Eimear McBride: A Girl is a Fully-formed Novel

By Noelle Mateer, March 18, 2016

This is part of our series of interviews with some of the speakers at the 2016 Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival.

Eimear McBride didn’t want to become an ‘Irish’ writer. But then she became the best one of her generation.

“I didn’t want to write about things that are perceived as being so Irish, like debt and sex and guilt. I really wanted to do something else,” she explains. “But then I found myself still having to write about those things. It’s almost as though I had to work through this part of my Irishness to move on as a writer.”

Write about ‘Irishness’ she did, and masterfully. Her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is one of the most celebrated fiction releases of the past decade, beating works by more established authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch to win the 2013 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize).

A Girl, the first-person account of a young woman whose brother suffers from a brain tumor, won the award for its groundbreaking approach to language. Take the book’s opening paragraph, for example: “For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.”

The rest of the novel continues in this lyrical stream of consciousness that, while not strictly grammatical, creates an intensely powerful experience for the reader.

“I wanted to see if it was possible to make [readers] feel as though the action of the book was happening inside them, so that [reading A Girl] isn’t an intellectual experience or even an emotional experience, but something much more visceral and physical,” McBride says.

“It seemed that the best way to achieve that was by making language work in a different way – by bending the rules, breaking the rules, sometimes stomping all over the rules, and really trying to capture that aspect of life that is often lost once that experience is channeled through language.”

For those familiar with the Irish canon, this singular approach should remind readers of James Joyce, whom McBride cites as “a big influence.” At least it’s certainly reminded the press. Despite not setting out to write a quintessential Irish novel – McBride says she personally identifies more with European modernism – she’s been hailed as the talented new ‘Irish writer.’

“It’s a tricky thing to be an Irish writer because you’ve got the weight of Irish literature weighing on you in a way that few other traditions have – this sort of monstrous international renown to cope with on a daily basis,” she says. “I think being an Irish writer is a great thing, it’s a calling card, but it does come with certain expectations of what an Irish writer will be like.”

McBride has also been called a feminist writer – again, a label she didn’t create for herself, but rather unintentionally inspired through A Girl’s protagonist, both deeply flawed and complex. (McBride was once quoted as saying: “It was a blessed relief to write a female character who was released from the traditional models of the fictional female—and God save us from novelists who want to create role models.”)

A Girl was published after seven years of rejection by various publishers who thought it was too experimental for mainstream readers. Its eventual success proved them wrong.

International success, even – A Girl is now published in nearly a dozen languages worldwide, the next of which is slated to be Chinese. Given the unique writing style, this is no small task. The Bookworm is especially aware of this, and they’ll be bringing in one of the book's translators for McBride’s Friday talk. (“I have admiration for any of my translators, but particularly those translating into Chinese,” McBride adds.)

McBride’s visit corresponds with this upcoming translation. But this is not her first trip to Beijing.

“I was in Beijing for my honeymoon in 2003 – in the midst of the SARS crisis, no less,” she says with a chuckle. “I was wearing a protective face mask, but I have fond memories of it nonetheless.”

The author’s excitement to return to Beijing is both genuine and evident in her voice.

“I’m looking forward to seeing it without a mask,” she says, laughing. Well, let’s just hope it isn’t smoggy.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing was published by Faber & Faber, is available on Amazon and through The Bookworm.

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