
Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library,” published in 2020, was a popular book recommendation on Instagram and TikTok. Users were excited by the novel’s magical storyline: a library where one can visit infinite alternate versions of one’s life — every time-traveling reader’s fantasy.
I decided to give this book a shot. I was thoroughly disappointed, as its protagonist was reduced to standard conservative ideals of what a woman should be, especially given the controversial state of women’s rights in politics with the Supreme Court having overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. This historic precedent granted women immeasurable freedoms and protections, and its overruling was met with celebration from Republicans and outcry from Democrats.
Roe v. Wade granted women the choice to continue or end their pregnancy, believing it to be an essential right. In the grand scheme of things, one of the reasons why Roe v. Wade is so important is because it recognized that women are not solely created to bear children. The case granted women the right to choose their life paths despite the criticism of people, institutions and cultures around them.
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the conversation of what a woman is and what she should be has become more prevalent as states determine what their stance on abortion will be. General American reactions elicited either recognition that women deserve to choose what they want to do with their bodies or that there should not be a choice for pregnant women.
“The Midnight Library” is told through a third-person narration from the perspective of Nora Seeds, a woman grappling with life and death as she has lost nearly everything: her cat, her job at a music store, her piano tutee, her parents and all her romantic and platonic relationships. Seeing no purpose in life, Nora attempts to kill herself and finds herself in limbo where she is encouraged to explore her “Book of Regrets” and see all the lives she could have lived.
As interesting and promising as the premise is, the plot’s execution could have been much better. Haig does a great job presenting Nora’s regrets but never quite establishes how she moves past and accepts them, let alone concludes her inner conflict in the story’s resolution.
In the novel’s first half, the book begins to deliver on its premise by having Nora and the reader experience and come to terms with different regrets in her life and how. However, life is not without consequences. In one life, Nora marries her fiance and lives a quiet life in the English countryside. Unfortunately, the pages reveal that he is cheating on her, effectively shutting down her regrets about not marrying him when she had the chance.
In another life, Nora keeps Volts as an indoor cat and gets to spend more time with him, but Volts is an animal and nevertheless, Nora relives his death. This erases Nora’s regret that she could’ve done something to save him. In a different alternate life, Nora fulfills her childhood fantasy of being a glaciologist, and in another, makes it big in her brother’s band, The Labyrinths. This version of her is successful and seemingly happy but surrounded by scandal and haunted by her brother’s death.
Haig paints a world so desolate and empty that it is hard not to sympathize with Nora’s frustration with the world. I could have read countless other chapters of Nora examining the lives she regretted and desired and coming to peace with all of herself. She begins this beautiful journey of discovering that she is imperfect, but authentically human.
The story continues exploring Nora’s regrets on a personal and professional level, creating a magical world that highlights the power of choice, time, guilt and consequences.
If Nora had become a professional swimmer, she would’ve lost her mother and friend at a far earlier age and ended up on a very different path. If she pursued any of her other hobbies or interests, she could have been anywhere on the planet in any emotional capacity. Haig does not explore these themes concretely enough for Nora to know whether these lives are good or bad for her. In fact, half the novel briefly walks into the many lives of Nora Seeds and her consequential spiraling.
It is here where the plot falls flat and loses potential. The reader is a second-hand witness just as much as Nora is. The Midnight Library’s librarian tells Nora how to feel and interpret the different lives she could have lived, and Nora rarely develops her reactions and thoughts. The point of seeing the lives she could have lived was to inspire Nora out of feeling sad and isolated, yet she lacks the agency to reflect on what she truly wants and what is standing in her way. For many women, societal hierarchies or the people around us can either hinder or uplift us. There is no depth to the obstacles Nora faces, only that she receives no empathy or kindness from the other characters in her real and alternate lives, nor Haig, who refuses to make her anything but a plain suffering woman.
While Nora struggles to accept these realities as every version of herself has something different than what she has now, it is disappointing to me as a woman and reader that Nora only focuses on her losses. There is no perfect life, and while this may be a creative and authentic human portrayal, I can’t help but feel insulted that the biggest motivator that compels Nora to want to live is when she sees herself as a wife to a man she does not know and a daughter she has never met a day in her life.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with women having careers, kids, both or neither. My issue lies with the fact that Nora’s character is never drawn to motherhood. In the short time she is alive, she never mentions wanting to be a mother. While it cannot be outright ruled out based on this alone, Haig does not dedicate enough time to develop this interest or desire, whether it be one that she gave up for a career or one that she had always wanted. Haig makes her biggest regrets about her career and her ex-fiancé.
Haig’s creative choice of putting Nora in a happy relationship with her ex-fiance quickly turns sour for her and then, in every other life where she is a professional in something, she is not happy. According to Haig’s internal conflict for Nora, nothing in her “Book of Regrets” is compelling enough to make her live. This theme could have been delved into further to show that at the end of the day, life is indeed not fair, and there will always be something to screw us over or have regrets about.
Instead, it is not even this version of Nora’s relationship with Ash, a trusted friend and companion in the real world and her husband in the life she experiences, that salvages her hopes for herself. Rather, it is the mere presence of Molly, their daughter in one of the possible realities, that puts everything Nora thought she knew into question.
It is here where “The Midnight Library” disappointed me. The novel has a complex, innovative premise with a female protagonist who is very much in the gray — she does not know what direction to move forward in, and therefore can have any character arc. It was comforting and disheartening to watch Nora in the first half of the novel find relief and regret in the lives she could’ve lived. Themes of the complicated nature of human desire and the hidden complexities of everyday life are masterfully woven within the narrative. However, throughout the lives she lives, Nora decides that her primary source of fulfillment can only come from traditional marriage and motherhood when she expresses initially zero interest in either. Furthermore, it encourages the notion that she and other women — both literary and real — should derive their self-perception and life based on external relationships instead of their internal selves and capabilities.
This subarc takes up half of the novel, and it is disappointing that in the motherly role, Nora loses the little agency she had left. All of what Nora had lost and felt compelled to end her life because of are not present in the life that inspires her to live.
Seeing a character’s potential in the professional world wasted for a classic social trope feels degrading and speaks to the larger societal issue that no matter how liberal and progressive times and politics have become, a woman is always subconsciously expected to be drawn toward motherhood.
Young adult literary fiction has played a large hand in helping young people seize opportunities for themselves. Fiction is meant to present journeys that readers can relate to or be inspired by. Putting a woman through all of her fantasy lives and only making her happy in the one life where she has no professional life or any of her hobbies or interests reinforces that a woman can never truly make it in society.
Haig’s portrayal, intentional or not, is another example of the female experience being denied. Nora’s struggles are classic depictions of a woman never having it all and reinforce that a woman must always settle for less while the male characters in the book get to live the same lives and roles as her without any problems.
This is harmful in the literary world because oftentimes, the young adult genre is an outlet for women and other marginalized voices to seek empowerment. Literature is how authors and readers have challenged societal norms and traditions and persisted against societal hierarchies embedded into everyday life.
When literature denies the female experience, as well as any other marginalized demographic, it reinforces such stereotypes. With “The Midnight Library,” Haig takes an opportunity to live a thousand lives to show that a woman should, if not would, always choose motherhood rather than anything else she could have wanted for herself. Haig takes Nora’s struggles of feeling lost and channels them into motherhood when this character does not actively think about, let alone want, the classic domestic life.
Given the current political sphere for women today, I found this characterization especially problematic. In the 2024 election, Republican candidate Donald Trump defeated Democratic candidate Kamala Harris with 312 votes to 226 out of the 270 needed to win. This pales in comparison to his acquisition of 232 votes in 2020. Since his first campaign, Trump has made it abundantly clear that he stands against women’s rights, making multiple sexual comments and aiding in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
This is especially problematic given the political setting in post-Roe America. As of November 2024, thirteen states have banned abortions and the overturning has been linked to decreasing resources for birth control in states.
While women all over the country grappled with this historic precedent, men took to social media in celebration of women’s loss of their reproductive rights citing, “Your body, my choice.”
The surge in Trump’s popularity in the electoral college is correlated with an increase in men sharing their views about women, ranging from their objectification to their apparent sole purpose: childbearing. This political setting extends to Republicans shaming Democrats and anyone who identifies as a liberal as not having family values. In several instances, women who do not want to get married or have children, such as Kamala Harris and Taylor Swift, are called a “childless cat lady” or “crazy cat lady” and shamed for not following their biological inclinations of motherhood.
For centuries, women have been scrutinized by men for their social and personal choices. If a woman works, she is often scrutinized for not being a homemaker or caregiver and, of course, exceedingly, overwhelmingly sexualized. If a woman is a stay-at-home mother, she is often looked down upon by other women and men and often is criticized for not having a profession of her own or being a good enough mother and is constantly compared to other mothers and the lifestyle choices they make for themselves and their children. If a woman decides to have children and a career, she is constantly pitted against the two while men do not face these societal expectations or contradictions.
In fact, a Pew Research Center survey reported that 64% of women are more likely to not want to have children compared to men at 50%.
Haig’s portrayal of a female protagonist is harmful to the art of the literary fiction genre by reducing a complex and layered woman who has failed to achieve her dreams and goals and allowing her to only find happiness in the one path she was adamantly against. There is nothing wrong with Nora finding happiness in motherhood, but for Haig to make her unfulfilled in all of what she truly wants perpetuates the notion that a woman can only be happy when she has sacrificed everything about herself other than her “traditional, biological” purpose.
Such notions exist and are reinforced in fictional literature since the beginning of the printing press — at least in America — and are used to instill them further socioculturally. As a woman who does not have any interest in the “traditional” life, I find it upsetting that some male authors seek to reduce women to the perpetuated stereotype that they exist solely to be mothers and should strive to be only that, especially given the American government and a chunk of the male demographic want to control women and steer them away from having a professional or personal life with or without the traditional life and its constraints. Women are not things to control or write the fates of so plainly. If a woman wants to be a mother, it should be established from the get-go. Not something that comes out of left field when her character has been clearly defined as an aspiring working woman.
Books like “The Midnight Library” give way for precedents such as Roe v. Wade to be overturned and further the stigma that women face from all angles of social life. It is high time that authors steer clear of literary tropes that are outdated and misaligned with the characters they’ve created and present to be relatable for.
J. Stewart • Feb 2, 2025 at 11:34 am
This might be the single most ridiculous book review I’ve read.
First – if you’re going to discuss the legality of Roe v Wade, at least understand what you’re talking about. R v W was not overturned. It was simply passed down to the states, which means that rather than one court (the Supreme Court) able to overturn the law, making it illegal for the entire country and every woman in the US, now 50 different state courts can make decisions that best represent the constituents of their respective state. Yes, 13 states have overturned. If the issue is that important to you as a woman, exercise your right to live in another state, or go to another state to have your procedure. No one is stopping you. As important as it is for women to have the right to an abortion (which I believe they absolutely should), it is equally important that citizens of states are allowed to live where the laws best reflect the values of those citizens. Just because your value is pro-choice, doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s. It is equally presumptuous and arrogant of you to assume and make judgment on others values as it is for them to want to make them about you. Are there stupid and jerk men/people who make stupid and jerk comments about keeping women down? Yes. Of course. As much as there are women who make equally stupid and jerk comments about men. Those people will never be eliminated completely. The more we give them validation for their insulting comments, the more they speak. Please stop giving these idiots press.
2) Fiction is not any one thing. It is not to intended to live to your standards, to send any particular message, support any particular political group or agenda, and it is certainly not intended to elevate certain lifestyles. Fiction is intended to be anything and everything. To assume that everyone wants what you want out of fiction is arrogant and frankly, juvenile. You lead an unconventional lifestyle? Great. You don’t like that this book isn’t beholden to that? So what. You and your narrow perspective do not dictate fiction. This book may not have been your thing. Fine. But it is not a reflection of the downturn of societal expectations of women, nor is it an attack on the relevance of Roe v Wade to the modern woman. It is a story of one woman’s fictional ethereal exploration into her choices, regrets, and desires. She is not you. Nor is she ‘every woman.’
3) I respect your comments that the character could have done with a little more depth, and that being a mother seemed to be what inspired her to want to go on, yet she never mentioned that desire early in the novel. But you seem to be more incensed that a man wrote this than the writing itself. Maybe that’s a you issue.
Your novel analysis wasn’t bad. Your politics are self-indulgent. Your man-bashing, tedious.