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March 13, 2016

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The story of a girl, uninterrupted

IRISH novelist Eimear McBride is coming to Shanghai for the Mini March LitFest at M on the Bund with her debut novel “A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.”

McBride wrote the book in six months when she was 27, but it took nine years to get it published. In 2013, Galley Beggar Press of Norwich finally picked it up.

Hailed as one of the most groundbreaking pieces of literature to come out of Ireland in recent years, the book won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize and the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

“After nine years staring down the barrel of failure I am extremely surprised by this turn of events! But what I’d say to a young writer facing the same thing is be sure you have written the best book you can. Knowing that will help you to live with whatever responses come after; almost none of which you will have any control over,” McBride told Shanghai Daily in an email interview prior to the event.

Talking about how she started writing, McBride said she had been writing fairly consistently ever since she was a child and always thought she would. But it wasn’t until 2000 that she decided to make writing a priority.

While living in the UK, she would get up to write at 5am every day before heading out to her various temp jobs. However, all of that writing was just practice, a way of learning the discipline required to write and not of any particular value in itself, she said.

In 2003, she started work on “A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing”. It was the first book McBride ever completed, she said.

With astonishing insight and in brutal detail, “A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing” tells the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, from age two to 20 years, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumor.

Linguistic innovation

Critics have lauded the book for its linguistic innovation, which is said to echo the likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

So be prepared. Beginning with a stream of broken or half-constructed sentences, sometimes just a couple of words long, such as “For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name...Mammy me? Yes you,” it will take most readers quite a while before the narrator’s voice can be distinguished.

If it were not for the reviews saying how captivating the book is, I wouldn’t have gone beyond the first few pages. There are no indicators for direct speech and hardly any punctuation, besides full stops.

All these elements ­— the words, the phrases and those incomplete sentences with incorrect word order, appear as the “half-formed” inner expressions of feelings, anxieties, and even nightmares of a young girl, who is only half-formed herself.

McBride once expressed her view that she wants to challenge her readers with her novel and compel them to reflect as they read and interpret the novel’s meanings and the author’s intentions in their own ways.

Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride’s “A Girl is a Half-formed Thing” demands you plunge inside its narrator’s head, experiencing her world first-hand. This may not always be comfortable — but it is always a revelation.

In 2014, the book was adapted for the stage and directed by Annie Ryan from the Corn Exchange in Dublin. It’s a one woman show starring Irish actress Aoife Duffin as the girl.

Eimear McBride took the time to share her “other half” of the Girl and her plans for the future with Shanghai Daily:

First, how did the book come to be? Did it start with a voice, the story idea, a particular scene?

I originally sat down to work on a very different idea but after two to three weeks of fruitless hammering away I hit on the first words of Girl and knew that, whatever it was, this was the start of something completely different. So both the voice and story came out of the language and I just followed where it led.

Was it difficult to get into the narrator’s mindset when you are writing the Girl or, more so, to escape it?

I didn’t find it difficult to enter the Girl’s mindset. 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, especially in those moulds. However, extracting myself from her was much harder work but I knew I had reached the end of the novel when I eventually could.

It took nine years to find a publisher for the book. What was the experience like, returning to the story after having written it almost a decade ago?

Well, it was a very long nine years and not an experience I recommend! When I finally returned to the book before publication I had so thoroughly forgotten the details that I read an early draft thinking it was a later one and felt rather dispirited by what I found. Luckily I realized this soon afterwards and read the proper draft which cheered me up again. But it’s very odd to return to your writing which, despite being fiction, is inevitably personal to you and yet it feels as though the version of yourself who wrote it belongs so utterly to your past.

Could this story be told differently, in a more matter-of-factly manner, and still express the same pain?

I don’t think mine is the only way to write about trauma but I was interested in exploring whether or not the readers’ understanding of those experiences could be deepened by trying to go around traditional methods of storytelling and literary expression. By seeking to make the language itself complicit in the experience of the girl’s story, I wanted the readers to recognize it almost on the inside of themselves rather than through an intellectual process of assimilation. I don’t know if the story could be told through straighter language and have the same impact. I suppose that would depend on who was doing the writing!

What are you working on now?

I have been working on my second novel for a number of years. I’d hoped to be finished this year but Girl finally got published and ruined my schedule. I’ll be sitting down properly again from January though and plan to get it published in September.

Editor’s note:

This year’s Mini March LitFest will take place at Glam, the lounge and bar of M on the Bund, from March 19 to 26, with 15 sessions of talks, workshops and literary lunches from dozens of authors from home and abroad. Tickets are now officially on sale through Yoopay: https://yoopay.cn/host/88630463.




 

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