Yeah,

it's a much harder route, and that's why people less often pick the route to sort of have a look at themselves. I mean, we'd all get out of it if we could, but I think if you've committed to, this is the path I'm on, you've got to keep walking down it. It's the only way.

Yeah. And I'm sure you found it. But as you reach different points in your career, you realize it's quite useful to have different points in your career. Points where you felt like you're a failure, points where you know, you're externally seen as successful. Because then you realize, actually, there's things that all this external stuff can't give you in any way. And actually then pushes you into a crisis because you're like, well, I'm expected to feel this, but I don't feel this. And I've been striving towards this because I thought all the problems and insecurities were to do with not having this, but now I have this. got to realise the problem was something else. It wasn't this lack I thought, this external lack of whatever, money or career or whatever. It was actually something that was always there and the striving was just a symptom of what was there and then I have to actually face up to that shit and just deal with it.

Yeah because I'm sure when you were a struggling writer back in the day that you assumed, oh if I ever sold like how many books is the midnight library sold now? 10 million worldwide or something?

Something. Something like that I know.

It's an absurd like in bookland, 10 million is absurd like it's insane. It's insane but I'm sure you would have thought back then, if one of my books sold 10 million, I will be happy. And it doesn't work like that. And no one wants to hear that.

That is the truth. Because you hate yourself, don't you? You hate yourself if

you're unknown. No, I think it's so important to say this. Yeah, no, yeah. I

think it's so important. But I still know my younger self hates myself moaning about this stuff that younger person wanted. But I'll say that what happens very easily, I think most humans are like this, is goalposts shift. Yeah, so quick, so quick. You can be at uni and just wanting that job and getting that job and you're saying, you'll say before you get that job, you think I'll be happy if I get that job, you know, that's where my ambition will stop, I'll just be happy doing that and you have about a week.

Yeah.

Actually, it would be nice to just like be a hungry hippo and just like keep grabbing him and it's really hard, but it's another thing about getting older, I think. I think once you hit, I've hit, I'm 49 years old now. And so you have a sense, whether it's real or not, of having passed over the hump in the bridge a little bit. And you think, so you have a different perspective, a perspective that looks back as well as forward, and it's not so striving and it's more about, okay, let's instead of always going in that forward line, let's just expand out and look around and see where we're at and that's a nicer way to be than always that forward ambitious momentum of, you know, rat race and wanting to be respected by your peers, whatever that means. And the interesting thing about the internet age is of course no one. When I was younger it was possible to be naive enough to think you could be a person that everyone liked. The internet has radically shown that that's not true. No people ever like that. And you know, even people get you think, a drama's like this, you can find some Reddit thread or something like that. That would be someone that doesn't

like Taylor Swift out there.

I suppose that's a good thing now, because everyone so knows that you can't reach that point. That we all, anyone who's vaguely public, or even if you've got an outward facing job in any capacity, you have to understand that you can people please to an extent, but you're not going to win everybody over.

No, no. So knowing that's futile, as is perhaps having lofty goals about, oh if I sold 20 million books I'd feel any different, or whatever the next goal would

be. Or the movie, or yeah, this, that and the other. So considering

you've done all of this stuff, where do you place your happiness now? Or what does it mean to you? I mean, again, to put it into context with this book, a line that I absolutely loved was somewhat related, where Grace again says, we beat death by living while we are here. And I think that's what I mean is, what does living mean? What is it to you now that brings you that sense of, I feel alive?

I think it's weird, like happiness sometimes happens at that point where you worrying about it like it's often life often the best moments of life are the ones that you're not thinking too deeply about when you're in your happiest moments you're never tweeting them you're never instagramming them or doing a selfie in those moments so it's as many a day as sort of natural living moments. I mean, my indulgence, and it's always been the case all my life, has been traveling. I love travel. And I think the thing I like about travel is when you're in a different country, you get a perspective and you remember that your life isn't that important that at any moment the day, there are people in this restaurant in Japan or Spain or America doing these things, walking down that street. There's that man in the corner busking. There's this happening nine billion times. And I've always since was a kid been fascinated by that. One of the things I, one of my happy memories, it's a strange one, but when I was a kid I did that thing of looking out the window as I'd be past like Sheffield or Nottingham and seeing the distant lights and imagining all the lives that were going on in that city when you were passing it on the M1 or whatever. And I love travel for giving you that sort of broad sense of a whole planet and a whole world out there. And that you're small but you're beautifully small and part of this beautiful whole. And actually it can make you feel bigger in a sort of more zen way because you actually feel part of something much much bigger than your little concerns about your little work and your social media feed and this that and the other but you're part of something and I think that is where true escape and comfort is. It's never via yourself, it's via other people, other things, other places and how you interact with them. I think we're very focused on, and it's important to do work as we've been talking about, but very focused on all the answers are inside us. And they're not. I think the way out is through other people a lot of time.

There's something magical about when you're flying into another country, specifically at sunrise. Yeah. And you can sort of see the sun coming up and you're almost imagining like people having their coffee, people making their breakfast. That always blows my mind like, oh my god, right down there, having many thousands of feet below, people just having cereal and waking up about to go and do all the stuff they need to do in their day. That is my favourite perspective shifter. I love it.

once my mum and dad took me, we never went to cities on holiday, but we went to Paris once. I remember it was like, my mum was a teacher, there was a scheme where they exchanged houses with other teachers. So we went to this Parisian teachers flat. And just looking out in the morning, street cleaners and people and in France, obviously, they go to like, you know, have breakfast outside and you can see life happening out on the streets and it was just so sort of like spine-tinglingly lovely for someone who'd been so wrapped up in their school life and home life to just see the world out there and I thought yeah I want to get out there and see some more. Yeah but

I love that we've just talked about that and like how our happiness and our aliveness is through that connection to other people and essentially that storytelling, like learning about other people's lives and their experiences and their days. And do you find when you're writing a book, a fiction specifically, that you do have a beautiful level of escapism where you can almost park your life whilst you're writing and diving into that world.

Yeah and I think that for me, you know, everyone focuses like when we think of writers or want to be a writer they think of it in the bookshop and all that, the actual beautiful thing about writing and maybe any creative endeavour is the creating and the organizing. And with fiction, what are you doing when you're telling a story? You're sort of creating a world that you have a control over, which you don't necessarily have a control over the real world. But you're ordering, you're creating a world full of like causes and effects that you've got sort of mastery of. And it's like, it's a lovely feeling to shape that. I'm not the best editor. I'm a bit too sort of ADHD to sort of like go back through, go back through over and over, dealing with all the criticisms, but that first draft of creating something, I love that.

It is the best. I mean, I've only done it once, but I was like, it's like going holiday every time I open my laptop. It just felt remarkable. I mean, your fictions all have a fantastical element to them. In this one, you've got, this is not fictitious, you've got the seagrass that sits outside of the island of Ibiza. But the sort of fantastical bit is, would you call it a magic?

Yeah, I mean it is, this is very much, I think it's my weirdest book in that, you know, I think people will find it a bit, I mean Midnight Library is obviously science fiction and goes off into fantasy. Yeah. planets, you know, a sort of portal that's in the ocean that connects to higher life forms. There's a lot of weird stuff, you know, which possibly comes from having spent too long on a bee for my young years and my brain going a bit wild on, yeah. So it's a strange weird book but I kind of like that I didn't you know because it was a lot of pressure I've made it to do you know another midnight library or like I don't know the sunset bookshop or something that would have been but to just do something that's very different yet also I think thematically quite similar and It's about a woman who goes for a transformation and sees life very differently and has a perspective shift but everything else, how I get there is kind of very different to the Midnight Library.

What do you think it is that draws you to a sort of a fantastical element to your fiction?

Because I don't, I get really really bored and so if I'm writing a very realistic book after the third chapter I will be wanting to you know go with my imagination. Like I think like we have imaginations for a reason and it's all made up you know if you're writing a novel it's made up so you're kind of writing about parallel universe anyway so why not go really made up. And also I think having written non-fiction it makes me want to go a bit weirder in fiction because I realize that even in nonfiction there are things that you can't say. Whereas in fiction especially if you make it a real like fantastical proper story fantasy fiction you can then be very honest about the stuff you're being honest about you can be very I mean this is one of the reasons I often get asked like not all my books but the last two books had a female protagonist and it's like I want that person to be very clearly not me and a different age and a different place and then you can put a lot of yourself into it and you can be very exposed and revealing without having that risk in nonfiction of hurting your parents or whatever it is.

Yeah, it's nice that the sort of the boundaries move a bit. You can really kind of stretch out your limbs and go, right, where are we going to where are we going to take this because there are no rules. I mean, as long as you're, you're writing in a sort of coherent way that people are going to understand, you can really push the boundaries. It's so exciting.

Yeah. And it's fun to, I think, one fun moment, it's almost like fishing. When you catch yourself thinking or going somewhere that you didn't plan, I'm not much of a planner. And so when you're imagining stuff and then you imagine something really crazy, you think, where did that come from? And it reminds you that you don't know yourself that much. And I think like, I think probably musicians get that feeling and film directors get that feeling of like, surprising yourself and understanding So in a way, writing very weird made up stuff can be a way back to seeing yourself.

It feels like an essential practice in this day and age where daydreaming and having an imagination seems harder. We're distracting ourselves constantly so there's no actual room to daydream. And in terms of imagination, it's like everybody's imagining everything for us in the form of AI or movies or whatever we're being bombarded with constantly because it's hard to avoid screens. That's a strange idea. We almost need to work harder to give ourselves the time to really explore that imagination. And I agree with you, I think whenever I allow myself to properly daydream or just sit and see what comes up, or if I'm out walking or running, I'll not listen to anything. I'll just sort of let my brain freely wander around. think it does show you something about yourself. It's almost, I feel like new parts of my brain are opening up. Like I didn't know that existed. Like there was a little door over here with another room that I'd never seen. So I think we all need more time just to let our minds wander and see what comes up.

Yeah, definitely. And I think it's no coincidence I've wrote my weirdest book when I was away from social media. I was having my mental health dip going through therapy. I couldn't be on social media. I had my fingers burnt too much with social media. I had all sorts of stuff and I was well away. And I didn't, obviously, like everyone who's so so believed in social media, I came back to social media when I realised I've got to promote this thing. But for a little blissful while I left it. And and I think that as well, because I wasn't plugged into other people's opinions so I could actually work out what I like and my own taste, because we're all so second guessing everyone's opinions on everything, from politics to everything. We're so worried about stepping out of line on any issue. And it's so good to sort of like step away from that for a while. And I definitely even though I've come back to social media and around this I'll be sort of Instagramming a lot, but I have very different attitude to it now. I don't really do Twitter. I use Twitter as a sort of like mailing list really. I don't really, you know, I don't really put as much of the sort of stuff I was putting out there anymore. So I've had a, got very, I don't, I think I wanted too much from social media. I wanted something that, because I hadn't had the right therapy, I wasn gonna get from social media and you can never get it because going back to our thing about moving goalposts social media See, you know it praise. Yeah from a very young age whether it's snapchat with their sort of like the friendship streaks where Teenagers feel like they've got to contact, you know, build up the street. It's about encouraging you to always want more, want more followers, want more, you know, interaction and you'll never reach the limit. Never. No and there'll always be, you know.

Someone bigger, someone cooler, someone more popular. I'll always be Selena Gomez with like 77 gazillions. This is ridiculous. Crazy. So post being diagnosed with ADHD, autism, now being in therapy, having had a good chunk of time off of social media, it seems like a lot has changed for you and you're in a place where you're perhaps aware of what works for you and what doesn't. And I know that I've read even recently that, you know, much like myself, you have to always keep an eye on your mental health. I mean, most of us will have that, but you really have to keep an eye on your mental health. How are you doing that? What does that mean? Especially going into a really busy bit where you're about to promote a book. I

think, you know, for me, I am aware now of the times of day that I'm happiest, and I'm happiest when I'm walking my golden retriever in the morning, Bruce, on Brighton Beach. And yeah, we're about to go on a little road trip with Bruce through France while we're going to a beef room. So I'm really looking forward to that. I think that's the perfect thing for me to not think about work. Spending time with people and animals I love and traveling and things like that and focusing on that. I think front and centre it always used to be the work and it didn't actually help the work, it didn't help me having that you know because you'd be doing the wrong things and so now having a focus on the people and the sort of quieter moments and to realize that this is it this is you know life isn't something you're working towards it's a very sort of fleeting moment in the cosmic scheme of things that we're actually here. It's the literal blink of an eye. And we're always wanting more out of it or we're wanting the next thing or the next chapter and we always have, you know, and forward momentum is very important. But it can come a point, especially in the West, where we have so much forward momentum, we're not actually aware that this is it. This present moment, this being, this right now is it. And writing at its best and living at its best is when you're sort of lost in that moment and you're not thinking too deeply about it, you're just in it, you're just throwing stones on the beach for your dog or whatever it is and you're there and you're here, you're like, insistent.