Stream of Pre-Consciousness
Extract from interview with Eimear McBride published in Los Angeles Review of Books
“Please tell me you love me. You sleep. You sleeping. When I know. I think your face the very best. When we were we were we were young. When you were little and I was girl. Once upon a time.” (A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.)
IN A LETTER about Finnegans Wake to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1926, James Joyce wrote: “One great part of human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, and goahead plot.” Around 76 years later Eimear McBride read Joyce’s Ulysses on the train on her way to work as an office temp in London and knew she had found the touchstone she needed to write A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. She began it in the autumn of 2003, completed it in six months, and spent the next nine years trying to find a publisher.
Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 and raised in Counties Sligo and Mayo in the Republic of Ireland. At age 17 she moved to London to study at the Drama Centre, where she became interested in the Method, a form of the craft developed by Constantin Stanislavski in which actors build characters by drawing on their own emotional memories. While McBride was living in London, her older brother died of a brain tumor at the same time as the radical playwright Sarah Kane committed suicide. McBride cites the work of Kane, whom she admires for “the purity of her intent and the ferocity of her approach,” as profoundly important to her own creative development, and McBride shares with Kane an unwillingness to play, what she terms, those linguistic games that are forced on female writers. Her brother’s death, together with Kane’s uncompromising approach to art, informs McBride’s novel, which is written from the point of view of a girl with an abiding love for her ill brother — to whom she refers throughout as “you” — and using a (mostly) simple vocabulary that derives its flexibility through the manipulation of sentence structure and basic punctuation. English needs to be made to pick up its feet and move, McBride believes, and, when interviewed by The Guardian, she said, “If you are not uncomfortable as a writer, then you are not doing your job.”
Galley Beggar Press of Norwich, England, where McBride now lives, finally published A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing in 2013. It went on to be a finalist in the Folio Prize, and win the Goldsmiths Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, beating odds-on favorite The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Coffee House Press has just released A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing in the United States, where it has polarized critics. Reviews have ranged from the laudatory to the skeptical; James Wood in The New Yorker described McBride’s prose as a “visceral throb” with results that “are thrilling, and also thrillingly efficient,” while Ron Charles in The Washington Post wrote that the novel represents “a complete disconnect” between “the seamless confluence of critical and popular tastes,” and warned that some readers may find it “a migraine in print.”
McBride and I met on a sunny September Sunday at the Clarence Hotel in Dublin. The night before we had both attended the premier of a one-woman play based on her novel, produced by the Corn Exchange Theatre Company, adapted by Annie Ryan and performed by Aoife Duffin. After leaving Dublin, McBride was heading to a book event in Indonesia and will then be on a book tour of the United States and Canada from October 19 through November first.
SUSAN MCCALLUM-SMITH: Thank you, Eimear. I’d like to start by talking about form because that is the most distinctive aspect of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. I loved the title because it refers not only to its feminist overtones — that half-formed girl — but also because the book comes to the reader, in a sense, half-formed. It is very participatory: a joint enterprise between you, the writer, and me, the reader. How did this form come about?
EIMEAR MCBRIDE: My beginning was James Joyce, of course, and his quote about how “wideawake language” and “cutanddry grammar” is insufficient to cover all aspects of human existence, that there was a part of life that wasn’t being expressed through straightforward language. The development was very organic; I did not approach it in any way academically or critically.
When I first sat down to write, I sat down with a very different idea, and for about three weeks I bashed away and nothing came of it. Then one day I just hit on the first words, and knew straight away that what I had been working on before was done. I didn’t have any kind of plot or narrative in mind, I tried to listen to the voice, followed where it was taking me. And there are parts of the book where I can see that crunch very clearly. For instance, in the moment before the uncle rapes the girl when she’s 13, she says, “He didn’t get me,” and that was me, the writer, trying not to tell that story, trying not to go down that road, but coming back to it the next day and knowing, “Oh, but he did.” I knew that would be the story that I would have to tell. So the mechanics are actually visible in some places…
