Eimear McBride’s debut novel is devastatingly haunting and heartbreaking: a young Irish girl-turned-woman narrates her thoughts and the painful (because all of them seem to be painful) events in her life through stream-of-consciousness narration. The novel begins with her brother’s brain tumor and his survival of it, something that marks not only her brother, but also her and her mother for the rest of their lives. After being raped by an uncle in lieu of her first sexual experience, she goes on a downward spiral of pain and brokenness that ultimately destroys her.
This book is a difficult read, and not only because of how hard this woman’s short life is. The prose is also broken and disconnected, and the reader is never completely sure who she is talking to in her encounters, although the indirect receiver of her narration is her brother.
What frustrated me most about A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing wasn’t the novel itself; but rather, the reviews I read that kept referring to her uncle raping her as a ‘sexual encounter’. When a grown man has sex with a 12 year old, it is rape, not sex. The end. The quicker we are to change how we talk about things, the quicker these things will change.
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing was heavily lauded: it won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Desmond Elliot Prize, and of course, the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2014. McBride wrote the novel in six months while working temp jobs, and then spent nine years being rejected numerous times before finally finding a publisher.
Born in Liverpool and raised in Ireland, McBride started writing as a child, and went to The Drama Centre in London at age 17. Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, was published in 2016, and in 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship from the Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading.