Mullingar is like Paris or Prague

Mullingar is “very much like Paris or Prague”, Michael Harding told Brendan O’Connor on The Saturday Night Show at the weekend.

The playwright, author and Irish Times columnist was talking about his latest book, Staring at Lakes.

He says it’s a candid memoir of a middle-aged man on the verge of disaster, and how love brings him back from the brink, it is a brutally honest account of Harding’s journey through life.

This is what he told the Westmeath Examiner in February:

“It starts with myself and the wife having a row about the dishwasher and I got the thought into my head that every man must have his own dishwasher and I decided to leave,” explains Michael.

“I thought I’d go somewhere very sophisticated like Paris, but I only made it as far as Mullingar. Mullingar is very much like Paris or Prague. I started writing the column in the newspaper, Displaced in Mullingar. So a lot of it is centred around tales from Mullingar,” he continues.

“I was doing the theatres, doing the Thinker’s Curse and I got very sick. I got totally burnt out. I developed a chest infection and was taking antibiotics and steroids but I didn’t want to stop working, until eventually one day I collapsed and ended up in Mullingar hospital. My beloved wife came to visit me and took me back to Leitrim and after that I went into six months of depression.

“So it’s a story of depression brought on by overwork and too much worrying about money in middle age. It’s also a love story and rediscovering the woman in my life.”

Michael is currently rehearsing for a new one-man show based on stories from Kinnegad, which he hopes to put on stage later this year.