Eimear McBride: how I wrote A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

I wrote my debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in six months, during 2003 and 2004. I wish I could offer a detailed account of that time, explain why I was drawn to my subject matter or exactly how its linguistic style was arrived at, but I can’t. When I began writing there was no real plan and nothing, I thought, that I urgently wished to say. All I had was an idea about a girl walking down a London street over a single day and the feeling that Joyce’s observation – “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot” – pointed somewhere interesting. So I wrote it on a scrap of paper, stuck it over my desk and began.

Not having a university background, I had no idea how to set about writing a novel, so I decided to write 1,000 words a day and hope something would emerge. It was largely due to this luckily, if inadvertently, arrived at discipline that a hoard of hitherto unmoored images and experiences began to coalesce.

I remembered watching Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves in 1996. How the distressed innocence of Emily Watson’s Bess came like a kick in the stomach and made me, probably for the first time, aware of a work of art altering the very molecules of who I was. Six years later I read Ulysses which turned everything I’d previously thought about literature on its head and showed me that within the novel lay the greatest freedom I would ever possess. Then, as I was beginning the book, I saw a production of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. There was such uncompromising brutality, and beauty, in her writing that I suddenly recognised the degree of my own prejudice regarding appropriate modes of expression for female writers. This bizarre prudery, which bore no relation to the way I lived my life, came as a shock, but casting off this final, subconscious hobbling meant I was suddenly ready to go.

And what came was nothing like I’d imagined. The naive plagiarism I’d begun with pretty much died as the words hit the page, while the much feared “Irish” themes of sex, death, family, guilt and religion – all done up in a parochial bow – began to surface. When I tried to circumvent them my sentences immediately dried into platitudes, so I knew something different was called for and this was when Joyce’s quote woke up in me. But how to describe those parts of life which grammatical English and linear sentences fail to serve? Presumably new methods of binding the reader closer to the character’s experience than “wideawake language” normally allows, had to be explored.

So, firstly, I avoided all tangible information about time and place, leaving my inevitable Hiberno-English to fill in those gaps. Similarly, all characters remained unnamed in the hope of closing that very basic sense of separateness down. The reader experiences the narrative from the girl’s perspective, therefore it seemed logical they never receive descriptions of her appearance – for who walks around describing themselves to themselves? Once all identifying markers were withheld the reader was left with what the girl sees, thinks, how her body reacts to what it experiences and can, from the sum of these, hopefully extrapolate how she feels. I didn’t want the reader to feel separate from her or in a position to pass judgment on her actions. I wanted them to feel they were her, and that what was happening to her, and inside her, was also happening within themselves.

Quite a tall order, and certainly not one I knew how to fulfil. What I did know, as a result of three years’ drama school, was how to make people. To express a natural, prismatic experience of life through words – rather than the performer’s body – language had to work differently. Be broken, reformed, have its grammar mauled and punctuation recalibrated. With no way of knowing whether this would work, my only option was to try.

And my protagonist deserved that effort. She suffers a lot. But she is also the opposite of all those passive female literary victims. She never longs for romance or seeks fulfilment from “the love of a good man”. She rages against the dictates of her deformed society, seeks control in the places she has been stripped of it, and rebels against dogma’s diagnosis of her chaotic sexuality. She chooses always to choose. And she is filled with so much love. It was such relief to write a woman like that. Well worth the risk of constructing this rickety immersive style which, while owing much to modernism’s “stream‑of-consciousness”, might, more accurately, be termed “stream-of‑ existence” instead.

Eimear McBride will discuss A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing at a Guardian Book Club event in London on 29 September. Tickets ��15. theguardian.com/guardianlive.

Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, is published by Faber and Faber at £16.99 and is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £13.93.