What does ​“home” mean, anyway?

Róisín Lanigan has been concentrating on scheduling her panic attacks. ​“Just small, tiny ones, in-between trying to make sure I walk 17,000 steps a day,” she says over the phone (semi-cheerfully).

There’s good reason for the Belfast-born writer to be feeling trepidatious: today marks the release of her debut novel, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There. Neatly billed as a horror story for generation rent, it’s also a poignant character study of a young woman, Áine, whose desperate loneliness and feelings of inadequacy are compounded by London’s brutal housing market.

At the start of the book, we meet Áine at a crossroads which might sound familiar to some: she’s got an office job that’s a bit of a doss and has been with her boyfriend Elliott for a couple of years. She’s lived with her best friend, Laura, since university. But now their shared lease is up and Laura is moving in with her own partner. Why shouldn’t Áine move in with Elliott? She loves him – enough, anyway – and it’s not like she can afford to move in on her own.

And so Áine and Elliott find a flat which, on the surface, seems like a steal: trendy location, within their budget, clouty pub round the corner, overpriced bakery on their doorstep. Elliott is thrilled; Áine is reluctant. Something, deep down in her bones, doesn’t feel right. But they sign the lease anyway, and before long, what’s supposed to play out as the exciting next chapter of their lives becomes Áine’s anxious, all-consuming conviction that the flat is haunted. The walls start to literally close in on her, its damp, mouldy interiors becoming sentient and contaminating her insides. As the central relationships in Áine’s life break down, she becomes totally unmoored from reality.

​“She’s someone who lets herself go with the flow, not really knowing what she wants, and doing things because she thinks she should want them rather than the other way around,” Lanigan says. ​“And so she goes through this long, drawn out crisis. I wanted to do that on purpose, because when this happens to people, they have to put on a show of normality for their work or relationships or friends.

​“Áine doesn’t have a solid enough support system to have a breakdown, or enough privilege to hide from the world completely. And so she has to engage with this, which is why she falls apart.”

Hi, Róisín! Where was the seed for I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There sewn? When did it turn from a gripe into a fully formed idea for a novel?

When I moved back to London after living in Belfast for an extended period, at the tail end of the pandemic. Living there has become way more expensive, like London and Dublin, but at the time it was much cheaper. It was kind of my first experience of being able to function as an adult. Renting in London, so much of your money goes back into someone else’s hands – you can’t really live normally.

At that point, when everyone came back to the city because they had to go back to work or whatever, the housing demand was so high and these bidding processes were starting, which I’d never experienced before and are so evil. So that was on my mind. At the same time, I was reading a lot of horror. I was particularly interested in Amityville and how it was the most lucrative ghost story of all time – it’s been recontextualised recently, with people saying it wasn’t really a ghost story but rather about this family who were Catholic and couldn’t split up. They made a huge financial investment in this house and couldn’t walk away from it. I was thinking about what haunted house stories are sometimes about: being tied to capital and not being able to walk away from it.

So this was like an equivalent ghost story for millennials or Gen Z?

Yeah. You can walk away from a flat if you don’t own it – most of us aren’t married with children, so you don’t have the same roots. But you can’t escape the process: you can leave, but you’ll go back into the same system and be potentially thousands of pounds worse off because you’ve broken your deposit. Around that time, a lot of my friends were moving out of London permanently, thinking about moving in with their partners for the first time or having children.

It was almost like this second coming of age where we were all trying to decide how to be adults, and in some cases doing things too soon because it was cheaper to do so: people moving in with their partners because it was financially sensible rather than them actually wanting to do that. So both of those ideas together became the basis for I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There. You described it as a gripe, which is a good word to use because I wrote it quite quickly. It poured out of me. You only start to realise how horrible these things are about renting when you slow down to think about them.

I wrote an article about ​“inflationships” in 2023 about just that – when you rush a milestone like moving in with your partner for the sake of saving cash, making those big steps first because you’re forced to.

When you grow up, the relationships you see on TV and in films are so much more demarcated. You fall in love, you share a key, you move in together. Then you get married and have children. It’s so much more complicated for our generation. Where am I gonna put a baby? In the drawer? Or it’s: we’re living together because the landlord has kicked one of us out. Bleak! And it’s not always like that, but occasionally, it happens.

This book has clearly been written by a well-seasoned and burned renter. What was your first flat in London like?

It was so awful. I knew one person in the city, who I’d gone to school with, and she was moving out of her flat so I moved in. I got bed bugs and had to throw out all of my stuff. I lived there for like, two weeks. Then I found another flat on the same road, in Bethnal Green. I didn’t know any of the people I lived with and it wasn’t a very nice experience – you’ve got a lock on your door, you don’t really talk when you get home. I lived on crisps and toast. It was not a good start to living in London. For the first three or four years, I was moving more than once a year. Everything was so temporary, and at the time, fresh out of uni, that felt really exciting. You look back on it now though, and it’s like, ​‘oh my God. How did I live like that?’ And also: this is not a good way to live. You don’t really realise how unsettling it is to have to eat your dinner in bed because you only have a bed.

I think there’s this concept that this is a character building, rite of passage type of thing. But it’s actually not normal.

Everyone has these horror stories, and it becomes almost like a bonding experience to talk about them. But I’m really reticent to think of them as an experience you ​“have” to go through. You shouldn’t have to!

To me, I Want To Go Home… is about the concept of home – whether that’s a person or a city or under an actual physical roof – as a fundamental emotional requirement that we all have. Can you tell me more about that?

I mentioned that second coming of age you have in your twenties. I describe this as being really homesick but not knowing what or where you’re homesick for. It’s not your flat. If you’ve fled back to your parents’, it doesn’t feel right either, because you’re older and everything’s changed and it’s uncanny in some ways. In a sense, that is a rite of passage people have to go through. If you disregard the housing stuff, it’s a part of growing up – realising that you don’t really know where home is and you have to build it for yourself. Áine’s far from her parents, who are emotionally absent; her boyfriend is also emotionally absent; her friends are going through the same thing. So she feels abandoned.

What were you reading and listening to while writing I Want To Go Home…

A mix of contemporary horror and female-focused literary fiction. I read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which I loved as a teenager – that idea of a woman being driven mad by being confined in this room. I liked Daisy Johnson’s Sisters, the eeriness and uncertainty of whether what was happening was real or in the characters’ heads. For the class aspect, I read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. I also read My Year of Rest and Relaxation a bunch of times, I love that book. I’d started writing I Want To Go Home…, and I was wondering how a person would deal with psychic stress in their life if they were a normal person.

What do you reckon being a grown-up means and looks like in 2025?

Realising what you want to do and making those choices in a sensible and safe way – even if it contradicts what you imagine adulthood to look like – and not rushing into things before you feel ready to do them. I have a relaxed view of adulthood. Everyone feels like they’re cosplaying it, anyway. There are people you speak to who are 20 years your senior and they’re an executive at work and they’re winging it. To quote that classic meme: it’s everyone’s first time being alive. No one actually knows what they’re doing – it’s just that some people feel more secure in themselves.

I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There is out now.