Our host Vick Hope is joined by author Eimear McBride.
Eimear’s first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, took nine years to find a publisher but found a home with indie Galley Beggar Press. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing subsequently won the 2014 Women’s Prize for Fiction, as well as the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Eimear’s second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, won the 2016 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017, she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. In 2022, Eimear wrote and directed A Very Short Film About Longing (DMC/BBC Film) which was screened at the 2023 London Film Festival, and she also writes and reviews for the Guardian, New Statesman and the TLS.
Her latest release The City Changes Its Face is a continuation of The Lesser Bohemians, following Eily and Stephen as their passionate love affair is tested to its limits.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to see Eimear’s five most influential books written by women.
‘I read it when I was 13 and I was away at Irish language summer school – I read it sort of under the covers as Edna’s name was still considered somewhat risque back in the late 1980s. […] I was reading it in the environment where it was written about and there was something quite magical about that. […] The idea of physical desire, of women having it, and it being something that could be written on a page and read and shared and spoken about was revelatory for me.’
‘I was very interested in Gothic fiction – being Irish of course, the inventors of the Gothic, it is always with us! And this was set outside the usual historical context that you’d see in Irish Gothic fiction. […] It’s kind of followed me throughout my own fiction as someone who sits and tells their story from beginning to end.’
‘This novel is normally seen as a footnote and kind of forgotten. Tender is the Night is a magnificent novel, it’s my favourite Fitzgerald novel actually, and Save Me the Waltz, it’s [Zelda] telling her own version of that story, of that slide from the wonder, and glamour and fun, into the terrible mess that both of them ended up in. It was her taking back her own story and also her attempt to assert the artist within herself.’
‘I was working in the city at the time and I started to see that I was in the place where this story unfolds, this place that he lived, the streets that he walked on – many of them still there. So in my lunch times, when I would escape from the office, I would walk the different routes that Claire Tomalin described – this was the beginning of a love affair with London that’s never left me since.’
‘I like books that frighten me and [Dependency] really frightened me. I think it really describes human vulnerability and how easy it is to find yourself in a different place. It is a reminder to hold on to your humanity – how important it is to be very cautious when making judgements of choices others make in life because of course, we do not know what happens in the secret heart of anyone.’
