Matt Haig had already been a successful writer for some time when his debut non-fiction memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, published in 2015 thrust him into the limelight as a man at the forefront of improving the nation’s mental health. Seemingly overnight he became a social influencer and one of the most respected writers on mental health that the UK has perhaps ever seen.
In Reasons to Stay Alive, Haig explored his own experiences of depression and provided, in perfect bite-sized chunks, some wonderfully quotable excerpts which had the potential to provide a real comfort to readers and yet were wrapped up with a raw truth which is so often missing from the so-called ‘self-help’ genre.
Haig then returned to his fiction writing (also well worth reading and profound) and fans of his Sunday Times best-selling work were made to wait... read the rest of the article here