This is the scaffolding, but McBride is telling the story of a mind that is in pieces, and what happens to those pieces when they lose coherence, or even the drive to attempt coherence, because of grief or guilt or some inborn disturbance. She seeks control through passivity, connection through bruises, and punishment, always punishment. Beaten and berated by her mother and subject to an over-attentive uncle, the narrator finds solace in transgressions, fucking boys and scandalous men throughout her young life. Coming of age in Catholic Ireland, enduring the onset of sexuality, escaping to college and Dublin, McBride’s narrator is always ricocheting back to her family and her origins despite or because of the damage they’ve done.
The narrator begins telling her story from the womb, and the pages that unfold are nominally her autobiography. But if someone’s going to set out to write an Irish novel in the twenty-first century, could it be anything else?Ī Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is narrated by an unnamed young woman who grew up, we glean from scattered hints, in rural Ireland, with a mentally damaged brother, a beleaguered, desperate mother, and no father.
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McBride’s debut could feel, if you’ve glutted yourself on Irish literature, like Finnegan’s Wake plus Beckett snippets mixed with lyric Yeats, mashed together with the macabre Irish gothic of Patrick McCabe’s Butcher Boy and Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River. But its Modernist style combined with the unflinching depiction of a woman-a girl, really-owning her sexuality, her kinks, her pain, makes A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing remarkably new. When Eimear McBride’s novel, which sat in a drawer for ten years before getting picked up by a micro-nano-indie press, won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize and the 2014 Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction, the headline seemed like a throwback. Not a jaw-dropping headline, if the year is 1927.
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