Julie's Journal : A Comparison of Two Books

I'm going to start off this post with a few warnings...

1.  Trigger Warning : Suicide - both of the books mentioned below deal in large part with suicide, but in very different ways.  

2.  The following are very much my personal opinions.  I had very strong reactions to these books because of my personal beliefs about suicide and the culture around it.  You may or may not agree with me and that's ok.  

3.  If you haven't read the books, this post will contain spoilers.

I read Me Before You by Jojo Moyes not long after it first came out at the very end of 2012.  Since then it has stayed at the top of my "Books I Hate" list.  Anytime anyone asked me about books I didn't like, this one came to mind.  The biggest emotion I felt when I finished the last page was anger.  More than any other book I can think of, this book made me see red and I still feel angry when I think about the story line.  The story centers on Louisa and Will.  Will is a quadriplegic after an accident.  Louisa takes a job as his caregiver/companion.  She discovers pretty quickly that Will has decided that for the sake of his parents he will hang on another six months and then he is going to take advantage of an assisted suicide facility and end his life.  His pre-accident life had been one of extreme physical activity.  He was a bit of a daredevil who lived life on the edge.  Now that he is confined to a wheelchair he cannot see any reason to keep going.  Over the course of the story, Louisa and Will fall in love, and Louisa begins trying to show him how wonderful their life could be if he chooses to continue his.  I read this entire book hoping she would convince him to live, and he does tell her that the last six months have been the best of his life.  However, in spite of Louisa and his family, he still decides to end his life.  Will is such a selfish, selfish character.  This is not a case of depression keeping him from seeing clearly.  He knows exactly what he is doing and who it will hurt, but continues anyway.  What I took away from this book was that the author does not see that the quadriplegic life as worth living and that if your life doesn't turn out the way you expect it to, it is perfectly fine - normal even - to decide to end it all, regardless of the affect your actions have on the people around you.  

On the other hand we have The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig.  The book begins with Nora losing her job and her cat in the same day.  Her relationship with her brother has faltered, and her one piano student is no longer interested.  Overwhelmed by depression, when her neighbor also no longer needs her services to pick up his medications she decides that there is no one who needs her and no reason to keep going.  She takes a handful of pills and waits to die.  She wakes up in the Midnight Library, staffed by Mrs. Elm, a librarian who was kind to Nora in her childhood.  Nora is first given a book of regrets and is quickly overwhelmed by the weight and content.  She is told that she can change decisions she made earlier in life and see where her life would be now if she had followed a different path.  All of the books on the shelves are stories of her life lived a different way.  She can take trips she didn't take, go on dates she said no to, or continue activities she previously set aside.  The first life she tries finds her married to the guy she recently broke up with.  They are running a pub in the English countryside like they always dreamed of doing.  It takes her less than the course of an evening to realize that this life isn't what she had hoped it would be.  When she returns to the library, one regret - the one of not marrying Dan - has been erased from her book of regrets.  Over the course of the book and several more lives, Nora realizes that life has infinite possibilities and all suicide does is erase the chance to make new decisions and change directions.  She ends up returning to her original life and quickly discovers that many of the things she thought had ended had in fact only paused.  She quickly finds joy in all the possibilities life offers that she hadn't seen before.   

Both these books are available in the library, but I feel that The Midnight Library is by far the better book.  It doesn't gloss over the difficult parts of life, but the reader is left with a very life-affirming feeling.  I definitely prefer that feeling at the end of a story over a feeling of depression and anger, like I had at the end of Me Before You.  I want books that glorify life rather than ones that glorify death.  Of course you are welcome to try them both and decide for yourself!