Author interview: Harding back to college days with love of campus novel

'The Wildelings' is set in a fictionalised version of Trinity College Dublin in 1992 — when the author was a student there

Lisa Harding calls her university The Wilde as a homage to the Oscar Wilde Creative Writing department where, in 2014 she took an MPhil. File picture: Darragh Kane

• The Wildelings 
• Lisa Harding 
• Bloomsbury, €16.99

In early 2021, at the end of Ireland’s final covid lockdown, Lisa Harding was feeling blue. She’d been looking forward to the new year, with the release of her second novel,  Bright Burning Things, and indeed, it had received rapturous acclaim from critics.

But with covid still raging, she was unable to get out and publicise the book.

So even the extraordinary news that the novel had been picked up for the Today Show book club in the US failed to lift her mood.

“It was huge,” she says, as we chat over coffee in the Museum of Literature, Ireland, “and my publishers were very excited, but I didn’t get to go to America.

“I should have gone over and been on The Today show. They would have put me up in New York.

“I was on TV, but it was all done on Zoom, and that felt flat and very isolating.”

I was on my own in life, so the whole experience felt sad.

It was during this time that she started work on her recently released third novel, The Wildelings, set in a fictionalised version of Trinity College Dublin in 1992 — when Lisa was a student there.

“I’ve always loved the campus novel,” she says.

“It’s rarefied, but you have youth, hormones, abandon, drugs, sex, and rock and roll, and the petri dish setting.

“In the early 1990s, we could afford to live in town. I made my own way, waitressing throughout college and managed to pay rent. We had a lot of freedom.”

She calls her university The Wilde as an homage to the Oscar Wilde Creative Writing department where, in 2014, she took an MPhil.

“I love Wilde; I love the centre, and calling it that gave me total artistic licence,” she explains.

Characters have all suffered familial abandonment

The novel features a group of beautiful students, headed by suburban best friends Jessica and Linda, who have all — in various ways — suffered familial abandonment.

When an older student, Mark, takes up with Linda, he infiltrates the group and sets them up against each other — plying them with drink and drugs — then he watches the fallout.

The book starts when Jessica, now in middle age, is talking to a therapist, trying to understand and come to terms with the events of her student life — and to try and forgive herself.

Lisa met her deadline. The novel was accepted for publication, but she felt it wasn’t quite right.

After realising how she could fix it, she asked for it back.

“Initially Mark was just a dark predator — a mentalist who played with all these kids — but then I realised that he was a writer, and that Jessica was an actress.

“It blurs the boundaries of the theatre and real life.

“He was the writer who watches the worst of human behaviour and sets it off so that he can write about it; the brilliant writer’s mind and icy heart.”

I loved the idea of his feeding into all their insecurities and wounds — inveigling his way into their lives and causing havoc.

Jessica is cast as the star of Mark’s play and, in a shocking scene, is left traumatised. That didn’t happen to Lisa, who adored her Trinity days — and particularly her time acting in Players.

But as a young actress in Dublin, she remembers feeling unsafe.

“I was in a rehearsal room with two men who were older than me. I was in my underwear, because the part required it, and they were smoking dope. Really inappropriate things were said.”

Her experience gives this book an air of authenticity throughout. I was hugely impressed with it — with the writing, theatricality, and sheer page turning drama of it.

I learned from it too — what it is to be an actress, as well as the long-lasting effects abandonment can bring. 

I’ve always loved Lisa’s visceral writing, and this, her best yet, may well become my novel of the year.

While Lisa has always enjoyed writing, her initial ambition was to be a dancer.

I was a strong contemporary dancer, but there were no training schools in Ireland.

“I got into a place in London, but there was no money and no funding back then,” she says.

She studied European languages at Trinity, and then got caught up in Trinity Players — discovering her love and talent for acting. Dominic West directed her in her first play.

Having caught the acting bug, she won a scholarship to the Gaiety School of Acting.

From there, she built up a successful career — appearing at the Gate Theatre, the Abbey and the Lyric. But a move to London proved less enjoyable.

“I was having a really hard time in my late 20s,” she says. 

“I was panic attacking. When you train in the Meissner technique, they’re clearing the actor of any ego. They draw on your past hurts and traumas, but they’re not psychologists.”

They take you to a place where you get really distressed but don’t put you back together, and that can be really damaging.

Mark uses this method among others to bring out the best acting in Jessica.

“Mark was a good director and a brilliant writer,” says Lisa, “but does the end justify the means?

“Does high art mean you can do anything and get away with it? Mark would say yes, but ‘no’ is obviously the answer.”

Lisa hated auditions — never feeling she gave of her best, and as time went on, she wasn’t getting the kind of parts she wanted.

By her late 30s, it was all getting a bit much. That’s when she tried writing plays.

“I shocked myself,” she says, “as I hadn’t written since school.

“I sent a play out everywhere, and the National Theatre in London called me in. They said ‘this is unique. It’s weird and wonderful’.”

They didn’t put the play on, but they commissioned me to write for a festival for new writers.

The books which have followed, she says, are a continuation.

“They are very theatrical, with a lot of dialogue, action, and colour.”

The first one, Harvesting, grew out of a short story Lisa wrote during her MPhil in Creative Writing. 

A visceral, raw story of sex trafficking in Dublin, it focuses on the friendship of two 15 year olds who end up in a highly supervised brothel — Sammy from Dublin, and Nico from Moldova.

And the second, Bright Burning Things, features Sonia — a former actress and single mum who is struggling with addiction.

“I felt like I was in Sonia’s skin,” says Lisa, “whereas Jessica is a very heightened, damaged wilful part of me — and of all young actresses I think.”

She is currently playing with her fourth novel — which also features an actress.

“I’m writing a lot of scenes and chapters, and just exploring the world of it,” she says.

Describing herself as a very messy writer — the last two novels have taken four years each to complete — Lisa is determined to get the next one finished quicker.

“But you never know. In four years, I could be saying: ‘I’m not finished.’”

Lisa is now in a happy place — she has a partner she adores and has enjoyed several Arts Council funded residencies. She enjoys teaching, but does writing make her happy?

“When I’m in the flow, writing has a similar pulse to dancing. It feels like it’s coming from somewhere bigger than me. That feeling is amazing, but it doesn’t happen a lot.

“The more you write, and the more pressure is on you to write another book, the more difficult it is to feel that freedom. But when I’m in it, I really do love it.”