A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Then, as I was beginning the book, I saw a production of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. 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. 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. I remembered watching Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves in 1996. It was largely due to this luckily, if inadvertently, arrived at discipline that a hoard of hitherto unmoored images and experiences began to coalesce. 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. So I wrote it on a scrap of paper, stuck it over my desk and began. 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. When I began writing there was no real plan and nothing, I thought, that I urgently wished to say. 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. I wrote my debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in six months, during 20.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride