‘I’ve suffered, and still suffer’: Bestselling author Holly Ringland reveals how she overcame fear and anxiety

Her novels have soared to the top of bestselling charts and been turned into Hollywood TV shows, but author Holly Ringland admits in a new book she has been crippled by self-doubt and fear.

A few rare people – artists mostly, writers or songwriters and sometimes academics – possess a freakish ability to acknowledge human suffering and meet it with optimism and hope, and best-selling author Holly Ringland is one of them.

The wildly successful Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and the TED Talk superstar, academic Brené Brown, are also members of this elite band, as is Queensland’s Trent Dalton, who causes both women and men to quiver with the kind of joy more usually found in persons giving themselves to Jesus.

What each of these public performers has in common is an ability to connect deeply with their audiences, making them catch their breaths in recognition, or cry openly and generally act as if someone has truly understood them for the first time.

Holly Ringland Picture: Giulia Zonza

Now 43-year-old Holly Ringland joins them: she might be best known as the internationally acclaimed author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (now screening on Amazon Prime starring Sigourney Weaver) and co-host with actor Aaron Pedersen of ABC TV’s Back to Nature, but to anyone who has witnessed the adoration of her audiences, it’s obvious something else is going on.

Catherine Milne, head of fiction at HarperCollins Publishers, has just published Ringland’s first non-fiction book, a joyously sweary and optimistic exploration of how to overcome the obstacles blocking creativity called The House That Joy Built.

Packed full of Ringland’s trademark mix of wonder and homespun wisdom, it resembles her fiction in reflecting her belief that no matter what trials we face in this life – domestic abuse, self-sabotage, disappointment, grief, emotional violence – we each have within us courage and joy and the power to rise.

It’s an affecting and powerful message and Milne suggests the key to Ringland’s success is her extraordinary capacity for empathy.

“People are so drawn to her (because) she’s one of the most generously empathetic people
I know,” Milne says, “and that empathy has been painfully hard-won, through trauma, grief and loss.”

Ringland herself is painfully aware of how hard she fought for her success, having “lived small for so long”, and knows what an incredible privilege it is to have a voice at all. She doesn’t want to waste the opportunity she’s been given.

Holly Ringland and Aaron Pedersen in Go Back to Nature.

She says she wants to give something back, not just to wannabe writers, but to anyone with a desire to create – gardeners, cooks, yoga teachers, florists, carpenters – anyone striving to reach their deepest sense of self, that rich inner country of creativity.

In her book, Ringland takes free-floating fear and shapes it into eight specific topics – imposter syndrome, procrastination, self-doubt to name a few – then blasts them with both barrels.

“(This book) is really me putting on to paper how I’ve suffered, still suffer, from all the different types of fears when it comes to creativity, and how I manage those fears,’’ she says. “I knew right from the get-go that it wasn’t going to be a book about creativity written at arm’s length distance from my heart. This was going to be me showing up with all my skin in the game.”

It’s what Holly Ringland does best: she’ll show you her heart if you show her yours.

“It’s a lifelong practice, to meet fear and manage it,” she says, “I couldn’t write this book without sharing examples from my life illustrating how vast and wide and powerful and relentless and tiring fear can be. (But) what’s on the other side of fear is everything inside that’s lush and full of potential that we don’t know we have until we reach.”

Holly Ringland.

Ringland was born and grew up in South East Queensland, close enough to the Gold Coast to think of the beach as her natural home. She spent most of her childhood under the generous care of her single mother, Colleen (now 70 and a retired schoolteacher who still occasionally works as a relief teacher).

When her first novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart was published in 2018, Ringland said its genesis was trauma and that she had “lived with male-perpetrated violence for a lot of my life” which had consequently silenced her dream of becoming a writer.

The novel tells the story of Alice Hart, who stops speaking after her violent father and vulnerable mother perish in a fire, and her previously unknown grandmother spirits her away to a domestic violence women’s refuge. It’s now been translated into more than 30 languages. The book was followed in 2022 by her equally successful second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding (about a fairytale quest for a missing sister), which had an eventful and troubled gestation.

Sigourney Weaver in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Picture: Prime Video

Ringland had been living in Manchester, where she had been based since 2009 when she left Australia to take up a masters in creative writing at Manchester University. She met her partner, creative director Sam Harris, 52, there and together they bought a house.

Ringland was a few years into researching Esther Wilding when she and Sam travelled to Australia for Christmas 2019, ahead of filming her ABC documentary. Harris’s family was also living here after his mum Merilyn, a former BBC radio producer, migrated from London to be closer to her other son, sound engineer Matthew, and his family in Melbourne.

“We walked out of our house with two suitcases each. We had no idea of what was coming,” she says.

What was coming was the pandemic, stranding Ringland away from her research material but also making it impossible for her to visit the locations where her new novel was set.

“I was 39 when I came home, and I would never have said, ‘Oh, Mum, Sam and I are just going to come and live at home for four years!’ We’re middle-aged and living with the folks!”

Fortunately, Ringland, her partner, her mum and stepfather Gary (69, a retired bank manager) get on amazingly well at the parental home in the Gold Coast hinterland.

She has now written more books in her parents’ house than her own (or rather in “Frenchie”, the 60s retro caravan she bought to work in, now berthed in their garden).

“My wildest hope for this book is that it helps people feel seen,’’ she says.

The House That Joy Built by Holly Ringland.

The House That Joy Built, Holly Ringland, Fourth Estate, $30, out October 4, available to pre-order