Matt Haig: ‘I use Winnie-the-Pooh as a pencil sharpener for the mind’

The book that changed me as a teenager SE Hinton’s The Outsiders. I am not sure of my exact age when I read it. Maybe 13 or 14. Susan Hinton wrote about teenagers – especially teenage boys – so well. It managed to be romanticised and sentimental and honest and gritty all at once. It was a friend to me, that book. I was also a big Sue Townsend fan. So Susans were my genre.The writer who changed my mind Emily Dickinson. She was about the only writer I could read when I was really ill in my mid-20s and knowing she too was agoraphobic, her words of light amid the dark gave me hope.