Eimear McBride is not James Joyce. Since she came to global attention in 2014 when her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize, the J-word has never been far from the lips of critics.
“It’s very flattering. That sort of thing is great for selling books,” she tells me. “But I leave it outside the door because it’s not part of my inner life as a writer. And sometimes I do feel it misses the point of my work.
“I love Joyce, but I’m not interested in the same things at all. His writing has been hugely influential to me, but I’m not walking in the same track.”
It’s true. For every reader who is attracted to McBride – who has just released her fourth novel, The City Changes its Face – because of the Joycean comparisons, there is one who will be repelled. This is a shame because she offers something very different. To read her work is to delve deeply into the intimate, corporeal reality of her characters, created in a style that is uniquely her own.
“Joyce is all about intellectual and academic games,” she says, “whereas my writing is all about the body and intimacy. What Joyce did give me, though, was permission to just go my own way.”
Going her own way led her to write A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. The story covers a girl’s difficult relationship with her family, and is written in highly experimental, pre-conscious language. The book opens: “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.”
It took nine years before Galley Beggar Press, an independent publisher based in Norwich, took a leap of faith and offered her a deal. When the book landed in 2013, reviewers – particularly in the US – were astounded by its audacious brilliance. The New Yorker called the book “blazingly daring”. Success creates its own truth, so the publishing story of McBride’s debut has taken on an almost mythological quality, as a story of greatness rising inexorably to the top. The truth is more unsettling – a novel worthy of global critical acclaim very nearly slipped through the publishing world’s net.
“The fear of not being published never goes away,” she says. “I thought perhaps I would spend my life being an unsuccessful novelist, hiding out in my failure. That leaves a mark on you, no matter what happens afterwards. The most important thing is to hold on to the writing because you can’t control anything else or know if it will be a success.”
We go back to the beginning, and I ask McBride if she believes writers are born or made. There is no hesitation. “Born. Talent is something that’s innate, and you can’t acquire it if you haven’t got it, but the willingness to put in the time is very important, too.”
McBride grew up in the north-west of Ireland and her father died when she was just eight years old. “I had a feeling very early on of wanting to create something permanent, something that could exist outside of myself,” she explains. “I don’t know if that was to do with the early upset of losing my father, or lots of moving house, but I wanted to drill down into the world somehow and root myself. I still have the same instinct now.”
That Ireland of her childhood is the backdrop to the first novel, and living in England gave McBride the perspective she needed to write it. “I don’t know if I would have had the courage to be as brutal as I was about that time and place if I had still been in Ireland. If I was concerned with what people might think or be wounded or insulted by it. The Ireland of my childhood is long, long gone, thank God, but it still exerts a lot of influence inside of me.
“I can’t understand life through any other prism than that of an Irish woman of a certain generation. The way we speak in Ireland, and the way we deal with language, is an encouragement and a useful tool for a writer.
“But I do feel separate to Irish writers who live in Ireland and who have always stayed in Ireland. They have a different perspective on life, and certainly a different perspective on Ireland, that I can’t share. I don’t think that I could write a book about contemporary Ireland now.
“I do feel, though, the connection to Europe and to European literary traditions very intensely. I feel lucky that I live in the middle. I can stretch to Ireland, or to Europe from here and that’s a very rich experience.”
While struggling to find a publisher, McBride had trained at the Drama Centre London. “I originally wanted to act, but then I realised I needed more power,” she says, laughing. “I wanted to be the one who created the thing that people interpreted, rather than being an interpreter.”
The acting school had a substantial effect on her. “I wouldn’t be the same kind of writer at all if I hadn’t gone. The school asked a lot of people. It was very rigorous, and demanded that you took what you did seriously.
“The most important piece of advice I took away was not to be too easy on myself, that I should find the stuff that makes meaning and understanding and connection to the world, even if it’s a broken or a difficult connection.
“The things that I write about are most often things that I’m most afraid of or that I don’t want to write about. That is a kind of simultaneous escape and embrace. I learned that we go to art to be challenged and transformed by it. I want people to have that experience if they read my work.”
McBride was 22 when she experienced another formative tragedy – her brother died of a brain tumour. “That really affected me very deeply. It made me think about the world in a different way and allowed me to make the change from acting to writing. It created a sense of urgency, not to waste time or take for granted that there will be more of it.”
Now McBride is back with her new novel, which takes up the tempestuous and at times brutal story of Eily and Stephen, the protagonists from The Lesser Bohemians (2014). He is a 40-something actor and she a young drama student, living together in run-down 90s north London, long before the gentrification started.
“Even before I had finished The Lesser Bohemians, I knew that I wasn’t done with them,” she says. “They’re everything that I like to write about and find interesting: the pressure of brokenness and people trying to find their way out of that.
“The point of Eily,” McBride explains, is that “she insists upon her own will and wants to be the person who makes the choice, and even if it’s the wrong choice or a mistake. She wants to experience all kinds of things, and she’s willing to take risks. She doesn’t ever want to feel as though she’s drifting through the world, or that the world is telling her how to be in it. That’s what I like about her.”
Which leads straight to the subject of sex. McBride does not shy away from it in her writing, believing it is central to her story. “When I started to write The Lesser Bohemians, the sex kept showing up and I wondered why. I certainly didn’t enjoy writing sex, but then I began to realise that it was a way of exploring character. Women have such convoluted, complex relationships with their bodies, so it seemed completely reasonable and logical to use the body to explore the mind and the consciousness.
“There wasn’t really a useful vocabulary for writing sex that wasn’t a bit porny, so I just decided I wasn’t allowed to use any sex words at all. No thrusting, grinding, pumping. None of that. The minute you use that language the reader is transported out from something specific and personal to the characters. The way forward was to make sure it wasn’t generalised sex, but to show how their bodies specifically interact with each other and how that changes over time.
“I wanted it to feel interesting for the reader, like they were uncovering things about these people while it was all happening, that they understood more at the end of the sex scene about who they were than they knew at the beginning. Each time something different, something further is revealed. Something has changed.”
But as the world moves from crisis to crisis, what is the role of literature now? McBride is clear: “What literature can do is show us our shared humanity. One of the real reasons why the world is on fire is a loss of understanding of how close we all are. Disagreeing perspectives on life, be they political or social, doesn’t excuse us from forgetting the humanity of others. We might feel angry, but it’s down to us to make that leap of imagination into how it feels to be inside the skin of somebody else.
“Literature can do that. It shows what it’s like to be someone who isn’t you, and the value of that life, even if it’s one that you don’t agree with.”
The City Changes its Face by Eimear McBride is out now from Faber
