The psychiatrist RD Laing famously described insanity as “a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. His words returned to me while reading Róisín Lanigan’s debut novel I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, about a young woman whose experiences in the housing system drive her into psychosis. It’s bleak and all too real, but permeated with a sharp sense of humour.
Áine’s troubles start when her best friend, Laura, moves out of their shared flat in London to live with her boyfriend. It marks the symbolic end of their twenties: no more sleeping around, no more chain-smoking indoors. While Laura embraces this new phase of adulthood with enthusiasm, Áine is quietly horrified, seeing it as a desolate stretch of “caring about pension plans and which retinol is the best retinol”.
Though she seems ambivalent about her own boyfriend, Elliott, living alone isn’t an option she can afford. Together, they move into a flat in a gentrified, leafy neighbourhood. The rent is surprisingly reasonable, but something about the place unsettles Áine. “The emptiness, the perfectness of the circumstances.” So begins the horror story.
Lanigan mines the underlying affinity between the classic haunted house plot and the modern experience of endless renting. There’s an ambient sadness to these temporary spaces that are not designed to be homes. People pass through like ghosts, leaving invisible imprints. Áine works from home, “intermittently scrolling the mousepad to appear active”, soaking up the flat’s haunted energy. “She thought about how dust was made of other people’s skin, and it felt weird not knowing whose skin she was coughing up now.” Strange noises filter through the walls. She’s convinced she’s being watched. Fruit rots too quickly. Mould spreads out from the basement door. She becomes ill. She has nightmares, and when she wakes up she fears she might still be trapped inside them. Her mounting panic is exacerbated by the placidity of those around her. Elliott is patient but wishes she would cheer up. Laura is busy planning her wedding. The landlord doesn’t reply to her emails. Why can nobody else see that something is deeply wrong?
Anyone who has lived in awkward or squalid accommodation out of necessity knows how much it impacts your psychological health. I Want To Go Home But I’m Already Here evokes the moment when end-of-youth nostalgia intersects with a distinctly late-capitalist shade of blue. Another writer might be tempted to get scholarly, tracing Áine’s depression back to Thatcher or the financial crash; invoking Marx and Fisher to frame it not as a personal affliction but as a symptom of systemic failure. RD Laing again: “Do not adjust your mind, reality is at fault.”
But this isn’t really a state-of-the-nation novel. Something more interesting is happening under the surface. However badly we might want to relate to Áine and bemoan her situation, Lanigan makes it impossible to be on her side. She’s unsympathetic not because she cheats on her boyfriend or looks contemptuously on her best friend’s ordinary aspirations, but because she complains so incessantly, because she is so completely allergic to any form of joy.
She scans everything and everyone in her life for irony, and if something is deemed “unironic” then it’s immediately dismissed as cringe. She describes her commute in great detail, as if to punish us for it. Her inner monologue is painfully millennial. Sundays are “objectively the worst day to carry out planned engineering works”, she thinks in the first line of the novel. She complains about her flat so extensively that it ends up saying more about her own lack of spiritual largesse than about her living conditions. When she eventually moves out there’s not much of a sense of relief because it’s December: “objectively the worst time to move”.
Lanigan reveals her concerns as a novelist in her decision to make Áine so thoroughly unlikeable. She is reaching beyond the overtly political, towards something more complicated and spiritual that has to do with agency. How much of our misery can we blame on the atomised times we live in? Elliott and Laura’s numb contentment may be bleak, but Áine’s acute sensitivity is surely worse. The reality is that the housing system operates exactly as it was designed to. It’s the nightmare we won’t wake up from.
I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There reckons with the real psychological effects of systemic problems, but manages to counterbalance them against the great, unwavering fact that we alone are responsible for our happiness on this earth. These are big concerns for a first novel, and Lanigan formulates them with wit and precision.
