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Róisín Lanigan, 33, grew up in Belfast and studied at Queen’s University Belfast before moving to London to work as a journalist. She previously covered pop culture at i-D magazine, and is now contributing editor at the independent quarterly the Fence. Her absorbing debut novel, I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There (Fig Tree), remakes the haunted house genre for the rental age, following a millennial couple, Áine and Elliott, as they first move in together. Soon, Áine begins to think the flat is against them, and Lanigan incisively tracks her character’s very modern descent into despair.
Up until now you’ve worked as a journalist. Did you always want to be a novelist?
I always wanted to write fiction, but it’s one of those jobs that feels so out of reach. It took me a long time to take it seriously and to believe that I could do it, especially when it comes to making up characters. It’s a strange departure from one where everything is factual and you can’t make up quotes.
Where did the idea for your novel come from?
I started writing it in 2022. I had just moved back to London after being in Belfast for part of the pandemic, working remotely. So I had to re-engage with the London rental market. At that time, landlords were desperate for you to move into their flats because they’d been empty, so their prices were quite low. If I’d left it six months later I would have really struggled. I’ve lived in London for 10 years now, so I’ve seen all the permutations of the London rental market – the book came out of that.
Why was horror the right approach?
I’m a big horror fan. I was reading a lot about haunted houses, and thinking about how all haunted house stories are essentially about owning property and the huge burden that places on you psychologically. And then I was thinking, I wonder what the equivalent is for us, as millennials who rent? Alongside that, I was seeing a lot of my friends – and myself – beginning to live with their partners much earlier than we had been conditioned to think you might do so, for financial reasons.
That then brings complications, if you’re not quite ready to make that step. So the book is a ghost story set in the rental crisis, but it’s also about this young woman’s experience of a situation that she finds increasingly intolerable, and how she has no outlet to express that.
Your protagonist, Áine, is pretty unlikable. What was your intention?
When you look at traditional horror and ghost stories, the women are always selfless. They’re often wives and mothers. They hold everything together. That always annoyed me. I wanted to write about the people I actually saw. There are a lot of young women like Áine who are listless and uncertain and aren’t driven towards domesticity.
The dialogue feels very realistic. Did you borrow much from real life?
I have this really bad habit where, if I hear someone say something ridiculous, I write it down in the notes app on my phone. I wanted the dialogue to be naturalistic and spiky, to reflect how people actually speak to each other. The other part that is based on reality comes in the long section where Áine is scrolling through Rightmove and is terrified by the rental listings she finds. Those are all taken from real Rightmove ads. In fact I kept coming back to them over the course of writing the book because what I saw kept getting worse, so I would replace them with even crazier ones.
What are your worst rental stories?
I moved to London with just a suitcase – it was the most Irish thing in the world. I moved into someone’s spare room and immediately got bedbugs. I had to throw away everything and start again. It was an inauspicious start. But I think the worst experience I’ve had is the crying woman, the banshee. She was our landlord and was constantly crying that we weren’t looking after the house the way she wanted us to. I eventually took my revenge: she left a case of champagne under the stairs, and I drank it.
How can the rental crisis be solved?
I think there are certain things that will help, like the renters’ rights bill, if it ends no-fault evictions. Currently there is this massive power that landlords have over tenants – it feels like they can do whatever they want. It’s also about housing stock: we just don’t build enough houses. And I think there’s a problem in the way we talk about property ownership culturally. It’s completely poisonous the way some people aspire to be landlords; that there are young people who want to build property portfolios, who want to flip houses and rent them. If we talk about that as a normal career choice, that is a sign of a deeply sick culture.
What books do you think best depict millennial life?
One of the things I read when I was writing my book was Common Decency by Susannah Dickey – it has a lot of interesting themes around surveillance in the community, and obsession. I also loved Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna. It’s about knowing when the party’s over and when you might have to leave London. I found that very relatable.
What’s your favourite literary horror story?
I really like Daisy Johnson’s Sisters, and The Yellow Wallpaper [by Charlotte Perkins Gilman]. They’re not necessarily horror stories, but stories about young women experiencing things that are not quite right, and how people around them react to that. I also like the melodrama of The Amityville Horror [by Jay Anson].
What books are on your bedside table?
I’m just about to start Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte because next I’m interested in writing about loners and “incels”. I want to write a novel about violent male crime and how we metabolise that as friends or people who knew the person, but also as the machine of journalism – how we turn those things into spectacles. I also have a copy of the new version of Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women, which feels very prescient.
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I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan is published by Fig Tree, £16.99. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
