Michael Harding: ‘I don’t spare the gory details of this sad eejit’

“I feel there’s an authenticity in trying to say: I’ll tell you my own story and I won’t limit it,” says author, playwright and columnist, Michael Harding, about the third instalment of his memoir.

“It’s not telling my family’s story, but I will not spare myself in giving you the sad gory details of this sad eejit,” he told Róisín Ingle, presenter of the Róisín Meets podcast.

Harding chronicles his life in a weekly column in this paper and in his previous two books he has written about his battle with depression and the grief of losing his mother.

His latest book, Talking to Strangers, takes place over the space of a year and details – among other things – the marriage breakdowns of some friends and the difficulties he faced while his sculptor wife was away working.

Theirs’ has never been a conventional marriage he says, but his wife is his, “anchor, it’s that she’s a compass in life. You’re like a little satellite that heads off out into space and finds a moon and gets into orbit around it and says: “oh I have direction now!””

Harding admits that sharing your private stories comes with the, “price of exposing yourself”, but he is careful not to intrude on other people’s privacy, particularly that of his wife.

“I tell the story of how a man feels – but if you look at it there’s nothing much about her, but it is a full story,” he said.

As he has done with his previous books, Harding has taken Talking to Strangers on the road for a series of live performances. They are evenings of storytelling, readings, and musings, but things can get dangerous he says.

“I ostensibly read from the book. Now, that’s what I’d tell the guards: “I was reading from the book, sir”. Sometimes after about three minutes I do have a tendency to drop the book and go off in a tangent and that’s when it gets dangerous and flirtatious.”

For details on Michael Harding’s Talking to Strangers tour go to michaelharding.ie. Talking to Strangers, published by Hatchette Ireland, is out now.