Although he’s “not too bad at the moment”, this is usually his most difficult period.
I tend to write my mental health books in summer when I’m feeling quite good. Was The Truth Pixie a response to Notes on a Nervous Planet? “I think there is a sweet spot in the balance, where you can go to the dark place and find the optimism in it.”Ī tale about Father Christmas seemed an unlikely next step for an author who had just found fame with what he describes as a “slightly misery memoirish book”, but written in the wake of Reasons to Stay Alive, this was exactly why it appealed to him. “Children’s books either tend to be totally happy, all rainbows and unicorns, or very self-consciously adult and gritty,” he says. This is not Haig’s first foray into the children’s Christmas market A Boy Called Christmas, published in 2015, was inspired by his son asking what Father Christmas was like as a child, and is the first in a sparkly seasonal trilogy.
“ The Truth Pixie is the one that really pleases me because it was a total surprise. Since then, it has been quite a year for Haig, who has been in the bestseller list four times: his latest novel, How to Stop Time, was a Richard and Judy book club pick in January Reasons, which spent 46 weeks in the Top 10 in 2015, returned on the back of his follow-up Notes on a Nervous Planet, which made it to No 1 in the summer and now his poem, published just in time for Christmas stockings. “In the same way that Reasons comforts adults in that you are acknowledging that pain.” “I wanted to think of something that would comfort them,” he says.
The uplifting tale of a young girl cheered by a cheeky sprite who is unable to lie, The Truth Pixie is short and very sweet. To cheer himself up, he decided to write a poem for his kids, and the result is his latest book, The Truth Pixie, completed pretty much that day. This was not just the usual post-Christmas blues: Haig’s struggles with depression and anxiety, almost leading to suicide in his mid-20s, were acutely documented in his phenomenally successful memoir Reasons to Stay Alive. L ast Boxing Day Matt Haig was having “a bad morning”.
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