Hello and welcome to another episode of I Way with Jameela Jamell. I hope you're all right.

I'm fine. I'm actually quite pumped to bring you today's episode. To the point where I don't

really want to talk about very much, I just want to get straight into it because I feel like there

is so much that was said in this episode that is so important and I don't want to dilly dally.

So I am talking to Matt Heig. He is the great author of the best-selling novel, Reasons to Say

Alive and he's written so many great books. The humans have stopped time, notes on a nervous planet,

but he also has an extraordinary book that is already getting rave reviews called The Midnight

Library that comes out on the 29th in America. And I will let him explain what this book is about

at the end of this podcast, but he is the voice of reason on the internet. He is who I look to and

all of my darkest and most chaotic moments. He has dedicated his life to being so open about his

own experiences with mental health, with suicide. And actually I will offer a trigger warning here

that we do talk about suicidal ideation or suicide attempts in this podcast in a very

informative and helpful and loving and shameless way. But it's definitely something I need to

make you aware of in case you are feeling fragile and just not ready for that conversation yet. Maybe

bookmark this for later. But it is definitely a very helpful thing for me to have heard having been

someone who was in the past suicidal myself, but also someone who has been the care of four

suicidal people. I just feel like there was so much helpful information and so much great content

around how we shouldn't shame ourselves or shame one another for losing control of the way that we

feel and we don't shame ourselves for these same feelings around our bodies. So therefore why do we

do it when it comes to our mind? And Matt has a wonderful way of highlighting our kind of societal

ignorance and also he's a progressive. He's always thinking ahead of how we get better. He's

always planning for what we need to do next rather than just in an outcry about what a mess everything

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