This week, Eimear McBride was awarded the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.
In an interview with Kira Cochrane of The Guardian, Eimear reveals that James Joyce’s Ulysses had provided the spark for her own novel. “I started reading the book, got off at Liverpool Street, and just thought: that’s it. Everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else.”
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is “the inner narrative of an Irish girl from before birth to the verge of death, written to capture what McBride calls ‘the moment before language becomes formatted thought’,” explains Justine Jordan in a review of the book in The Guardian. It tells the story of the girl who has to deal with the consequences of her brother’s childhood brain tumour and the abuse she experiences.
Because of the difficulty of selling such a narrative, McBride struggled for nearly ten years to get A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing published. In the interview, McBride says that publishers underestimate readers. “There are serious readers who want to be challenged, who want to be offered something else, who don’t mind being asked to work a little bit to get there.”
Eimear McBride was in her mid-20s, living in Tottenham and working at a terrible temp job in the City, when she decided to read Ulysses. She had been trying to write for a while, and one 20-minute train journey with James Joyce changed everything. “I started reading the book, got off at Liverpool Street, and just thought: that’s it. Everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else.”
Not long afterwards, aged 27, she wrote her novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, in six feverish months. This week, 10 years later and after a stack of rejections, it won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange prize), beating big, brilliant novels by established literary stars Donna Tartt, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jhumpa Lahiri.
When Baileys announced its sponsorship of the women’s prize for fiction last year, there were mischievous musings about what sort of novel one might wash down with such a sweet tipple. The inaugural winner, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, is certainly not a cream liqueur kind of book.
Jaggedly uncompromising in both style and subject matter, it languished unpublished for a decade before being picked up by a fledgling independent house. Since its publication last summer, when Anne Enright hailed it in the Guardian as an “instant classic”, it’s been feted by the sort of prize juries that set out to reward stylistic innovation, winning the Goldsmiths prize and being shortlisted for the first Folio prize. That it should now bag an award that traditionally keeps accessibility in mind is a surprise, but a wonderful one.
Get a taste of the experimental syntax in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing from the following extract:
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.
Walking up corridors up the stairs. Are you alright? Will you sit, he says. No. I want she says. I want to see my son. Smell from dettol through her skin. Mops diamond “oor tiles all as strong. All the burn your eyes out if you had some. Her heart going pat. Going dum dum dum. Don’t mind me she’s going to your room. See the. Jesus. What have they done? Jesus. Bile for. Tidals burn. Ssssh. All over. Mother. She cries. Oh no. Oh no no no.
Watch videos of McBride talking about A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and reading from this award-winning book:
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Book details
- A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride
EAN: 9780957185326
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Image courtesy CBC News