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; begins writing in brandname stream-of-consciousness style; moved from Ireland to Norwich, 2011;

wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), about her family history from the age of five embracing family death and abuse; publ. by Galley Beggar Press, (Norwich) becoming 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); 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;

married with a daughter; awarded inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading 2017; issued Strange Hotel (2020), a novel set in a hotel revisited by a single anonymous woman after some years - and other hotels in between; also Something Out of Place (2022), on the shaming of women; and The City Changes Its Face (2025), a novel concerning Eily and Stephen, aged 20 and 40, untangling what went wrong.

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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.)

Megan Nolan, ‘Eimar McBride’s literature of desire’ [The City Changes Its Face proves there is nobody writing sex like her], in New Statesman (12 Feb. 2025): ‘What is perhaps most surprising about The City Changes Its Face is how little its unconventional style intrudes on its narrative. Often, such unorthodox registers continually announce themselves, the reader always conscious of their alien presence. Here, though, McBride’s genius is to create a work whose innovation allows the reader to experience the sensation of feeling and thinking, instead of observing thoughts and feelings described. The sentences do not show themselves off, are not self-conscious of their strangeness. After being rebuffed by Stephen for sex, Eily wishes him goodnight but then we hear her actual inner workings, fizzing away in silent resentment: “Night night bitch battle body fold and ache. Bloody spurned to the wall by your blanched shoulder blade. Bloody looking at the state of the wallpaper on it. Bloody f**k. Bloody what anyway.” [Cont.]

Megan Nolan (review of The City Changes its Face - cont.): ‘It isn’t necessary to have read The Lesser Bohemians to pick up The City Changes Its Face, but those who have will be familiar with some of Stephen’s bleak backstory, revealed in the first book through a long reported monologue – a story that includes addiction rendered with unsparing physical abjection, and maternal sexual abuse. In this book, Stephen’s demons are roused by the resemblance he thinks he can see between his daughter and his mother. The suggestion that any personal qualities can be traced down through the family line is, understandably, a difficult reality for him to bear. The problem of his lover, Eily, being only marginally older than his daughter presents its own discomfort. There is a brilliant, long scene where the two young women go to the pub without him and get blind drunk. Eily is a little better able to handle herself, while Grace must be helped to vomit and then undressed and put to bed. [....] This shared transgression, speaking to their shared, all-too-proximate girlhood, inflames the latent anxiety of the situation. Stephen has already, to Eily’s rage, found it difficult to have sex while his daughter is in the same house. Now, she collects all her frustrated sourness about the situation – about Grace’s presence, about Stephen’s incapabilities – and threatens to say something unforgivable. [...]’ (See full copy in RICORSO Library > Reviews - via index or as direct.)

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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.

Summaries

Strange Hotel (2020): A nameless woman enters a hotel room. She’s been here once before. In the years since, the room hasn’t changed, but she has. Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms. From Avignon to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each is as anonymous as the last but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she negotiates with her memories, with the men she sometimes meets, with the clichés invented to aggravate middle-aged women, with those she has lost or left behind--and with what it might mean to return home. (Goodreads notice - online; accessed 15.02.2025.)

Something Out of Place (2022): Eimear McBride unpicks the contradictory forces of disgust and objectification that control and shame women. From playground taunts of 'only sluts do it' but 'virgins are frigid', to ladette culture, and the arrival of 'ironic' porn, via Debbie Harry, the Kardashians and the Catholic church - she looks at how this prejudicial messaging has played out in the past, and still surrounds us today. In this subversive essay, McBride asks - are women still damned if we do, damned if we don't? How can we give our daughters (and sons) the unbounded futures we want for them? And, in this moment of global crisis, might our gift for juggling contradiction help us to find a way forward? (Amazon notice - online; accessed 15.02.2025.

The City Changes its Face (2025):

A rainy Camden night, December 1996. 20-year-old Eily and 40-year-old Stephen retrace the course of their two-year love affair in search of what's gone wrong. Is it Stephen's reconnection with his long-lost teenage daughter, Grace? Or that he's a well-known actor while Eily's still at drama school? Maybe the autobiographical film he's just made has brought his old demons back to the surface? Or perhaps Eily's youth has led her into a mistake she doesn’t know how to fix? / Intimate, experiential, and immersive, this is the story of what happens when it's love beyond question, but trouble comes along anyway. (Waterstone's notice - online; accessed 15.02.2025.

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