Eimear McBride

Life
1976- ; b. Liverpool, of Northern Irish Catholic parents; dg. of psychiatric nurses, one of four (three boys); her family moved to Ireland when she was 2, at first to Tubercurry, Co. Sligo before moving to Castlebar, Co. Mayo at 14; she lost her father at 8; studied at Drama Centre, London [aka ‘Trauma Centre’], aetat 17 - where the training was ‘brutal, invasive and not particularly careful of the human’); lost her br. Donagh, to effects of infantile brain-tumour, when she was 22; lived in London in her mid-twenties;

issued A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), a novel written 13 years earlier about her family history from the age of five embracing family death and abuse; publ. by Galley Beggar Press, Norwich and became an astronomical success - counted as moving, funny, and alarming; winner of  2014 Baileys Award for Women's Fiction [formerly Orange]; also won The Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2014,  Desmond Elliot Prize, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; McBride was called ‘a genius’ by Anne Enright (Guardian, 2013);

also issued The Lesser Bohemians, (2016), set in the 1990s, about a young drama-student Eily’s relationship with Stephen, an older actor with a disturbing past involving incest and drug-abuse - called a love-story; uses the same interior style as A Girl; married to theatre director William Galinsky; theatre-director and lately director of Cork Summer Festival, 2006; moved from Ireland to Norwich, 2011; has a daughter with her husband.

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[ See Eimar McBride, ‘your questions answered on sex, acting and self-publishing’ - webchat at The Guardian (20 Sept. 2017) - online.]

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Commentary
Anne Enright, ‘A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’ [review], in The Guardian (20 Sept. 2013): ‘[...] Eimear McBride is that old fashioned thing, a genius, in that she writes truth-spilling, uncompromising and brilliant prose that can be, on occasion, quite hard to read. Here, for example, are the opening lines: “For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.” If this kind of thing bores or frightens you, then there are many other wonderful books out there for you to enjoy. [...] The adventurous reader, however, will find that they have a real book on their hands, a live one, a book that is not like any other. [...] There are moments when you long for the style to settle down, or evolve; the prose at 18 is just as broken as it was at five. But the style is also direct, simple and free of intertextual tricks and, after a while, the language becomes its own kind of object. The narrator is better at hearing things than telling them: there are riffs of reported speech and scraps of banter, and these are put to virtuoso use in building scenes and describing action. There is also, surprisingly, a strong storyline when, at the grandfather’s funeral, what seemed aimless becomes completely gripping. This book is hard to read for the best reasons: everything about it is intense and difficult and hard-won. / The result is an instant classic - an account of Irish girlhood to be set alongside O’Brien’s The Country Girls for emotional accuracy and verve, and the sense of its overwhelming necessity. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is completely modern in its sensibility and completely old-fashioned in the way it triumphantly ignores the needs of the book market. It took nine years, apparently, to find a publisher. Who forgot to tell Eimear McBride about the crisis we are in and about the solution to that crisis: compromise, dumb down, sell your soul?’

Further: ‘‘A ranting, Catholic mother, a disabled brother and a pervy uncle: these may be bog-gothic standards of any Irish book season, but McBride brings passion and and distance with the voice of her highly dissociated protagonist, whose name we never get to hear. The “you” of the book is her older brother, whose brain was damaged by the removal of a tumour in infancy, and the love she has for him is a clean space in a soiled world. She imagines a strange underground, pre-sexual life for them together, “In burrows rabbits safe from rain ... You and only me.” The brother’s condition makes him both cause and cure of all her guilt - and this is a novel soaked in guilt. [...] The narrator’s mother is deeply troubled and her childhood both chaotic and cruel. Puberty brings a power that is scarcely hers to control. After a sexual encounter with an uncle, she becomes that figure much loved by male fiction writers - the girl of uncertain background who lifts her skirt at school. The events of the book are simple and not so much described as powerfully evoked. Her grandfather dies, her brother’s life goes downhill. Meanwhile, our heroine goes to college and pursues a career of shame and abandonment, seeking damage and defilement in a trail of sexual encounters that are anonymous, aimless and finally, horribly masochistic. “The answer to every single question is Fuck.” Drink may be involved, but the way the narrator inhabits - or fails to inhabit - her own account feels more French than Irish. Marguerite Duras and Catherine Millet come to mind as much as Sean O’Reilly or Edna O’Brien. She is affectless and highly transgressive - in her attraction to an older man, in her need to become a debased object; to break through pleasure and protect herself from the disaster that is desire. [...] an instant classic - anaccount of Irish girlhood to be set alongside O’Brien’s The Country Girls for emotional accuracy and verve, andthe sense of its overwhelming necessity.’ Also quotes opening: ‘For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

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Lara Feigel, ‘The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride review - a brilliant evocation of sex and intimacy’, in The Guardian (25 Sept. 2016): ‘Reading the opening pages of The Lesser Bohemians, I wondered if I might still be in the world of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Here was a diffident 18-year-old Irish girl talking, writing or thinking in Eimear McBride’s characteristic broken sentences, gliding between the demotic and the lyrical. “Daub my soul with a good few pints til my mouth swings wide with unutterable shite. Laughing lots too, like it’s true. Worldening maybe, I think. I hope.” I felt anxious that the voice that had seemed to be created for the heroine of A Girl had suddenly become the voice of an apparently different character, and that we were expected to accept this and read these sentences as though for the first time. / In fact, McBride’s style is more capacious than it might seem. The voice here is different, though it takes a couple of chapters to feel your way into its cadences. The girl whose head we are in now is more eagerly poetic, more gently amused, more responsive to the sights around her. This is Eily, a young drama student new to the London of the 1990s and determined to lose her virginity as quickly and decorously as possible. [...]  McBride manages to get across the essential strangeness of sex itself: the disjunction between the triviality and repetition of the physical acts and the intense, high emotion with which we can experience them; the way that within a single encounter we can go from being just bodies, doing odd things to each other, to minds, urgently expressing love, without it being easy to define what has shifted. [...] The Lesser Bohemians confirms McBride’s status as one of our major novelists.’ (Available online.)

Publishers’ Weekly / PW (Sept. 2016): ‘McBride’s second novel is more ambitious than her acclaimed debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and it retains the uncompromisingly Joycean brogue and diary-like intimations of adolescence that made that first novel such a success. Set between 1994 and 1995, it follows 18-year-old Eily, a boozy ingénue, as she leaves her native Ireland to attend drama school in London. There, caught in whirl of excess and the shadow of IRA terrorism, she is mostly assigned stereotypically Irish bit parts, but finds herself captivated by a much older actor named Stephen, an ex-junkie estranged from his family and young daughter. Initially meeting without names, they embark on a tempestuous relationship that reveals the worst in both while offering Stephen a chance at redemption and Eily a future. But the real focus is McBride’s stream-of-consciousness prose, in which drinking is rendered as “pints turning telescope”, “the lightless hall sings sanctuary from the frenzy” of a violent encounter, and a night of youthful debauchery leaves the revelers with “Satan under every skin. Skinful under all our skin.” The story (especially when Stephen’s backstory hijacks the narrative) isn’t full enough to sustain McBride’s style, which comes to seem less and less an accurate shorthand for first love. Still, this sophomore effort is striking enough to continue McBride’s forging of a daring career.’ (Available online; accessed 3.09.2016.)

Jacqueline Rose, ‘From the Inside out’, [review of The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride], in London Review of Books (22 Sept. 2016): ‘When Eimear McBride burst onto the literary scene in 2013 with her first published novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, she proudly trailed James Joyce in her wake, claiming her allegiance to a European modernism which some have argued, wrongly I would say, has been betrayed by most of today’s fiction, in the UK at least (as if literature had prematurely taken the path of Brexit). McBride has stated firmly that she wishes to be considered a European writer:“I’d like to set up my stall as a European writer ... I probably belong in the diaspora set because I only have clarity from a distance.’ At the same time, speaking about this extraordinary second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, she has lamented the dearth - even in the modernist tradition she rejoins and celebrates - of anything approaching an adequate exploration of the perils and pleasures of sex. The lack is especially glaring in relation to women. Only when she read Edna O’Brien did she understand that“there was a part of women’s lives that had been absent in everything I had read.’“Bored’ (her word) with the way sex is mostly written about, she has now given us two novels in which language falls apart under the pressure of sex. And violence. After all, sex and violence are two experiences that tend to leave people lost for words (Hannah Arendt described violence as“mute’). In McBride’s hands, they re-find their natural affinity, together precipitating a crisis of speech. She is the writer of sexual abuse, now recognised as one of the hallmarks of the new century. / In The Lesser Bohemians, the clue is planted early. [...] McBride has said that her aim in her novels is“to go in as close as the reader would reasonably permit’ - a perfect aesthetic formula for the sexual problem that haunts her book. In a rare distancing from Joyce, she describes Finnegans Wake, alongside Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, as“obscure’ and“obtuse’ for the non-specialist reader (‘kamikaze missions’). Instead, she uses the simplest vocabulary in the hope that this will allow readers to make the complexities of the syntax their own as if the narrative was running inside their minds:“from the inside out rather than the outside in’. Wherever she chooses to go next, it is, then, hardly surprising that abuse, incest, passion have been her themes to date. In each case, closeness is the burning issue: whether desired, killing, too little or too much. Aesthetic form and story are twinned.“Fright,’ Eily says when things are going badly,“goes everywhere like losing blood.’ Sometimes it seems that, as a writer, McBride is chasing her own fear. Without ever passing judgment, The Lesser Bohemians situates itself at that point of moral, sexual and grammatical uncertainty where, in Eily’s words again,“pure is indivisible from its reverse.’ For me it is the ability to delve so deeply into all of this, more or less regardless, that makes for the unique talent- the wilful, sensuous generosity - of Eimear McBride.’ [Not that much of the review - here omitted - deals in detail with the sexual experience of the character, especially Stephen who recounts his seduction by his mother as a boy.] (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

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Quotations

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Notes
Goldsmith’ Gold: McBridge one the £10,000-inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in assoc. with Statesman for fiction that is ‘genuinely novel’ with A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, a stream of consciousness novel, written in 2004, about a the title-character’s relationship with her brother who suffered from a brain tumour in childhood, featuring a violent mother, an absent father and a predatory uncle who triggers her abuse-victim behaviour at school; published by Galley Beggar Press, Norwich; sold on to Coffee House Press for US release.

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