A decade or so ago, when Róisín Lanigan first moved to London, she would go to events and parties with other writers. The topic of housing would inevitably come up in conversation – how hard people had it; how difficult it was for this generation to buy homes – but when she asked her fellow partygoers where they were living, the answer tended to be something like, “Oh, my dad has a flat.”
Lanigan herself was renting a room in Bethnal Green, having moved over from Belfast shortly after completing her degree in Queen’s University.
“I had no money,” she says. “I lived on ready-salted crisps, tins of soup and bacon from Tesco. People always say that stuff like it’s dead glamorous, but it’s obviously really not. I lived in agency flats [rental property managed by letting agents]. I didn’t know anyone that lived there. They were mainly Spanish and Italian – students or young professionals like me.
“None of us spoke to each other. I’d leave in the morning and have to lock my door, not because they were, you know, dangerous, but we didn’t know each other.”
Lanigan grew up in a working-class family on the Falls Road. Her mother was a hotel cleaner and worked in a shoe shop. Her father was a bartender for a period, and later stayed at home looking after the children while in receipt of the dole. In Lanigan and her two younger sisters they raised what she calls “three nerds”, but no amount of academic grounding could compete with the kinds of generational wealth on show in the British capital. She began to realise that “we’re not on a level playing field here. Everyone’s kind of accessing the housing crisis in different, secretive ways”.
Having now lived in more rental properties than she can count (“the longest time I’ve lived in a place is three years, and the shortest is maybe six months”, she says) and having written, as a journalist, about the strains and indignities of the housing system, it’s perhaps no wonder that her debut novel, I Want to Go Home but I’m Already Here (Fig Tree) is a take on the millennial housing crisis, in the form of a haunted house story.
On a bright spring morning, we sit in a dead glamorous Dublin hotel to chat about it. She wears a suitably Victorian-gothic white ruffled top (she was once a fashion journalist for i-D magazine), along with a black leather skirt and knee-high boots. In her ears are Claddagh-shaped earrings, and on the palm of each hand is a tattoo of the closing lines of a Wendy Cope poem – “I love you” (right hand), “I’m glad I exist” (left hand). More on the significance of those tattoos anon, but first the novel.
“I started it because I was reading and listening to a podcast about haunted houses, and started thinking about how haunted house stories are not actually about ghosts, they are about capital, and they’re about the financial burden of owning property,” she says.
She references works such as The Shining, and The Amityville Horror, which feature families who purchase large properties and cannot leave when things begin to feel “a bit off”, because all their capital is tied up in the property.
“I was thinking, oh, that’s really interesting, but what is my equivalent as a millennial? I’ll never own property, so I can’t have the traditional haunted house story.” But then she began thinking about the lived reality of renting today.
“I thought, well, I could leave my rental flat if I wanted to – if there was something really wrong with it, I could walk out – but where am I going? I have friends, but they’re in the same situation as me. They don’t own their own houses. They don’t have spare rooms. So, I’d walk out to nothing. I wouldn’t get my deposit back. I would be more financially insecure than I was previously. And also, I was thinking about how younger people tend to go into relationships and living with people quicker for the same reason – they’re like, oh, it’ll be cheaper, so I might as well.”
In the novel, a young couple, Elliot and Áine, move into a ground-floor flat in a “boujie” area of an unnamed, but London-like, city. The flat “tick[s] a lot of their hypothetical boxes”, but from the beginning, Áine has the feeling of “being in the wrong place, or watching over a place that [is]n’t hers, never meant to be hers”. The longer they stay, the more the house encroaches upon her, with its dampness, its mould, its spooky upstairs neighbours, and as the months roll by, Áine’s inner and exterior circumstances begin to blend into a nightmarish hellscape.
The book uses horror tropes throughout, and like most horror stories, has allegorical undertones – postcolonial tensions, the fragility of mental and physical health, the loneliness of an unstable relationship, and more, all simmer beneath the surface. The very language of the text also feels haunted – it uses a particular and sardonic lexicon associated with the contemporary housing market. (At one point Elliott accuses Áine of having “squandered” the “asset” of silence, for example.)
When asked about this use of language, Lanigan brings up a phrase she often saw on rental advertisements, that she reproduced in the novel – “No DSS. No pets (sorry!)” (DSS, or Department of Social Services, refers to people in receipt of benefits.)
“I saw this phrase on every single rental thing and it used to really annoy me, but also it was just haunting,” she says. “I grew up on benefits. The idea that they were like, ‘no people on benefits, we’re not even sorry, but we’re sorry you can’t have your lovely dog‘.
“But that kind of thing, I think, we just absorb, and we’re like, ‘Okay’. Those kind of phrases that we don’t even unpack. Cost of living crisis. What does that mean? Things like that I wanted to put into the book.”
The process of writing the book involved making character profiles of Áine and Elliot – what their star signs were, what music they liked, how they met, what they studied at university and so on – and sticking them to her walls with “renter-friendly” Blu Tack.
“It was quite funny, the landlord kept dropping in and out throughout. At one point he came over and I had a big cork board, and I was editing it. He was like, ‘What are you working on at the minute?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, a book about the housing crisis,’” she laughs.
“I hope he reads it,” she adds.
The manuscript was completed in a blistering four months.
“I am quite a passionate person when it comes to the housing crisis and landlords and, like, capitalism, so I think I wrote it with anger in my heart,” Lanigan says. “And possibly, you know, there were other things that were going on at the time, and I think that’s probably why it came out so quickly, because I’m quite passionate.”
These “other things” included getting married in 2022, and divorced almost exactly a year later.
“I was getting married when I wrote [the book] – there’s some Freudian analysis there,” she muses, referring to the novel’s depiction of a doomed relationship.
“It’s hard to end something, especially when you’re young. And again, myself and my ex-husband didn’t own property together, so in a way it was easy because we didn’t have anything to split up. We were both very young; we just left it there. But in another way it was very difficult.”
The experience is one Lanigan memorialised in a scorching essay for The Fence Magazine in 2023, The Chic Young Divorcée.
“I don’t write a lot of personal stuff; that was the only personal essay-ish thing that I’ve ever written. It was interesting, I found it easier to metabolise that experience because there were a lot of young divorces at the time … but it also made it weirder.”
Being married and divorced having barely crested the wave of her third decade might seem like quite enough turmoil for one person, but Lanigan, now 32, seems to have lived a thousand lives. In 2018, when she was just 26, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“It was just completely out of the blue,” she says. “It was, like, a one-in-1,287 chance − like, mad numbers. I didn’t have the BRCA gene. There was no genetic reason why it would have happened. It was just bad luck really.”
I lost a lot of my hair, lost my eyebrows and my eyelashes. It was very stressful. I think what I found most stressful ... was the idea that I was a burden to people
— Róisín Lanigan
The doctors told her she could go home to Belfast and continue to be treated in the public health service, but she was determined to stay in London.
“I remember thinking I had always felt behind my peers in London – I already felt like they could do things quicker, they found things easier, they had better access – and I felt like I was just catching up. And then I remember [thinking], ‘I’m going to be so behind all these things that I want to do now, because I’m going to have to take time out to deal with the illness.’”
In the hot summer of 2018, during what should have been the most carefree time of her life, Lanigan was instead experiencing gruelling chemotherapy.
“It just makes you think about what you want in your life at an age where you probably don’t want to think about that,” she says. “I had to do IVF and do egg freezing ...
“It made me reconsider how I feel about how I look. I lost a lot of my hair, lost my eyebrows and my eyelashes, things like that. It was very stressful. I think what I found most stressful – which I think also kind of leads into the book – was the idea that I was a burden to people. But it feels weird – in a way, it feels like a long time ago, or like it happened to someone else, because it was so traumatic. And then in another way, it’s kind of always there.”
The aforementioned Wendy Cope lines tattooed on her palms (“I love you/ I’m glad I exist”, from the poem, The Orange) were a present to herself in 2022, for being five years with clear scans.
“I thought it would be a nice reminder to myself that I’m glad I’m here on days when I’m spiralling, or stressed, or gloomy,” she says. “I had absolutely no idea how painful they’d be, because they are my only tattoos and apparently palms are a killer. But I really love them.”
Unsurprisingly, she says the experience of having gone through cancer, “massively changed my life”.
“It’s probably why I work so fast now. Like, I wrote this [book] in a matter of months, as I said. I’ve written a second one and it’s finished and I’m writing something else now. I’m like, ‘I have to do things, I have to do things.’”
A quick internet search of Lanigan’s name will confirm she’s not a person who likes to sit still. Having earned her journalistic chops at the youth culture website The Tab, she went on to spend five years at i-D magazine, before it was taken over by new owners and she and many others were made redundant. These days, her articles, which range from the cerebral to the wacky (she’s written a dispatch from the worst Tesco in London, and published a chart comparing the heights of British journalists), can be found in The Fence Magazine, where she is contributing editor, along with many other high-profile outlets, including this one.
Along with the likes of Rachel Connolly, Séamas O’Reilly, Oisín McKenna and others, Lanigan is part of a cohort of Irish writers making strides in the London literary scene. Does she feel part of a rising tide?
“I’ve seen both sides of it,” she says. “When I started writing fiction I remember submitting – it wasn’t this book, it was a different book – and an English agent coming back to me and just being like, ‘Irish stories don’t sell. We have enough, and they’re not really doing that well. Can you write in a less Irish way?‘”
Lanigan’s instinct to apologise – “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry that you hate me” – was soon replaced by the feeling that “I actually don’t think that’s okay to say that sort of thing.”
“And now we have the other side of the coin. When I come into contact with English editors or writers, there is sometimes a bit of an undercurrent that they’re like, ‘Oh, Irish writers are doing really well. Irish writers are winning a lot of awards right now.’ You can’t win. You’re either unpopular and unfashionable, or you’re really fashionable but it’s part of a trend.”
The feedback has been really nice so far, but I am sort of waking up in a cold sweat every other night [with] this horrible feeling that it’s going to come out and no one’s going to read it
— Róisín Lanigan
I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There was acquired in 2023, after a drawn-out process which involved a whole other novel, and two different agents. When news eventually came through that her book was going to be published, Lanigan was abroad, on a job.
“A lot of the jobs I’ve had are so strange to me – I was working with i-D at the time, and I was at Paris fashion week,” she says. “Someone was sick, and they were like, ‘You have to go.’ I showed up, and I was the person that stood at the back of the room with my phone, filming things.”
When a text came through to say she had landed a book deal, she had to keep a straight face and carry on filming.
“I think I went out for a drink that night by myself. In Paris, which feels so glamorous, but it really wasn’t,” she laughs. “And then I couldn’t tell anyone because it didn’t get announced for ages. It was my little secret thing.”
A year-and-a-half later, as she prepares for publication, she says she’s nervous, despite her experience publishing work as a journalist.
“Obviously as a journalist it’s still really hard to take criticism, but you’re like, ‘Well, I’ll write something next week, and maybe they’ll be nicer about it,’ and that’s fine. With this, it took a long time to write, it’s taken a long time to come out, I have to sit with it, and I have to let people say, ‘I didn’t like this.’ And I haven’t yet learned to do that. The feedback has been really nice so far, but I am sort of waking up in a cold sweat every other night [with] this horrible feeling that it’s going to come out and no one’s going to read it.”
I assure her people are already queuing up to buy it, especially those who are all too familiar with the grind of the rental market. We talk a little more about book promotion – how unnatural it can feel to flaunt one’s own achievements, especially given the Irish sensibility. As our time comes to a close – Lanigan has a flight to catch, back to London – I ask if there’s anything more she’d like to add or discuss.
“Not really,” she says, sweetly.
Then, with a mischievous grin: “I mean, property is obviously theft. But apart from that, no.”
I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There is published by Fig Tree on March 20th
