THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY

WARNING: This book covers depression, suicide, a gay couple, mentions of hook-ups, and agnostic beliefs.

 

Nora Seed is a depressed 35-year-old who constantly wonders, “What if?”

 

Her life has played out as follows:

 

• When Nora was a little girl, she was encouraged by her father to pursue swimming. She won many tournaments growing up, but once she became a teenager, she became self-conscious of others watching her compete in a swimsuit, and she felt uncomfortable having her nickname be “The Fish”, so she quit.

 

• When Nora Seed was in high school, her father died from a heart attack.

 

• Nora expressed interested in researching climate change, and Mrs. Elm (the high school librarian who was her closest friend) encouraged her to become an Arctic glaciologist.

 

• Despite Mrs. Elm’s suggestion, Nora studied philosophy at university.

 

• Nora became the songwriter and lead singer for a band (The Labyrinths) where her brother (Joe) was the guitarist and friend (Ravi) was the drummer. Their group had a lot of promise of becoming successful, but they lost their record deal when Nora dropped out (since she was having too many panic attacks before performances.

 

• Nora was engaged to Dan, but her mother died from cancer four months before Nora’s wedding, and Nora later called off the wedding merely two days before she and Joe were due to tie the knot.

 

• Nora’s best friend (Izzy) encouraged Nora to move from the UK to Australia with her for a fresh start, but Nora declined. 

 

• Nora works for an instrumental shop named “String Theory” (which she is overqualified for). After years of work, she gets laid off (since business isn’t doing too hot, and she apparently puts off too many potential customers with her sour mood). 

 

• Nora gets a knock on the door from Ash (a surgeon and former customer of String Theory who once asked her out for a cup of coffee, to which she refused). Ash informs Nora that he spotted her beloved cat (Voltaire) dead, lying on the road. Ash kindly buried Voltaire in Nora’s backyard while Nora cried with a bottle of wine.

 

• Nora gives piano lessons on the side to Leo. However, she gets an angry call from Leo’s mother about missing Leo’s piano lesson (since Nora was busy coping with the loss of her job and cat and forgot that she was supposed to be giving a lesson).

 

• Nora’s neighbor (Mr. Banerjee) tells Nora the “good news” that he doesn’t need her to drop off his medication to him anymore since a different neighbor (who works at the lab) offers to do that. 

 

• Nora texts Izzy to request for them to catch up, but she gives up on Izzy replying to her after there’s no response for a few hours.

 

Feeling like a failure, unneeded to the universe, without a purpose but full of regrets, she overdoses on her antidepressants to end her misery.

 

Nora “wakes up” in the Midnight Library, which exists in-between life and death. Here, a fake Mrs. Elm offers Nora guidance to the infinite shelves of books, which each provide an alternative life story…

 

……………………………………………………………………………….

 

The way that the Midnight Library works is that Nora describes the type of life she would like the try to Mrs. Elm, who then locates the book. Books that are on the top shelf, bottom shelf, or further away deviate more from Nora’s root life (and are thus less obvious options and require some imagination). 

 

A character that Nora meets in one of her lives (Hugo) explains that he is also a “slider”, but for him, he sees a video game store. If they find a book/ video game that they are satisfied with, it’ll be like an item that they never returned. 

 

The more lives Nora and Hugo try, the more curious they get about what their other options could be, but luckily, Nora’s Book of Regrets at least also incrementally gets lighter.

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• If Nora went along with Dan’s dream of getting married and running a pub together, Dan would have continued to make rude jokes at her expense, and he would have cheated on her twice.

 

• If Nora never let Voltaire outside, he would have died sooner due to unhappiness. He was born with a heart condition, so his death was due to that and not due to getting hit by a car. 

 

• If Nora went along with Izzy’s dream of joining her in Australia, there was at least one possibility of Izzy dying from a car accident driving on the way to Nora’s birthday party. Nora gets stuck after this unpredicted outcome, feeling unmotivated to move away and get another fresh start.

 

• If Nora went along with her dad’s dream and became an Olympic swimmer, her dad would still be alive today (since her health kick inspired him to also go on a health kick, and his lowered blood pressure and cholesterol levels caused him to stop having chest pains). However, he had an affair with Nadia (the wife of a retired Olympian), which broke Nora’s mom’s heart. Nora’s mom quietly suffered alone (and died earlier than she did in Nora’s root life), not wanting to distract Nora from concentrating on her tournaments. Nora has a good relationship with Joe (since she never joined the band and let him down in this life), but she is sad about how many things she had to sacrifice along the way to become the best-of-the-best swimmer (music, philosophy, relationships, etc.). 

 

• If Nora went along with Mrs. Elm’s suggestion of becoming a glaciologist, Nora would have had a clearer purpose (of helping the planet). She would experience adventure, but also true loneliness (considering how far away from civilization she is). However, after an encounter with a polar bear who looked at her like she was food, she realizes that this death threat triggers her will to live (and thus can’t immediately return to the library, since doing so would require losing the will to continue living out that life, not just being scared of it).

 

• If Nora went along with Joe’s dream of staying in the band, Nora would experience scrutiny from the media for her every move. It was nice to have thousands of people retweeting her social media posts and asking for her autograph, and it initially was nice to have the chance to hook up with her Hollywood idol. However, this idol turned out to be a douchebag, and she had to get a restraining order against Dan (since he desperately wants what he can’t have), and she had to deal with turns of other drama (old manager ripping her off, copyright issues, rehab, etc.). This drama was too much for Joe, so he died from a drunk/ alcohol overdose.

 

“Was this what fame was like? Like a permanent bittersweet cocktail of worship and assault? It was no wonder so many famous people went off the rails when the rails veered in every direction. It was like being slapped and kissed at the same time” (178).

 

• If Nora pursued the gentle life of working at an animal shelter (instead of String Theory), she would have dated a sweet but socially awkward guy named Dylan (who she had a hard time developing feelings for on the spot upon her entrance through the book, and still felt unsatisfied (although less miserable).

 

• If Nora took a gap year after leaving university, she would have married a Mexican-American named Eduardo and owned a vineyard. However, she again felt like she was living someone else’s life and not her own.

 

Nora tried out many other possibilities as well (chess champion, concert pianist, volunteer at homeless shelter, etc.), but she began losing her sense of identity, like she was just going through the motions of trying any old new life. 

 

“It was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life -- that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn’t only be bad experiences. She realized that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. // That, she supposed was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you” (215).

 

Mrs. Elm reminded Nora to pursue an option with purpose, and in Nora’s last try, she got the closest to experiencing love.

 

• If Nora would have said yes to the coffee date with Ash, they would have eventually married him, and the two would have a sweet daughter named Molly and a dog named Plato. Nora would work as a philosopher professor but be on the verge of stopping her work to write a book.

 

“You could eat at the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in Sao Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love” (248).

 

“Here there was Molly, there was Ash, there was Joe. There was a net of love to break her fall” (248)

 

Nora really wanted this last life to work out since she was convinced that it was the best book in the whole library (even though Leo would have gotten into repeated trouble with the law since his mother could have never found a cheap enough piano teacher for him to have a creative outlet to focus on). However, she could never shake the feeling that this wasn’t her life, so she exits and goes back to her root life. Upon her decision to willingly stay in her root life and live it out, the Midnight Library collapses. 

 

Nora regains consciousness, tries to pick up her phone to call for help, drops it and loses it out of view, and so then uses all her strength to stumble next door to Mr. Banjeree’s house to ask him to call an ambulance. 

 

It turns out that Izzy did text her back (and was just super busy at that time) and would love to catch up, and Nora’s relationship with Joe got repaired. Nora also was able to find the real Mrs. Elm at a local nursing home (who she long ago assumed was dead by now) and pick up their friendship.

 

“The prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective” (284).

 

“Above all things, that heavy and painful Book of Regrets had been successfully burnt to dust” (285).

 

But Nora supposedly now know things that she didn’t before (i.e., learning from Ash that the stomach liner replaces itself every 4 days, and knowing that Ewan would be a good match for Joe, and knowing that Ingrid from the Arctic exists)... So did these experiences actually happen (instead of just being a figment of Nora’s subconscious)???