Women occupy a strange place in domestic horror stories: both the victims and the vessels through which the house’s dark forces manifest. Take The Haunting of Hill House, for example. Or if you take a more psychological approach to the genre, you’ll find The Yellow Wallpaper or Rebecca. For good reason, domesticity as a kind of gendered prison is a well-worn trope in gothic fiction – but today’s haunted house stories are less likely to be set in derelict mansions than in shoebox bedroom flats in Zone 4. There’s black mould creeping up paper-thin walls; the neighbours you hear but never see. Unlike ghosts, a landlord’s evil knows no bounds.
In her debut novel, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, Róisín Lanigan offers a timely and exacting look at London’s rental crisis. When Áine’s housemate and best friend Laura moves out, Áine decides to take the plunge and move in with her boyfriend Elliott. Their new, gentrified neighbourhood offers all the expected perks – artisan bakeries and yoga studios, babies who look like “Copenhagen-based fashion influencers”. But a sense of restlessness soon starts to settle in and Áine begins to feel that something’s off: an eerie, supernatural presence she can’t quite shake. As is par for the course, not everyone believes her; as Laura tells Áine, “I don’t think you can get a Foxton’s discount for demonic possession.”
Lanigan is a writer best known for her sense of humour, something that shines throughout I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There. But it’s also a book that offers extreme empathy to its subjects and deftly captures the strangeness of the world right now. In Soho, we spoke to Lanigan about the UK rental crisis, London, and what it means to belong.
It’s so interesting to me that your novel has come out at a time when quite a few other books are talking about the state of the rental market right now: Holly Pester’s The Lodgers and Oisin McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends. You’re all doing very different things. I’m wondering why you think there’s such a drive to tell these kinds of stories right now. What inspired you to write this story, in particular?
Róisín Lanigan: I’ve read Oisín’s novel and I loved it. His characters are a little bit older than Áine and Elliot; they’re more around my age, where you start wondering if you can afford to live in London forever. Thinking along those lines was partly why I wanted to write the book. I was living in a rental flat at the time, I’d just moved back from Belfast and prices had jumped massively. I was reading a lot of actual ghost stories, like The Shining, in which the characters were tied to financial insecurity in various ways. I was thinking about the insecurity that comes with writing now and not being tied to anything, bouncing around different jobs and different houses.
I think what you write is always informed by what you know. If you’re a millennial, if you’re a younger person in a city like London, that will inform where and what you write. When I first started writing the novel, I panicked that there might be loads of housing books. But I think that’s ultimately a good thing. It’s informing a moment that people are experiencing. When I signed the book, I thought: what if Labour come in and fix the housing crisis? Then I remembered that they won’t, so it’s fine. That’s one silver lining of it.
There’s a really beautiful moment line I wanted to talk to you about. Áine is packing up ‘the things that had previously made up the detritus of her life’. It really gets at how much we centre material possessions – and, by proxy, where we live – as a force for shaping our sense of self. Could you talk a little about how Áine sees herself in light of that?
Róisín Lanigan: She’s a very unsettled person. That plays into it for sure, but I think also because she’s also not from London, she’s Irish, and so she uses the things around her to confirm her identity. Áine can’t do that to the extent that she wants, because she doesn’t have the financial means; she can’t change anything about where she lives. Especially when you move in with someone new, you have to then navigate those sorts of things.
When we move into these anonymous, boxy flats, unfortunately we are encouraged to use material possessions to affirm our tastes or who we are, what we care about. When you have to leave a place every 12 months, that kind of exposes how reductive that is as a sense of self. Áine works from home, too, so she doesn’t have a professional self. She doesn’t feel she can be open with Elliot, and that informs her insecurity as well.
Everyone I know has a story of moving in with a partner after six months not because they’re in love, but because they can’t afford rent. You speedrun through milestones out of necessity, not choice
I think that remote working culture has made the house or where you live has more significance than it ever did before. There’s no physical space to separate the different parts of yourself.
Róisín Lanigan: Yeah! As much as financial insecurity can fracture your psyche. Also, moving in with someone living really closely with someone that you know the relationship is not quite right can do that too. For Áine, she’s almost performing herself to all of these people in her life. She performs for Elliot and for Laura, to an extent, as someone who’s more domestic, wholesome and responsible. With Cian, she pretends to be more hedonistic. She doesn’t have anyone that she can fully be herself around, although Laura is the closest person she has to that.
How did you approach the emotional restraint in your storytelling? Even moments that might typically provoke strong reactions – like the moment where Áine and Elliott get bitten by a dog they take home or the couple’s arguments – feel fairly subdued. Was this a deliberate choice?
Róisín Lanigan: Áine mentions early on that they don’t often fight, but that unnerves her. She almost feels as if that should be a part of their relationship. But then if she opens that door, she’ll unleash something within herself, so they don’t engage with it. Elliot’s very compartmentalised, as I think a lot of young men are. They both have these idealised versions of each other – she sees Elliot as such a good person. I can’t argue with him, she thinks, because everyone will think that he’s right. And she even imagined what people would say if they split up.
It’s almost one of the situations where, when you’re in an awkward situation with a friend or with a boyfriend, it’s always better to have a big row. But their relationship, particularly in the house, is spent tiptoeing around each other. You know it’s not quite right, but you don’t want to have the conversation or the fight.
When you’ve got these financial ties to people, the whole dynamic is contingent on those facts. In that respect, your book straddles comedy and realism to the more surreal and gothic. Did you always intend for it to have an uncanny edge or did that happen more naturally?
Róisín Lanigan: Their relationship is very naturalistic, but I always wanted to have a sense of the uncanny so it could reflect what a ghost story would look like for two people who, as you say, linked together like this. I wanted to lean towards the trope of horror but resist the stereotype of the very good mother who puts her children or her husband first, or who flees in the middle of the night in her car because the house is haunted and her husband finally takes her seriously.
I don’t generally like how women are represented in horror. I don’t think that Áine puts Elliot above her. She struggles with the fact that something’s a bit weird and he won’t listen to her. But I wanted to write a book where everyone is the worst version of themselves, where the woman is not a good, strong, noble person. So, I wanted it to be about modern relationships, with this element of the weird and the uncanny, too.
There’s also a cultural thing there because in Ireland, the uncanny is much more accepted. You have Púcas and fairy forts. You might not fully believe it, but you accept it’s part of the culture. Whereas in the US and UK, the feeling is that you should be more logical and accept that that stuff obviously doesn’t exist. That’s how all those elements have come together.
How much of Áine’s background informs how she sees the world?
Róisín Lanigan: She’s a classic diaspora character because she feels very outside of the people that she knows in London. Her background is different, and she’s far away from her parents. She doesn’t really let them into her life. They can’t understand each other, they’re not a safe space for her. That informs how she moves to the world, and she definitely keeps it at arm’s length as well. But someone like Cian helps bridge the gap for her.
To paraphrase a term you use towards the end, I’d call the book an autopsy of domesticity. But it’s also one of London, and what it’s like to live here in your twenties and thirties. How has your relationship with the city shaped the book?
Róisín Lanigan: It’s very much based on East Dulwich, where I lived while writing the book. It’s a very middle-class area; everyone has a child and a garden, strolling through the farmers market on Sundays. That definitely informed the setting because these people annoyed me on a cellular level. Their lives seemed so lovely. Then I’d go home to my overpriced, shitty flat. When I first moved there, it was affordable, but that changed like everything in London. Áine thinks she’s found a gem because it’s off the train line, just like I did. But even that got discovered and priced up.
Those little indignities build up. I’ve lived in London for ten years and never stayed anywhere longer than three. Some places, just five months. London is so breakneck, so fun, you push it out of your head, like Áine and Elliot do. But when you stop to think, it adds up. Everyone I know has a story of moving in with a partner after six months not because they’re in love, but because they can’t afford rent. You speedrun through milestones out of necessity, not choice. It’s a cohabitation of convenience, and I think there’s a much better way to live than that.
I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There is published by Penguin, and is out now.
