Free Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) by Matt Haig Page B

then the exit route is through words. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.
    ‘The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare.And my life – and my mess of a mind – needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to ‘someone is looking for something’.
    One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.
    In my deepest state of depression, I had felt stuck. I felt trapped in quicksand (as a kid that had been my mostcommon nightmare). Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind.
    And because it was only a few months before that I had lost the point of words, and stories, and even language, I was determined never to feel like that again. I fed and I fed and I fed.
    I used to sit with the bedside lamp on, reading for about two hours after Andrea had gone to sleep, until my eyes were dry and sore, always seeking and never quite finding, but with that feeling of being tantalisingly close.

The Power and the Glory
    ONE OF THE books I remember (re-)reading was The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.
    Graham Greene was an interesting choice. I had studied the writer while doing an MA at Leeds University. I don’t know why I took that module. I didn’t really know anything about Graham Greene. I knew about Brighton Rock but I’d never read it. I’d also heard once that he’d lived in Nottinghamshire and hated it. I had lived in Nottinghamshire and – at that time – had often hated it too. Maybe that was the reason.
    For the first few weeks I’d thought it was a major mistake. I was the only person who’d taken the module. And the tutor hated me. I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the word, but he certainly didn’t like me. He was a Catholic, always dressed formally, and spoke to me with delicate disdain.
    Those hours were long, and had all the relaxed andcasual joy of a trip to the doctor’s for a testicular inspection. Often I must have stank of beer, as I would always drink a can or two on the train journey to Leeds (from Hull, where Andrea and I were still living). At the end of the module I wrote the best essay I had ever written, and was given a 69 per cent. One shy of a distinction. I took it as a personal insult.
    Anyway, I loved Graham Greene. His works were filled with a discomfort I related to. There were all kinds of discomforts on offer. Discomforts of guilt, sex, Catholicism, unrequited love, forbidden lust, tropical heat, politics, war. Everything was uncomfortable, except the prose.
    I loved the way he wrote. I loved the way he’d compare a solid thing to something abstract. ‘He drank the brandy down like damnation.’ I loved this technique even more now, because the