Staring at Lakes: A Memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking

Winner of the Irish Book Awards' National Book Tokens' Non-Fiction Book of the Year and The John Murray Show Listeners' Choice Award, 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 fifty-eight, 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 thirties, 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. Staring at Lakes started out as a book about depression, and then became a story about growing old, the essence of love and marriage—and sitting in cars, staring at lakes.