This interview is an exclusive preview from the Winter 2013 issue of New Humanist magazine, which is published by the Rationalist Association and relaunches on Thursday 21 November, with a new editor, new design and new contributors. You can subscribe here.
Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in western Ireland. Her stream-of-consciousness debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing – about grief, sexuality and life growing up in a stifling religious household – won this year’s inaugural Goldsmith’s prize for fiction. It was reviewed for the New Humanist by Toby Lichtig last month.
Toby Lichtig: We know very little about you other than a brief line of blurb at the back of your book. Tell us about your early life.
Eimear McBride: When I was three we moved from Liverpool to rural Ireland, a tiny, terrible village. And then to Castlebar in County Mayo. By the time I was seventeen I had to get out of Ireland, so I escaped to London to a hardcore method acting school. Then I did a lot of crappy temping jobs before starting my novel.
Had you written much before then?
I’d been making notes for around two years. Then I got married and my husband [the arts festival director William Galinsky] got a gig in Japan. The plan was for me to take some time off to write when we returned. But just before we left, our house got broken into. My handbag was stolen along with all my notes.
You didn’t have anything backed up?
I didn’t even have a computer! This was in 2004.
What did you do?
I spent about three days looking through the bins and hedges of Tottenham. I was devastated. But it was probably a good thing for me to start afresh.
Very sanguine.
It’s true though. By the time we returned I had a real sense of urgency. I needed to finish it before I began temping again. I wrote the first draft in about two months.
That’s impressive. And it’s an urgency reflected in your prose. But that was nine years ago. So I’m guessing the process of getting published was less urgent.
Yes. After I’d finished two more drafts I sent it off to agents. And then the long journey of failure commenced.
Were there positive rejections – if there is such a thing?
By and large yes. Someone scrawled across one of the standard rejection letters “I suppose this is some kind of masterpiece.” But no one felt able to take the risk. And that was it. Occasionally someone else would read it. But nothing.
So what was the bridge between nothing and success?
A few years later we moved to Norwich and I met Henry Layte of Galley Beggar Press. He loved it but said they had no money. And then, finally, they bought it. For £600. They bargained me down from £1,000!
Did you feel you’d moved on from it by then?
Yes. I hadn’t even looked at it in seven years.
Were you pleased with what you found?
No! When I first went back, I read the wrong draft. And I thought this is terrible. And then I worked out that it was the wrong one and the real one wasn’t as bad as all that.
Was it hard territory to revisit? Both then and originally. Your brother, like the brother in the book, died from a brain tumour.
Yes. I hadn’t originally wanted to write about the brother-sister relationship, but the story just kept coming back to that point. Going through the proofs, over and again, was the hardest part.
Was it difficult to show to your family? The mother character is rather fierce.
Yes. None of them even knew what it was about until this year. Thankfully my mother really liked it. She appreciated the writing.
The novel is very critical of religion. Did you grow up in a religious household?
Oh yes. We were brought up stern Catholics. I had to go to mass every week, confession every second week. There were pilgrimages. We used to have to say the rosary at night. It was a real pain in the arse.
Did you always feel that way?
When I was a child I was very taken by the romance of it. Then my father died when I was eight and it was a useful thing to cope with that. The idea that I would see him again. But as I got older, I got bored and annoyed.
Was that difficult for your mother?
Yes, we argued a lot. Later she became disillusioned with the Irish Catholic Church. She’s more interested now in faith than in organized religion.
You’re fantastically funny about religious hypocrisy in Girl. But there’s also a lot of anger.
I was a lot angrier when I wrote it than I am now. I felt strangled. Religion was supposed to help. And it never did.
Ireland has changed a lot in recent years. Once copies of Edna O’Brien were publicly burned. Now I hear stories of nuns queuing up to buy A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing in local bookshops. Are you surprised by this?
Well I don’t know if any of the nuns have actually read it! But it’s true, Ireland is completely different from when I was growing up. After I left, the boom happened and then no-one gave a shit about God any more. But I think many people from my generation identify with the childhood they see in the book.
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