Eimear McBride is making coffee in her kitchen in Norwich and, as she does, I tell her that I like her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, even better than her extraordinary and celebrated first: A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Set in the 1990s, it is the story of a young drama student’s relationship with an older man. So far, so ordinary, you might think. But it is an unpredictable, turbulent, passionate book – remarkable for the quality of its interior life. She says it is good that I like it, as it took nine years to write and “nearly killed me”.
Her first novel almost failed to find a publisher because, “it did not fit into any niche”. Eventually, Galley Beggar Press, an independent Norwich firm, bought it and it went on to meteoric success – Anne Enright called McBride a “genius” and the book won the 2014 Baileys women’s prize for fiction (what used to be the Orange prize). I have only just caught up with it because, I confess, I had been put off by gushing comparisons to James Joyce – mutinously thinking there was no room for imitators. But Girl (as she now calls it) is a one-off and not slavishly Joycean at all. She laughs and agrees that comparisons to Joyce are a mixed blessing. “We don’t have to talk about Joyce,” she says. Ah, but we probably do, I say.
She leads the way into a front room filled with light. She has banished her two dogs upstairs, afraid of barking replies to questions intended for her. Her four-year-old daughter is at nursery and the house is quiet. Eimear (in Celtic mythology, the name of “the wily wife of a famous warrior”) settles herself on the sofa. At 39, she has a handsome, strong, unmade-up face and auburn hair. She seems relaxed in her body, yet there is a wariness about her too. I glimpse a stowaway humour in the corners of her mouth and eyes. She is dressed like the actor she used to be, as though for a rehearsal: simple T-shirt and leggings with one concessionary ornament, a silver cuff of a bracelet.
She started writing her second novel when her first was still homeless. It must have been difficult to persevere? “For three years after writing Girl, I didn’t write at all. I thought I should try to be a productive member of society. But then I moved back to Ireland and had to decide whether or not I was a writer. And I realised I’m not equipped to be anything else. I saw that even if I was going to be a failed writer, that was probably the best I was going to manage [laughs] and I made my peace with it – as much as you can.”
The first draft of The Lesser Bohemians took a year, she explains. At first, she barely knew what – or who – she was writing about. But after that first year, “the book had come alive in me”. She had no idea how to write it but knew she would. The rejection of Girl continued to feel a “terrible social shame” but she could forget about it when immersed in writing.
London, she says, was the book’s first subject. She missed London. Although Irish, the decision to return to Ireland had not been hers. Her husband, theatre director William Galinsky, had been offered a job running Cork’s midsummer festival (he now runs the Norfolk & Norwich festival). “I started to write about the London I’d known in the 90s when I came from Ireland because, at 17, I had got into Drama Centre. It was an incredible and mercurial place. The training was brutal, invasive and not particularly careful of the human. But I was dying for that. It was exciting to be in an atmosphere where art and culture were the norm and nobody asked how many pages there were in a book if they saw you reading one.”
What impact has the actor’s training had on the way she writes? “It has been fundamental. Drama Centre was about creating character from the inside out. For me, character is the most important thing. Language is a vehicle for content, not a showpiece in itself. The training was about what an actor does with the body and I’ve been trying to make language do that instead. It was also about trying to change language to extend its capabilities.”
It was at Drama Centre she met her husband (he was on the directors’ course). But those happy years became “a closed part of my life because I didn’t become an actor”. Consciously, she had no wish to re-examine them. But, as she has discovered, “The things I do not want to write about become the things I write about.”
It was the same with Girl: she had not intended to write about a boy who died of a brain tumour, as her brother Donagh had (it is important to point out here she does not write memoir, her characters are invented) but the book had a life – and death – of its own. “His death changed everything. I was 22. I had left drama school the year before. It devastated me. I decided I didn’t want to act any more. When you lose someone at the age when you are supposed to go out into the world and feel immortal…” – she fails to finish her sentence – “it took me a long time to find my feet. It was only writing Girl, I felt a sense of purpose again.”
But why did Donagh’s death turn you away from acting? “I realised I’m not a communal person. As an actor, you need to be able to be around people a lot. And I really can’t. I couldn’t because of the grief and then, once I had learned to live with it, either I’d been changed into a more solitary person or I realised that was the person I’d always been.”
McBride was born in Liverpool, then moved to Ireland at the age of three (moving from Tubercurry in Sligo to Castlebar in Mayo). She grew up the third child in a family with three brothers. “It was a very rough-and-tumble childhood. My mother came from an enormous family of 14; there was no princessing for her. I’ve never felt particularly feminine nor interested in women preoccupied with such things. I take delight in the fact my daughter is more interested in rubber spiders than in dolls.”
McBride’s parents were psychiatric nurses, practising Catholics, who worked with the “criminally insane”. Her father, to whom The Lesser Bohemians is dedicated, died when she was eight. “I remember him very well and fondly. He was gentle, curious about the world and taught me to read at three. We were very close.” She went on to become an avid reader – CS Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, E Nesbit. Her father read Animal Farm to her when she was six, omitting the animal deaths as they upset her. She laughs: “I celebrate his effort at trying.” She read whatever her older brothers were reading. At 12, she was bowled over by One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and more Russian literature followed. But it was not until she was 25 that she read James Joyce.
“The Joyce thing has become problematic. Like many, or most, Irish writers, Joyce has been a big influence, partly because I’ve never been particularly interested in social realism. Reading Ulysses was like someone opening the gate and saying: if you have the virtuosity, there is nothing you cannot do with this form. I think Joyce’s barbarism gave me the chutzpah to try. But it was never about imitating him. I remember sitting down to write Girl and feeling Joyce was on the outside. He and I are looking for different things. His work is about the extension of the human into the universe, mine is about human vulnerability and fallibility.”
The astonishing thing about the way she writes is that the language is broken yet makes what she describes whole. It is language that creates intimacy in a way that overdressed, conventional prose forbids. McBride likens writing to “animal instinct” and I tell her the prize she is not about to win is the Bad Sex award. She laughs, says she hopes she isn’t but is still unsure about some of her novel’s sex scenes. Sex, in The Lesser Bohemians, is the great lure, not open to reason, a lawlessness unto itself, an all-consuming consummation. “Writing about sex is very difficult,” she goes on. “I did not set out to write lots of sex scenes – they kept recurring and I realised they were intrinsic to the story of the relationship. And yet, I wanted it to be the opposite of pornography – even literary sex can be pornography. In this novel, it was the characters’ way to speak to each other about what they could not verbalise.”
She tries to keep her eye on the “internal life” as well as the “objective of the scene” and “what is physically happening”. She reflects: “Sex is usually like that, it doesn’t matter whether it is with someone you love or someone you just fancy shagging or someone you are making someone else jealous about, there is an internal life that goes with the activity. It is when you lose the connection with that internal life that the writing gets embarrassing.” She also says, laughing: “I forbid myself some language: there is no pumping, thrusting or grinding.”
The hardest thing about writing the book was inhabiting a central male character: “I was nervous because of that terrible thing that gets said about women novelists not being able to write men (although apparently men can write women very easily). I was interested in writing about a person who felt themselves to be a failed human being and the complexity of that, of being damaged, struggling, trying to repair. Of coping. And what it was like to be on the outside of that.”
She is working on a third novel, although “not as much as I would like”. She is determined, for her daughter’s sake as well as her own, that motherhood should not be an impediment to working. Before she had a child, people would tell her she would change. “I dreaded the idea. I thought: who the hell am I going to be once I have given birth? It has already taken me 35 years to make this person!” She remembers her relief at finding herself unchanged.
Throughout our conversation, I have the sense that she is anchored even if that has not always been easy. She appreciates living in Norwich, “easy if you have a young child – not to mention a good place to get published!” But she still pines for London. And what about Ireland? “I feel completely Irish and that informs so much of who I am and how I write. But exile is more comfortable, the sense of being outside more useful to my writing. My place is not there, it is here.” Writing, she reflects, never stops being hard and painful and yet, “it is probably the closest you can get to joy in life”. And then she adds an afterthought, as though to herself: “Happiness and joy are not the same.”
The Lesser Bohemians is published by Faber (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £13.93
