'It's not like you just have this one emotional blowout'

Riding a wave of post-Sally Rooney Irish lit, Grainne O’Hare tells Ellie Harrison about her novel Thirst Trap’, the tale ofa group of young Belfast women grappling with life and loss

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We’ve all got that friend. The one who plonks herself down at the pub table, overflowing with anecdotes about the night before. The one who has the whole group in thrall to her stories, each one a marmalade-dropper in its own right and delivered with panache and killer timing. Whether it’s sexual escapades or a slice of office gossip, she’s got the tea. It’s always a joy hanging out with this friend. A rush. And that’s what it feels like reading Thirst Trap, the debut novel from Grainne O’Hare.

At the heart of Thirst Trap are three Belfast housemates – Maggie, Roise and Harley – who are coming to the end of their roaring twenties and faced with the fact that their fourth best friend, Lydia, will never turn 30. We join the women a year on from Lydia’s death, and they’re still in the same mouldy flat share, with Lydia’s pet turtle in the living room and her old moisturiser going crusty on the bathroom shelf. To cope – or to avoid coping – the trio are self-medicating with booze, drugs, questionable relationships and bad sex.

This is not a book for the fainthearted: O’Hare has a true gift for a visceral simile, her sandpapery prose scribbling vivid pictures of messy pleasure that you can practically smell off the tequilasoaked page. In these women’s world, taking MDMA is like having “glass shards dissolve” in the bridge of your nose. An unfilled condom lies by the side of a bed “like the abandoned hide of a shedding reptile”. One of the friends is sick in the loo at a club, and her false eyelashes, “loosened by vomiting”, morph into “strange black caterpillars” lurking in the toilet bowl.