SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Grace Winters calls herself, quote, "a big nothing, a crotchety old Brit, a retired maths teacher from the middle of nowhere." And she's bequeathed a house on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, one of the most glamorous spots in the world. The house was once owned by a music teacher named Christina, with whom she worked a long time ago but had no contact with since.
Ibiza is magical, but Grace cannot rest without trying to discover what happened to Christina and why she gave Grace such an unexpected gift. Her discovery - let's just put it this way - opens and transports Grace into other worlds. Or are they simply other layers of our own? "The Life Impossible" is the new novel from Matt Haig, who joins us now from the BBC Studios in Brighton, England. Thanks so much for being with us.
MATT HAIG: It's an honor, Scott. Thank you for having me.
SIMON: Grace is so puzzled by this generosity, isn't she?
HAIG: Yes. It starts off very much as a mystery as to why she has been bequeathed - to use a fancy word - this house on this Spanish island. You know, Ibiza is an island which has a young party reputation. And this central character, Grace, she's in her 70s. She's retired. She's a widow. She feels like life's behind her, so she's not the cliche of someone who goes. But she goes out of sheer curiosity in the end and discovers quite a lot more than she'd bargained for.
SIMON: Does she want to get away from her life at the same time, including kind of what I'll refer to as a pall of responsibility over what happened to her young son and anger for her former husband?
HAIG: Yes. It's a story really about the past and regret and guilt, and she feels a lot of these things - grief, obviously, because her husband had died a few years before, and many years before that, they'd tragically lost their son, which Grace feels slightly responsible for. So she not only feels like she has no happiness ahead of her - she feels like she doesn't deserve any happiness. But she's very wrong, and this story's about how, at any moment in time, however grief-stricken or despairing we may feel, life can offer incredible surprises and changes around the corner.
SIMON: You have a line that I marked - joint pain is like grief. The more you think about it, the more it hurts.
HAIG: Yeah. I had a bad back when I was writing this book. It's a common writer complaint. So, yes, you know, it's that old sort of stoic philosophy of how we think of things versus how they actually are and perspective. And Grace's perspective undergoes a radical transformation due to a fantastical happening in the ocean next to Ibiza, which I won't - you know, it comes a good chunk of the way through the novel, so I won't give it specifically, but this alters everything for her.
But really, although it is specified in the book as this very fantastical thing, it's actually a kind of metaphor for - well, in my own life, you know, years ago, I wrote a memoir about my own experience of depression and coming out of depression. And that feels like you're entering another world when you finally recover because depression very often gives you nothing but pessimism to play about with, so I was convinced I wouldn't make it to 25 years of age, to 30 years of age. So when you finally recover and when you finally disprove the thoughts in your head, it can feel like you've done something impossible. It can feel like you've done something surreal.
So even though this book is a fantasy story, I put a lot of sort of my own emotional autobiographical feelings of recovery and healing into it. And it seemed to me the way to tell this story wasn't through straightforward realism. To actually be more realistic about the feeling of it, it worked better, I thought, as a fantasy. I mean, I'll leave it to readers to decide, but that, for me, felt the right way to go about this.
SIMON: You, I gather from the afterward, have spent time on Ibiza. You're concerned about its survival as a special place.
HAIG: Very much so. When you've got quite a small island like Ibiza - I mean, to give you an example of the scale, you can bike around the whole island. There's no drive in Ibiza that's longer than half an hour, and it has millions of visitors annually. Yet, at the same time, it's a place that's bountiful in terms of nature. It's got a beautiful national park called Ses Salines, which is a place full of salt flats, flamingos, lush pine forests and an array of life.
And also, actually, the starting point for this novel was to do with a natural phenomenon that really exists there, which is the Posidonia seagrass, which is thought to be the oldest single organism on Earth. It's around a hundred-thousand years old, and it's 8 square miles of a seagrass meadow under the water. But that in recent years, because of boat anchorings and various other things and plastic pollution, it's diminished by 35%, I think. It's definitely an issue in terms of how we interact with places.
You know, because when I was a young person, I was the cliche of a young hedonistic person who went out to Spain and didn't really think too much about nature or think too much about the place I was going in or how I was affecting it. And so there's possibly some of my own guilts and regrets in terms of writing this book and trying to sort of make amends and offer my own olive branch to the island and give people a totally different perspective on it.
SIMON: Yeah. You really made me appreciate something with your line, we don't want spoilers in our stories, but we seek them in our lives. Is this novel, in part, written to induce us to be a little more open on that question?
HAIG: Yeah. I think so. I mean, in terms of our life, I feel increasingly we want it all planned out in terms of health, in terms of our relationships, in terms of our careers. And this story is a sort of plea to embrace that fiction or that story aspect of our own lives, the sort of hypotheticals that we live amongst, and to sort of embrace that.
There's a Leonard Cohen quote, and I'm going to get it totally wrong. He said something about the only way to survive in the ocean without getting seasick is to learn to become the ocean. And I suppose this book's about that, is about accepting the sort of motions and flows of life and to not want to be totally on still waters because that isn't life, and that isn't the story.
And the interesting things often are quite tumultuous things as well. And as you get older and as you have more life experience behind you of the good and the bad, you can appreciate the fragility and actually enjoy life a little bit more, knowing its fragility and knowing that we should be grateful for every day we've got here.
SIMON: Matt Haig's new novel, "The Life Impossible." Thank you so much for being with us.
HAIG: Thank you, Scott. That was lovely. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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