Staring at Lakes

A memoir of love, melancholy and magical thinking

By: Michael Harding

Narrated by: Michael Harding

Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Staring at Lakes is about the essence of love and marriage, about growing old and sitting in cars and staring at lakes.

Throughout his life, Michael Harding has lived with a sense of emptiness - through faith, marriage, fatherhood and his career as a writer, a pervading sense of darkness and unease remained. When he was 58, he became physically ill and found himself in the grip of a deep melancholy.

Here, in this beautifully written memoir, he talks with openness and honesty about his journey: leaving the priesthood when he was in his 30s, settling in Leitrim with his artist wife, the depression that eventually overwhelmed him, and how, ultimately, he found a way out of the dark by accepting the fragility of love and the importance of now.

©2013 Michael Harding (P)2015 Hachette Ireland, Hodder & Stoughton

Critic reviews

"Hilarious, and tender, and mad, and harrowing, and wistful, and always beautifully written. A wonderful book." (Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane)

"This frank and unflinching memoir offers a fascinating insight into the mind of the author of two of the finest Irish novels of the eighties." (Pat McCabe, author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto)

"This memoir grabs you from the outset and holds you right to the end. Harding traverses the human soul and excavates its deepest secrets. His language sings. Extraordinary." (Deirdre Purcell, author of Pearl and Diamonds and Holes in My Shoes)

"It's rare for a memoir to demand such intense emotional involvement, and rarer still for it to be so fully rewarded." (Sunday Times)