Author Matt Haig: ‘I was a teenage shoplifter. In my foolish brain I was a kind of Robin Hood’

Matt Haig was born in Sheffield in July 1975. His memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, was a number one bestseller, staying in the British top 10 for 46 weeks. His novels for adults include the award-winning How To Stop Time, The Radleys, The Humans and the number one bestseller The Midnight Library, which has sold over 10 million copies worldwide.

Speaking to The Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Matt Haig reflects on teenage dalliances with crime and questionable haircuts, his early writing and his relationship with his mental health.

Sixteen was a bad age for me, various things were going on. Obviously I had the normal stresses of GCSEs. And I was a bit lost, a bit difficult for my parents. I was arrested for shoplifting at the age of 16. I’d been a shoplifter since age of 11, on and off, and it was becoming a bit of a compulsive thing. A sort of way, I suppose, of handling stress. I’m now diagnosed with ADHD, but obviously, in the ’80s, I hadn’t been diagnosed. So I had lots of stuff going on I didn’t know about. 

I started smoking and drinking and sniffing petrol behind Blockbuster Video, just being a bit of a waster. My nan died that year. I haven’t got the best memories of my 16th year. 

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I’d been very happy at primary school because I was in a very small, tiny British school, with just 28 people. Then I suddenly moved to this big comprehensive in Newark-on-Trent, an area I’d only recently moved to. So I was having trouble fitting in and making friends. One friend I had, a boy called Paul, was a little bit of a troublemaker, and he basically got me into shoplifting. I took the idea and ran with it. I had no interest in what I was stealing, it was about the buzz I got from walking out the door. It was my first addiction, the first high. I had rules; I’d never steal from an independent store or a small shop or anything. I’d often steal things and then give them to other people. I had this weird idea – because I was in Nottinghamshire, in my foolish teenage brain I was a kind of Robin Hood.

When I got arrested I had an afternoon in a police cell. Waiting for my mum was bad. That was the end of my teenage tearaway phase, because after that I realised there are consequences for actions. 

If you met the teenage me your first thought would be, what terrible hair. This was early ’90s OK, there were a lot of people with stupid hair. My version of the stupid haircut was, it was shaved on one side, and long on the other. Basically, I was just hiding half my face because I was so self-conscious. So I had strange hair and baggy clothes. You’d have probably liked me though. 

Even though I got up to naughty things, I was kind of nice with it. I had quite a lot of friends and my heart was in the right place. For instance, when it came to work experience, I wanted to work in a care home. I wanted to do useful things, even at 16, even though I was doing idiotic things too.

I started writing before I had a breakdown, before I became ill. While I had a summer job in Ibiza, I used to sit at a bar and sell tickets for nightclubs, and basically I got free alcohol all day. So I’d sit at a bar with a pint writing little bits, little scraps. I wouldn’t even call it a novel, but trying to get story ideas in my head. Eventually I did piece together a book, set in Ibiza, in my early 20s and then I tried to get a literary agent. I remember it was all rejections – one of them said they’d rather die than read a book set in Ibiza. So that sort of knocked my ambition on its head for a little while.

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I had a breakdown when I was 24. I think I’d had low-level lingering depression for a long time, probably since I’ve been a teenager, which would probably explain all the other behaviours. But as a typical young man of that era, I was in total denial. I wouldn’t have considered myself depressed at all. But I was masking a lot by drinking and taking cocaine. That was always my route to confidence, to what I imagined would make me likeable. And also, decades later, I’ve been diagnosed with autism and ADHD. So I think a component in my depression was also burnout. And unhealthy living on top of that, not sleeping. I basically wasn’t coping and was punishing myself. I definitely don’t feel safe that it won’t happen again but I now understand myself better. And over the years, I’ve had lots of not fully blown breakdowns, three-week patches of depression or anxiety. The difference is now I know what I need to do. Getting outside works for me. Breathing exercises work for me. Exercise works for me. Pills, when needed. It’s like physical health, isn’t it? No one would ever say, I’m never going to get physically ill again. But at the moment I’m as well as I can be.

If I could give advice to my younger self I’d just let him know that he won’t always feel that way. When you’re in your early 20s you imagine things are going to stay that way forever. When you’re depressed, you can feel like you’re a burden on other people. So my main advice to my young self would be to hold on, and really have faith in change. For better or worse, things change. That’s the nature of life. So if you’re at rock bottom, and you hold on long enough, and you look at yourself just enough, then you know that change is eventually going to be a positive one, because you’re already at rock bottom. It’s just about believing that other realities and other futures are possible. 

I’d also tell my young self to have more patience. I mean that in terms of work. When I started writing, I was so permanently frustrated that it wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. I’d tell myself, stick to what you’re doing, stay true to what you want to do. And eventually, it will happen. So long as you’re just making ends meet. Don’t rush it so much. Try to enjoy life in the process. Because that’s one regret I have, that I didn’t often look around at life as I was living it. I was just obsessing over the hypothetical future. It’s that Ferris Bueller thing, you know, you have to stop and look around once in a while.

I wrote a book called The Humans about 10 years ago, and I decided I was going to put everything into promoting it. I got on the phone and phoned up lots of bookshops around the country, and at my own expense, I’d go and do an event at these places. Often there wasn’t many people coming to these events, but I knew that if I’d arranged one they’d have to get my books in stock. It didn’t get me on any bestseller lists, but it got me a core of readers who could then help spread the word. 

My next book was Reasons to Stay Alive. I can remember it was ranked at 30,000 on Amazon, then I went and had a chat with Simon Mayo on Radio 2. The next morning, it was number one on Amazon. People were emailing the show saying they’d stopped the car because they were crying. These days it feels like everyone is yammering on about their mental health. But I think at that time, 10 years ago, it still felt quite new and brave to be a man talking about your mental health.

If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be my nan who died when I was 16. She was like a third parent to me. She lived with us. She was such a character. She was born in 1905. She lived through two world wars. She was a twin who had a strange relationship with her brother. She’d had a terrible marriage and terrible life experiences but was the kindest person – she’d looked after evacuees in the war and she’d adopted my mum and her sister. She was quite a selfless person, but a totally fun loving character at the same time with her cheeky sherries. She was just the nicest person to talk to, my nan, Flora Trott. 

The Life Impossibleby Matt Haig is out now (Canongate, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

The film adaptation of his novel The Radleys is out on 18 October

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