If you had a book of regrets, what would it contain? and if you had a chance to live different versions of your life, would you take it?
SPOILERS AHEAD!!
What is it about
Nora Seed is deeply unhappy with the trajectory her life has taken. She has been fired from her job, her best friend has moved to Australia, and her relationship with brother is not great. Nora carries a huge emotional baggage and has been depressed for some time. Then one night, she attempts suicide by overdosing on the pills. Rather than dying, she ends up in a limbo place called the Midnight Library.
There, she meets her old school librarian, Mrs Elm who gives her the chance to explore different lives from the opportunities she had missed. There were missed chances, like accepting a coffee date with a charming doctor, or accepting her ex’s offer to run a pub in a small town. She wondered whether life would have been different if she had said yes to them.
So, Nora begins exploring different lives, born from missed opportunities and missed chances. Each time, she finds herself in a different life, she doesn’t seem to experience happiness. Like for instance, in one life she is reunited with her boyfriend and is now married to him. But neither of them seem to be happy. Then in another life she becomes an Olympic swimmer, but ends up finding it unfulfilling.
It goes on and on, until she exhaust all her choices. She learns that through each life, no matter how successful it was, she found herself unhappy. After experimenting with different lives, she realises she doesn’t want to die anymore. When she wakes up, she makes up with her brother and plan to visit her best friend in Australia.
What I liked about it
This book was a balm I didn’t know I needed. It felt like I had read a good self-help guide disguised as a beautiful story to lift my spirits up. This book is like a friend, full of profound and thoughtful insights. There were so many passages that I loved , such as this one.
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
The Midnight Library stayed in my mind for a long time, and I often refer to this book whenever I am feeling down.