Eimear McBride Interview

When would I ever in a pre-publication life have spent an evening with Edna O’Brien and Viv Albertine?” laughs Eimear McBride. The success of debut outing A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing has seen the Irish author find herself in esteemed company at various literary events of late.

However, there was a time McBride thought it was destined to remain unread, gathering dust on her hard drive. Although the novel was written in a mere six months, it took another nine years to see the light of day.

“It was really awful, I think there is part of me that can’t really get over the nine years,” she says. “I have actually just returned from seeing the stage adaptation in Edinburgh. There must have been about 250 people queuing outside the theatre. I did have a moment of, ‘My god, I never thought I would see this book published, never mind be here waiting to go to the play!’”

The novel tells a story of Irish girlhood in a dysfunctional family setting: absent father, embittered mother, predatory uncle. And its publication – in the end – is a remarkable twist of literary fate itself.

“We had just moved to Norwich and my husband was in the local bookshop, The Bookhive, chatting to the owner,” she explains. “He happened to ask what his wife did and my husband told him the sorry tale of the nine years. He remarked that he and some friends were setting up a press and asked could he read the manuscript. We did an initial run of 1,000, which sold out in the first month.”

That was over a year ago and since then, as well as enjoying rave reviews and rubbing shoulders with various literati, McBride has contributed to The Long Gaze Back : An Anthology Of Irish Women Writers, edited by journalist Sinéad Gleeson. The collection includes contributions from modern authors such as Anne Enright and Belinda McKeon, as well as rare or out-of-print stories by deceased practitioners of the calibre of Maria Edgeworth and Maeve Brennan.

McBride’s composition, Through The Wall, examines the relationship between neighbours. It is a compelling tract, written in her Joycean prose, which utilises similar strategies to her novel – such as withholding names.

“I think that breaks down the barrier between the character and the reader,” she notes. “The more detail you start to give about a character, the further away they become from the person that is reading about them. All of the things that are not you, put you at a distance. You can see this person as someone else.”

Her unique writing style made her novel at once compelling and disturbing, especially when dealing with issues such as abuse.

“I tried to write about it in a new way,” she states. “I wanted the reader to feel really close to that experience and not look at the girl and go, ‘Poor girl, that’s terrible but this has nothing to do with me’. I wanted the reader to really feel part of that experience. I think writing about sex or sexual abuse, you have to be very careful that you don’t separate out the internal life from the physical experience. I didn’t want it to be pornographic.”

Another traumatic event central to the tome is the death of the protagonist’s brother, a loss McBride herself has suffered.

“I originally didn’t want to write about bereavement because I didn’t think I could do that without it becoming very sentimental and personal,” she says. “I am not interested in writing memoir, but the story just began to filter through. I found the idea of sibling bereavement was very interesting because it is not really discussed. It is not like losing a child or a parent, where it is very clear what the roles are. Sibling relationships can vary greatly.”

The girlhood she evokes in her book has been compared to Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls in terms of its significance to the Irish literary canon.

“Edna is a hugely important writer, certainly the most important person that I read growing up that was directly influential on me,” enthuses McBride. “She can do things with language nobody else can. I think she is not recognised as fully as she should be, for what she has achieved, because she is a woman and because of the subjects she chose to write about.”

Does McBride feel there is a literary glass ceiling?

“I think there is a problem in terms of women being taken seriously,” she asserts. “I have heard Anne Enright describe it as not so much an antagonism to female work as a ‘profound deafness’. It’s not that the establishment hates women it just doesn’t believe that they exist. I think I have been very lucky, because my influences and the style in which the book is written have allowed me to escape from the stereotypes. But it certainly exists and I have seen it happen to women around me. It’s very important for me to be part of this anthology. I think increasingly women have to do so much more to be heard.”

These sentiments were echoed by Viv Albertine when I interviewed the punk icon-turned-author about her memoir recently. She also remarked how she can sometimes feel nervous at book events and somewhat intimidated by other writers. Does Eimear ever grapple with these issues?

“All the time!” she says. “I feel as if I am constantly waiting to be found out. I think when you do a lot of those literary events and you are in the company of authors who have been around for many years who speak very well, and in a very interesting and fluent way, you can easily get intimidated by that.”

I point out that Albertine was on a panel with McBride herself.

“There you go! I think that tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it!” she exclaims.

Certainly, I’ve never had this conversation with a male author.
“Well, they always think they belong, that’s the whole point!”

The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology Of Irish Women Writers is out now through New Island