Finding her roar Trinity graduate, Lisa Harding (MPhil 2014, BA 1995) tells Bridget Hourican, Trinity Today, about moving from acting to writing, living in Dublin, and her new novel set on a certain campus. L isa Harding’s first novel, Harvesting (2017) is set in the disturbing underworld of sex trafficking in Dublin and her second novel, Bright Burning Thing s, published last year, confronts alcoholism and single motherhood. Her next novel, working title Truth Game , is a campus thriller set in the 1990s. ‘I wanted to write something more entertaining for myself,’ says Harding, when we meet online, ‘because the other two were so intense and disturbing to write. But my agent recently read the first half and she said “it’s really dark” so it seems like I can’t get away from darkness, in my writing life anyway. That’s not who I am otherwise. People are always meeting me and saying “you don’t seem like your books” - which I’m very glad to hear!’ We agree that the creative self is quite separate to the day-to- day living self, but it’s interesting that as an actor - her career for twenty years - Harding was always being cast as ‘pretty little things’, perhaps because of her blond femininity, and it was only when she changed art forms that she found what she calls ‘my roar’. The campus in her new novel isn’t identified as Trinity - ‘Trinity has been used so successfully by Sally Rooney that my instinct is to slightly obscure and obfuscate like Donna Tartt in A Secret History [set on a fictional campus, based on Tartt’s alma mater, Bennington College], but yes, I went to Trinity, for the first time, in the 1990s and what I depict in the novel is very much a heightened version of the university I remember.’ The early 1990s - after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11; at the apogee of rave culture and the start of the Celtic Tiger, when rents were cheap and climate change a distant glow - was the kind of carefree, hedonistic time that students today can only dream of. Harding recalls it as ‘wild, brilliant… Dublin had a romance then; all these eccentric characters walking around. I’d a flat in Raglan Road, which seems unimaginable now. The novel’s narrator is a woman in her forties looking back, so I get to relive my time, though totally exaggerated. The action centres on a group of kids from dysfunctional homes who are seeking family but in all the wrong places… I’m channelling an interest in cults, which I’ve had for years.’ In college, Harding was strong academically - she started in European Studies but switched to History and French and was awarded ‘a student prize, or bursary, in French, aimed at promising students of limited means - my dad had run into financial difficulties by then, so that was useful’. But all her passion during her college years went into Players - ‘I knew I wanted to be an actress, so as soon as I graduated, I went to the Gaiety School of Acting, on a council or corporation scholarship.’ After the Gaiety, she hit the ground running. ‘I worked in the Abbey, the Gate, the Peacock. I had a good career in Dublin, and in retrospect it’s one of my regrets that I left for London, but I was very ambitious and there was a sense that “to make it” you had to go to London.’ Those years, in her thirties, trying to make it in London were, she says frankly, ‘brutal’. She looks back now ‘with more compassion for myself but I’d none at the time. You judge yourself mercilessly and you’re always in competition with other people. You go to an audition, and you’re rejected. If you’re in a job, you’re scared because the job is coming to an end. It’s particularly hard for women because so much is about how you look, and in classical theatre there are so few female roles. I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be. And nobody tells you!’ The uncertainties and rejections built into an acting career are exacerbated, she believes, because ‘actors don’t necessarily have a strong sense of themselves in the world. I can only speak for myself but I was certainly needy. I think in drama school you should be given anchoring techniques and psychological training on how to navigate through.’ She has already produced one brilliant portrait of a troubled actress in Bright Burning Things , and in the future, she would ‘love to write more about what it’s like, and really sit in the pocket of that experience’. After 13 years in London, she was ‘really homesick’ and was able to return to Dublin thanks to landing the role of Connie in Fair City . A year later, she enrolled in the MPhil in Creative Writing in the Trinity School of English. By then she had already written her first play and her talent was evident. She has had three plays performed, in Theatre503, Battersea Arts Centre and the Project Arts Centre, but for the MPhil, she knew she wanted to write a novel. ‘Writing plays and screenplays can have the same kind of heartbreak as being an actor because you’re dependent on other people to produce the work. I wanted to do something that I had complete control over.’
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