inside The Midnight Library. The librarian, Mrs. Elm tells her that it is filled with books that represent the various lives that Nora lived had she made different choices. All she has to do is choose one and she is transported to become that particular Nora in that particular reality.
This book has an amazing concept with wonderful themes of choice, regret, memory, loss, possibility, personal happiness, and finding one's true path. The library itself is filled with an endless collection of books, lives, that are untitled and unmarked. They seem to convey sameness and monotony, but instead the stories inside provide a variety of lives with different situations, experiences, and memories.
Nora is the right character for something like this to happen (even if her surname, Seed, and Mrs. Elm’s names are a bit on the nose.) Nora works at a music store and despairs over missed opportunities and lost career paths. She has broken romantic relationships and is estranged from family members. Her life is just going through the motions and feeling like she isn't a part of anything. She feels that her life is one of past regret and barely living in the present.
The lives take Nora through various situations. In many ways, this book is similar to the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, which presents another woman entering various realities based on different worlds and choices. The realities come from different initial choices. Then those choices result in other outcomes. Some good, some bad but eventually lead to her becoming a more sagacious and perceptive person because of her experience with them.
Nora becomes a pub owner, animal rescue shelter worker, an Olympic swimmer turned public speaker, rock star, climate change scientist, and philosophy professor among other careers. Her family and love life fill the gamut from single, cohabitating, in romantic relationships, married, divorced, to widowed. Her friends are still in touch, grown apart, connected on social media, lost because of breakups, or are completely out of her life.
She is childless, had various miscarriages, has one or two children. She has plenty of pets, allergic to animals, or had pets that died. Her parents are divorced, widowed, still together, both dead, or out of her life. Her brother is estranged from her, supporting her, acting as her manager, alive, or dead. She can be healthy and destined to live a long life, sickly and dying, physically healthy but suffering from various psychiatric disorders, or caught in a serious catastrophic accident.
It's exhausting and also exhilarating keeping track of the various realities, moving along Nora’s life paths, understanding the changes, and finding out the knowledge and wisdom that she obtains from them. Each reality is different but tells a complete beautiful story of a woman receiving the opportunity to explore all of her potential lives to find the one that fulfills her the most.
That is the secret to the various realities. All of them have positive and negative aspects. One where she is rich and famous could also see her as depressed and suicidal. One where she married an ex boyfriend that she still has feelings for gives her lots of friends but various marital problems.
One where she travels and sees many great places reveals that she experiences them alone. Another where she works for important humanitarian causes puts her in Nihilistic despair when she believes that nothing will improve. Even when she is in a mostly happy reality, there is something that she lost or gave up on. Even when a possibility leads to negative results, she can find something positive inside it.
The point of the novel is not to find the perfect life or the life where Nora left the biggest impact. It's to find the possibilities that surround her and in turn us. It's for all of us to recognize the hardships and appreciate the pleasures. To find meaning and existence in living no matter the reality. To find everything instead of nothing. In my case, to find the meaning and possibility that exists in every story. All 1,000 of them.
