Page 201 - The Midnight Library
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Her novel e Shape of Regret received rave reviews and was shortlisted for a
major literar y award. In that life she had lunch in a disappointingly banal
Soho members’ club with two affable, easy-going producers from Magic
Lantern Productions, who wanted to option it for film. She ended up
choking on a piece of flatbread and knocking her red wine over one of the
producer’s trousers and messing up the whole meet ing.
In one life she had a teenage son called Henr y, who she never met
properly because he kept slamming doors in her face.
In one life she was a concert pianist, currently on tour in Scandinavia,
playing night aer night to besotted crowds (and fading into the Midnight
Librar y during one disastrous rendition of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at
the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki).
In one life she only ate toast.
In one life she went to Oxford and became a lecturer in Philosophy at St
Catherine’s College and lived by herself in a fine Georgian townhouse in a
genteel row, amid an environment of respectable calm.
In another life Nora was a sea of emotion. She felt ever ything deeply and
directly. Ever y joy and ever y sorrow. A single moment could contain both
intense pleasure and intense pain, as if both were dep endent on each other,
like a pendulum in motion. A simple walk outside and she could feel a heavy
sadness simply because the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Yet, conversely,
meeting a dog who was clearly grateful for her attention caused her to feel so
exultant that she felt she could melt into the pavement with sheer bliss. In
that life she had a book of Emily Dickinson poems beside her bed and she
had a playlist called ‘Extreme States of Euphoria’ and another one called ‘ e
Glue to Fix Me When I Am Broken’.
In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube
subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her
most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also
had one about Rome called ‘A Roma erapy’.
In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn’t sleep.
In one life she ran the showbiz column in a tabloid newspaper and did
stories about Ryan Bailey’s relationships.
In one life she was the picture editor at the National Geographic.
In one life she was a successful eco-architect who lived a carbon-neutral
existence in a self-designed bungalow that har vested rain-water and ran on
