In our new books series, Sophie Grenham gets familiar with EIMEAR MCBRIDE, who for seven years faced REJECTION LETTERS before publishing the brilliant A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING
Eimear McBride’s sensational debut novel, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing was written in just six months when she was 27. But after seven years of rejection slips, she gave up and it took a local bookseller to persuade her try again. Published a decade after its inception, the book has been a roaring success, winning the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2014.
Liverpool-born Eimear spent her formative years in Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo and Castlebar, Co.Mayo before moving on to London and Co Cork. Eimear now lives in Norwich with her husband and daughter and is currently working on her second novel.
On her Norwich neighbourhood
I live near the centre of the city. It’s quite a quiet place. Very bookish. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a writer in this town… I do like to walk through and Norwich’s old streets lend themselves very well to this pastime.
On what we’ll find in her study
I have a big old desk my husband bought me from a house clearance place in Tottenham years ago and it’s followed us on all our subsequent travels. I wrote Girl on it and am now finishing the second book on it too. I also have a poster of Dostoyevsky. I bought it in St Petersburg in 2000. It’s a terrible, ugly thing but it reminds me of a very interesting time as well as what small fry I am in the footnotes of literature.
On her creative process
Just sit down, write, delete, write, fiddle about with it. Swear a lot. Start again.
On her favourite local bookshop
The greatest book shop in the world sits in the centre of Norwich and is called The Book Hive. This is where its owner Henry Layte first read my much-rejected manuscript and decided to publish it. Life changing aspects aside, it is also one of the most beautifully curated, thoughtfully laid out bookshops I know. It’s a bookshop made by people who love books for people who love books too and that, sadly, is an increasingly rare thing.
On the books dear to her heart
Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls was the first great book of my life, one that taught me to look at language in a different way. The second was Ulysses because Joyce crossed every boundary and left the gates open behind.
Image: Jemma Mickleburgh
A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing (€14.20) is published by Faber and Faber and is available from all good bookstores.
Sophie Grenham