Matt Haig

Well. Project Hail Mary is an incredible film. Funny, clever, sentimental, and a heart so big it extends 11.9 light years away. Like ET this is the purest kind of love story. The love of unlikely friends. Science teacher who can’t drive and rocky alien who can’t breathe air. It’s a film that fuses hard astrophysics and hard microbiology and even hard chemistry while simultaneously making you cry. It made me feel every emotion. Including jealousy at Andy Weir for being able to make subplots about solid state gases and exothermic oxidation absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking. This is a wonderful film. I read a review that said it was too backwards looking to be the future of cinema as it has a feel of a movie from 1979. This is MISSING THE POINT. Cinema is fundamentally nostalgic. Indiana Jones is nostalgic for the Saturday matinees of the 1950s. Same with Star Wars. Even in the 1930s cinema was always looking back to the Wild West or the civil war. And here the nostalgia adds to it. It’s a film about homesickness and time and cherishing what we have so it makes sense this film pays homage to Close Encounters and ET and Rocky and 2001 and waxes on about the value of love and music and ramen noodles. It is coming at the right time. It’s a film about rescuing the earth and in its own way seems to try and do the same thing. It is doing the biggest job of art: making us see ourselves as human beings. And to see the hidden hero inside even the most reluctant of us. It is the opposite of a side of social media that wants us to see the worst in each other. It makes you want to save the world. And in doing so, save yourself. I didn’t get on as well with The Martian so never read the book. Oh and it’s funny. And Sandra Hüller will win an Oscar next year. And Ryan Gosling is a proper old school Jimmy Stewart movie star now. It is a film that makes you realise that where there is life there is love. It is about bravery and it is brave in its sentimentality. It could save cinema. It could save you. It could save the world, via the Beatles and cardigans. Five bright unfaded stars.

My mum just sent me a pic of my books in Newark Waterstones, the very newest Waterstones in the country. I grew up here after my parents moved from Sheffield for work. But it didn’t have a bookshop then. As a teenager books saved me. I am not just saying that. I was lost. And the local library was how it began to turn around. Quite surreal to see this especially because on that street in 1991 I was arrested for shoplifting.

My first actual copy. But not for long. Who wants this one? Signed, first edition. Very first. If so, just comment with a reason why it should be you. Best one wins. And let’s make it fun. I was signed up to do the Brighton Marathon and been trying to get my knee better. But it is fucked. So I can’t fundraise for that so for every comment I will donate a pound to @dementia_uk as someone v close to me is going through this. Let’s get to 5,000 or to 48 hours. Whichever happens first.

Hey! Okay! I am bringing THE MIDNIGHT TOUR to the US this summer because I promised. I’m very happy to share the details of the US events with @vikingbooks in celebration of The Midnight Train, which arrives this May. I’ll be partnering with some lovely special guests, wonderful venues with brilliant bookstores, including @porter_square_books, @musichallnh, @booksamillion, @barnesandnoble, @freelibraryfdn, @unclebobbies, @dallasmuseumart, @warwicksbooks, @vromansbookstore, @jccsf and @chihumanities. You can find more details, and tickets, via the USA link in my bio. Hope to see you there.

The manosphere is a deadly joke. It’s a pastiche. It’s hollow. It’s led by Ponzi scheme scammers as it is a lie on top of a lie. A postmodern vacuum. A signifier detached from its signified. Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines and HSTickyTocky are no more ‘masculine’ than a canal in a Las Vegas shopping centre is Venice. It’s pantomime. It’s pastiche. It’s - to use a word they hate almost as much as they embody - camp. The truth is the masculinity they yearn for is over. Men are not what they were. So this last fascist carnival of the grotesque is not a roar of true manhood but, like all fascism, a death cry. Testosterone levels since the 1980s have been falling decade by decade so statistically Louis Theroux is likely to have had more testosterone than any of his T-obsessed subjects. Sperm count too is waning. Even before we look at the myriad social stuff, male physiology is - let’s say it - transitioning. They aren’t just leaning into the space left by their absent or abusive fathers they also exploit an actual social space and generational identity crisis. In an age of growing female empowerment the traditional patriarchal shape of the economy is changing. Women no longer need men to earn money. They can earn their own money. This is good, obvs. And not a threat to men who understand human value has to be more than that dictated by hypercapitalism. Men who seek value in art, communication, kindness, love, books, community - will be okay. Ironically, for a group of men who talk about the ‘survival of the fittest’ a lot, the manosphere men are - in evolutionary terms - the ones struggling to adapt to a changing environment. They are, simply, apes that won’t make it. Which is why I felt the Theroux documentary resembled a David Attenborough one. I tried to kill myself when I didn’t feel I had the room to release my emotions. So I can see the bullshit of pretence and know it is worse than cocaine. So. The big delts and cigars, the TRT and steroids, the desperate need for a look is what you have when the substance has gone. It’s not just the lambos and apartments they rent. It’s an entire identity. And the lease is up.