Eimear McBride: 'I wanted to give the reader a very different experience'

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/16/eimear-mcbride-girl-is-a-half-formed-thing-interview

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If you're looking for a reason to shop at your local independent bookshop rather than Amazon, here's one: Eimear McBride's first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, might never have been published had her husband not got talking to Henry Layte, owner of the Book Hive in Norwich.

The conversation took place three years ago, by which time McBride, who is 37, had accumulated seven years' worth of rejection slips and buried her manuscript in a desk drawer, from where she hoped it might emerge at some point, possibly on the back of the second novel she is now working on, which is about joy.

"I was pretty crushed actually," she says of that time. "It's hard to feel like your whole life is a failure. Nine years of your life, that's a lot of life, and it's not like it had all been going so well before. To spend your adult life feeling like the thing you think you can do, no one else wants you to do, is hard."

McBride and her husband, theatre director William Galinsky, had recently moved to Norwich where Galinsky runs an arts festival. Layte was then planning the launch of a small independent press, Galley Beggar, and in June 2013 McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing became the second Galley Beggar book.

Rave reviews followed (in the Guardian, Anne Enright called McBride a "genius") and a few months later the novel won the inaugural Goldsmiths prize for "boldly original fiction". This year it was shortlisted for the Folio prize, and paperback rights were sold to Faber. On 4 June McBride will find out whether the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction judges rate it above works by big hitters Donna Tartt and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. By any standards her novel has made it.

Written in three drafts in six months when she was 27, McBride's debut is a daring attempt to represent experience "at the moment just before language becomes formatted thought", as she put it in an email to its first reviewer, David Collard. What this looks like on the page is a staccato stream-of-consciousness, without commas or speech marks:

"For you. You'll soon. You'll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she'll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I'd say. I'd say that's what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day."

This is the opening and the section McBride generally reads to audiences, addressed to a second person "you", the narrator's elder brother, who is suffering from a brain tumour before she is born, and it returns in the course of the novel. In earlier drafts it was even harder to catch the sense of these phrases but McBride took one piece of advice offered by her publishers: "They thought I maybe needed to lower the reader into it a little more easily, and so I did that."

Aside from cutting 8,000 words, which was her own idea, this was the only big change to the manuscript. "I didn't want to crush what I liked about the book, which was the rawness of it," she says. "The one idea that I brought the whole way through was that I wanted to try to give the reader a very different type of reading experience."

Asked why, she doesn't hesitate. "Joyce really. Absolutely. I was late coming to Joyce. I was about 25 when I read Ulysses, but after I read that I thought, OK, everything is going to be different from this moment on and everything I have written is just preparation for where I want to go next."

Eimear (pronounced Eema) McBride was born in Liverpool, the third child and only daughter of Northern Irish Catholic parents who were both psychiatric nurses. They moved to England because they didn't want their sons growing up in the shadow of the Troubles, but when she was small they moved again. McBride grew up in rural County Sligo and Castlebar, County Mayo. When she was eight her father died of cancer, and she now thinks grief was behind her ambition to become an actor, which led her to leave Ireland for London's Drama Centre when she was 17.

McBride met her husband in London, enjoyed acting and says she was good at it. But in psychic terms the theatre was a refuge from real emotions; when her brother Donagh developed a brain tumour soon after she left, this "blew apart the myth" that the worst life could throw at her had already happened. McBride, who helped nurse Donagh, was devastated by his death and "very lost for a long time afterwards, I didn't really know what to do generally, in life or in terms of career or anything". Gradually, while holding down assorted temporary office jobs, she started writing.

She had always been interested in fiction, reading Edna O'Brien under the covers at a youth camp where she hated the hiking and Irish songs. She wanted to be different, choosing German over French at school, and cultivating an interest in Russian writers, especially Dostoevsky and Chekhov, because she was drawn to Soviet atheism.

She began her novel in a flat in Tottenham, north London, soon after losing all her notes with her handbag in a burglary. With enough money to last six months, she set herself a target of 1,000 words a day, and began each morning by crossing out most of what went before. She didn't have a plot or a theme but knew she didn't want to write about her brother.

"I said absolutely not, I thought it was far too personal, but it just became the story I had to write. It was tough. I resisted it. But everything I tried to do against it was just rubbish. At some point I knew I had to give in and let it be what it would be," she says. The novel is dedicated to him.

In other ways, too, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is not the novel she intended. "You know, being Irish, oh God, sex, death, religion, shame, here it all is," she says in a singsong voice. "I thought I really don't want to write this book but, you know, it's a bit like asking English male writers not to write about the war. It's just there and it's going to come out at some point."

McBride and her brothers went to school with the victims of one of Ireland's first sexual abuse scandals, which she found out about years later when the children, now adults, sued social services for having failed to act against their father despite reports of what was going on. She says stories of inappropriate and illegal sexual behaviour were often swapped among friends when she was young and "just seemed to be a secret part of life". But times have changed, and she set her novel in the 1980s and early 1990s because those years mark the end of the era she grew up in.

If the subject matter of rural upbringing, escape to the city, stifling family relationships and sexual abuse might feel familiar, critics have hailed McBride's prose as a radical experiment and sock in the eye for the "heavyweight middlebrow" humanistic social realism she dislikes.

Though she read the Brontës as a teenager and found consolation in George Eliot, McBride places herself in a European rather than Anglo-American tradition: Thomas Mann, Bohumil Hrabal and Mikhail Bulgakov are the writers she likes. If her company is warm and comfortable, her fiction is not. She paraphrases Joyce's letter about the part of human existence that can't be rendered by cut-and-dried grammar and go-ahead plot, and says when she read it she thought, "Yeah, there is more in this tradition than we have been led to believe. Everyone thinks modernism is dead and done, because there's Finnegans Wake and Beckett and they've tied everything up neatly.

"I really don't think they have tied everything up neatly. I'm not interested in irony and I'm not interested in clever. I'm interested in trying to dig out parts of human life that cannot be expressed in a straightforward way, that don't fit neatly into the vocabulary and grammar that are available. To do that you have to make language do something else. I didn't really know how to do it, I just tried and that's what happened."

Abandoned by her father before she is born, raped by her uncle at 13 and deeply unsettled by the disease attacking her brother's brain, McBride's "half-formed girl" struggles to retain her shape. But McBride says it wouldn't be fair to describe her as a victim, and that until 20 pages before the novel's ending she was still looking for a way out.

"There are terrible things that happen and there are the choices she makes, and some of those choices are bad but I don't even like to say that because it feels like a moral judgment and I'm really not interested in that. There's a point where she starts to sleep around at university, which is about a kind of liberation, where she owns it for herself, but then because of all the other things that happen and because of the nature of the society she gets sucked back into something else. The relationship with her brother is so connected that without it she kind of loses a sense of herself. That's the reason for the end more than anything else."

One critic impressed on McBride her idea that her character, never named, is looking for love in anonymous sex, but McBride insists: "That's not what it's about. I think female sexuality is just so complicated, and we're given so few options. The idea that someone uses their sexuality for purposes other than what they are supposed to – pleasure or love or procreation – is still really taboo, actually." McBride's girl wants something but, in her own words, "nicer is not what I am after".

The evening before the Baileys prize McBride will read aloud from her novel with the other shortlistees at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. Such events used to make her nervous but not any more. A trained actor, she says her writing uses drama techniques: "It was a Method school, so it was about the wider life of the character and drawing all the different aspects of life into the moment. I think if I'd gone to university or done a creative writing course I probably would have had a very different attitude to language. Having an acting background, you're less reverent about it and more aware of how people speak, and also of the different things that go on inside people. It was the only way I knew how to create a character so it made sense."