Matt Haig is a British author originally from Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He’s gained international renown as both a novelist and a mental health mentor who’s been open about his experience with depression, anxiety, and more recently an adult diagnosis of autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Haig’s work includes children’s fiction, adult speculative or nonrealist literary fiction, and nonfiction. Reasons to Stay Alive is his most famous work of nonfiction and is largely credited with launching his global career; it is followed by two unofficial sequels: Notes on a Nervous Planet and The Comfort Book. He wrote all three with the aim of helping others through experiences with mental illness, anxiety, and the unique challenges of 21st-century social structure; Reasons to Stay Alive draws specifically on his own lived experience and is his most personal book.

Although Haig didn’t understand his mental illness until his mid-twenties, his experience began in childhood. He details some of these experiences in Reasons to Stay Alive. As a highly sensitive teenager, Haig struggled to fit in with his peers. These insecurities fed into his growing anxiety and sense of alienation. When he saw his own two children facing similar struggles at their public school in York, he and his partner, fellow author Andrea Semple, introduced them to homeschooling.