Saturday was a no-cellphone day, a break from media news, and a time to relax. I needed a good, escapist novel and I was willing to read one that had a few philosophical notes, but not enough to add stress to my day. The public library sent me an email that morning, an alert that the one book I had on hold was ready to be picked up. Harold Washington Library is one and a half blocks from home, easy access to a ready diversion. I picked up the book, finished lunch, then settled into my favorite chair to read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

Earlier in the month, I had sent a list of writing prompts to  members of the monthly writing group to which I belong. One prompt suggested writing about a crisis moment that permanently changes the viewer’s mental landscape. As The Midnight Library begins, its main character, Nora Seed, is experiencing so much disappointment and loss resulting in and exacerbating a deep depression that she decides to kill herself. Haig captures Nora’s downward spiral in seamless inner monologues with statements like:  Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be.

After ingesting both wine and anti-depressant pills, Nora writes a good-bye note and leaves messages on social media. Expecting to pass out as she dies, instead she awakens among misty bookshelves in a vast, seemingly infinite library. Someone who had comforted her during her childhood, the librarian Mrs. Elm or her likeness, greets her and slowly reveals the nature of Nora’s circumstances. She is in the Midnight Library which contains volumes of other lives Nora might have possibly led had she changed just one detail.

The rest of the novel follows Nora’s journey through hundreds of lives that are different in wildly varied ways from the one she is leaving behind. Haig plays with quantum wave theory and the concept of a multiverse as Nora grows through these varied experiences that ultimately and dramatically change her life. Nora has a revelation towards the end of the work, that the variations on her life experienced in the Library have impressed her with all the possibilities inherent in her original life, that there is so much more to learn and to do. It is good to be alive.

Haig writes a good story with clean yet colorful prose, so engaging that I read the 288-page book in one afternoon. Yes, it was an adventure in immersive fantasy, but I did relax that Saturday and closed the book with regret. For there is a little bit of Nora Seed in all of us, that ounce of speculation as we wonder what would have happened if we had decided not this way but that. What if we had opted for just one little something different?

Not everyone is on a self-doubting track. Nevertheless, thinking about possible alternative life outcomes is great fodder for any writer who explores the infinite variety of human experience. What would my life have been like had I—what?—chosen one path, person, course, career, or friend differently? I made and will continue to make choices that shape my life, a singular gift for which I am grateful. As Nora learned, this life is all we have and we hope to make the best of it.