You're listening to Love Stories with me, Dolly Alderton, a series in which I talked

to guests about their most defining relationships, the passion, heartbreak, longing, familiarity

and fondness that has formed who they are.

My guest this week is the writer Matt Hague.

His number one best-selling books range from memoir to fiction to stories for children,

but they all have one thing in common.

They explore and celebrate human frailty, the notion of contentment, and what it means

to be alive.

His children's books include The Truth Pixie and a boy called Christmas, his most recent

novel How to Stop Time is being adapted for film and will star Benedict Cumberbatch.

Reasons to stay alive are memoir about his breakdown age 24 and his subsequent experiences

with depression and anxiety has become a treasured book for hundreds of thousands of people,

full of wisdom, heart, pain, truth, and most of all reassurance that you are not alone.

His most recent nonfiction book, Notes on a Nervous Planet, is a similarly illuminating

and comforting read in which he investigates how modern life, the virtual world, over stimulation

and disconnection from reality is affecting our mental health, all while drawing on his

own experience and told in his own uniquely powerful, honest, tender, and witty voice.

I think one of the confusing things for people who have never had experience of serious mental

illness is that they imagine it to do simply and purely with a thought pattern that it's

something you think yourself into and think yourself out of.

Whereas my experience, I mean sometimes it can be like that and it obviously thoughts

are a major factor of it, it's something like depression, but my experience and certainly

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