‘Women are Expected to Tell Their Personal Story
all the Time’: In Conversation with Eimear McBride
Promoting and showcasing Irish writing has become an increasingly important part of the cultural programme at the Irish Cultural Centre. From 15-17 October the centre launched its inaugural ICC Literary Festival, welcoming an exceptional line-up of successful Irish writers, including Colm Tóibín, Eimear McBride, Dermot Bolger and Glenn Patterson, to name but a few. The celebration concluded with the premiere of a recently recorded interview with Ireland’s best-loved author, Edna O’Brien. We went along to the festival and had a chat with Eimear McBride, critically acclaimed author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and Something Out of Place: Women and Disgust.
How has your childhood and time spent living in Ireland influenced your writing?
I think it absolutely informs everything about who I am as a writer – my interest in language and that very particular Irish playfulness with language, how it can be bent and shaped. That transgressive attitude towards language is very Irish and that is something that I have always bought with me.
When I came to write The Lesser Bohemians it was about bringing an Irishness into London – that different way of being Irish, of being part of the Irish diaspora. I wrote Lesser while I was living back in Ireland, actually. I had moved back to Cork for four years and I was really missing London, so I started to write about it. It was the sense of being separated from it that gave me the space to think about it in a different way – to think about that time in my life, of those years at drama school, the subsequent shame of not becoming an actress and of coming to terms with that, re-embracing it and seeing the wonderful things I had got out of that experience. I used that as the diving board into writing the novel. But in both cases, it was being away, of not being immersed in that place, that allowed me to write about it again.
There is a very particular kind of relationship with the place you grew up in. It’s strange, though, because the Ireland I grew up in hardly exists anymore – it was completely racially and religiously homogenous and it is a different country now. But once you leave it’s always with you and when you go back it’s odd, you become the ‘girl who moved away to London’. The culture that was such a huge part of making you who you are suddenly sees you as not entitled to partake in it the same way anymore. And of course you don’t want to because if you did you wouldn’t have moved in the first place.
Your writing has often been compared to the Irish greats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. What do you make of these comparisons?
They’re obviously very flattering but very much a poisoned chalice too. Joyce was a very important influence to me when I first started writing. There is an influence there. But it’s not about trying to recreate what Joyce did, it’s rather to use it as a stepping stone onto something else. I was never interested in trying to write like Joyce or Beckett, or do what they did. I’m not even really interested in many of the same themes as them. But Joyce opened something inside me that gave me permission to explore language and form in a different way. He is a big influence but I don’t feel him sitting on my shoulder.
It took you nine years to find a publisher for your debut novel, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing – why do you think this was?
There were a lot of things. It was a very conservative time in publishing because it was with the advent of the internet. I think publishers saw what had happened with the music industry and thought ‘we’re next’. They pursued an approach of ‘let’s give it a cover that looks like the one that that won the Booker last year’, ‘let’s get more books like that’. It was a really dull culture and there was just no interest in serious literature at all, especially in Ireland. Then, there was a moment around when Girl was published, when there was a little fracture and a change – suddenly there was an interest and lots of interesting writers were being given opportunities. The readers had always been there but they had been patronised out of existence by the industry. The industry was turning its nose up at its own constituency. So, for some time there was a lot of interest in experimental writing again, but I feel like it’s closing down now, it’s becoming very conservative again.
What are some of the reasons behind this, do you think?
Playfulness is so discouraged by the industry and it’s a real shame. But there is also a problem with the critical culture. I think there are some great books that have been really atrociously reviewed because of a total lack of engagement in the critical culture. We see review pages being thinned down in newspapers all the time. A whole generation of critics who have been part of a bigger, broader culture are retiring and not being replaced, or being replaced by whoever is cheap, or whoever has got however many Twitter followers. It’s being pushed a lot by social media and by what bloggers are shouting most loudly. But books aren’t there for a flash in the pan. They are there for a long period and they should be read in the context of a writers’ body of work. People get one chance now and that’s it. I think that’s bad for literary culture generally and it’s definitely bad for writers.
There is a distinct style key change between your first two novels Girl and Lesser and that of Strange Hotel. What influenced this?
With Strange Hotel it felt right to go for a much more formal style. It is an overly formal style on purpose – long sentences, very complex constructions, very, very grammatical – because I wanted to write about a different kind of character. I wasn’t writing, for the first time, about young girls having overwhelming sensory experiences. I was writing about a middle-aged woman who isn’t interested in having overwhelming sensory experiences. She engages with the world in a much more reserved, tentative way. She wants to protect herself from difficult emotions. Rather than it being a book about evoking emotions in readers it was a book about thinking about emotion – thinking about how people don’t want to experience emotion, how they want to push it away. I think maybe for a lot of readers it was a bit of a shock because they weren’t getting all those big feelings. But it felt important to me at that time – to be writing a character that was my own age and to be writing someone who is a grown-up, who doesn’t engage in life in the same way that you engage with it as a young woman or as a girl. In culture, generally, there seems to be so much emphasis on feelings, that somehow emotion has primacy over every other aspect of life. I rebel against that. Emotion has its place but it is not the be-all and the end-all. I don’t think it has to trump all other aspects of life.
Your nonfiction debut, Something Out of Place: Women and Disgust, adds to the conversation about forms of social control over women and their bodies. How, as a society, are we responding to this, especially in the context of the#MeToo and Reclaim the Streets movements?
The problem is that language is developed in a very male-centric way, to talk about male experiences and life. I felt that very clearly when I was writing the sex scenes in Lesser; the sexual vocabulary was so completely male. It was hard to think in a different way about the experience of the female body and I think that extends much further to the human experience in general. If you think about Caroline Criado Perez’s work, where she talks about products not being built for women, healthcare not being tailored towards women, safety devices not being made to fit women’s bodies. It’s taken that ‘male’ is the starting point. And, I think, language is also like that. This creates a sense of isolation within women, an inability to discuss, even with each other, the sense of being cut-off from life, from the things that are important in life. Not even being able to name what it is that is wrong sometimes. And that is very hard and it’s going to take a long time to change. But we can see in these human moments of galvanised energy around #MeToo or around Sarah Everard’s murder, there is a huge desire, a pent-up fury underneath this sense of not belonging in our world. We are told constantly we have to behave in certain ways to gain access to centres of power and influence and all this stuff that you have to do that a man isn’t entitled to do. It’s not necessarily men’s fault either. It’s the system that has grown up. But it’s hard to always find the way to describe what it is, the sense of discomfort and dissatisfaction. Before #MeToo, for example, how often have all of us thought that something is off but we didn’t feel we had the right to say it, or even to know what it is that was wrong. Knowing that something was not okay and knowing that you couldn’t tell anyone because there are no words to describe that experience.
How does your own experience of being a woman shape your writing. What space does the publishing industry give to women writers?
I think there is a lot of pressure to write about the experience of being a woman and that can be hampering. There is a particular mode you see a lot, more so in the personal essay form than in the novel, of women being pushed into writing about being women. That’s really tricky because I want to write about those issues and my experiences of being a woman, but I also want to just be a person, a human being in the world, who is writing about experience that just happens to be female, because that is what I am. There’s a lot of pressure on women to divulge personal things about themselves in their writing, in a way that male writers don’t have to. In order for their work to be taken seriously they suddenly have to tell everyone about every sexual experience they’ve ever had or if they’ve had an abortion. They are pressurised into publicly divulging trauma. For some women that is what they want to write about and that’s great, but for others there is a pressure to do that and that’s not the way they want to think about the world or write about their world. It’s a phase that has to be gotten over because men don’t have to write about being a dad if they don’t want to, they don’t have to write about erectile dysfunction. Whereas women are expected to tell their personal story all the time. That is a form of oppression in itself.
Do you give much of your time to social media?
I’m not on any social media. There was a time I’d look at my husband’s to see what people were saying but I’ve stopped that. It’s a highway to self-destruction. What is the purpose of it? It doesn’t help you think more clearly about the world and I think it makes you more afraid. Sometime I think: maybe I’d sell more books if I was on social media? There are some people who it suits temperamentally but I am not one of those people. The less I engage with other people the better, the clearer I’m able to think about what I’m doing. It’s distracting. I don’t know how its possible to spend a lot of time on social media and to not allow the behaviour on there to influence you or your work, if you constantly have those voices in your head criticising you, or jeeping you. It’s not as if people are engaging in deep ways, it’s just quick and often just angry and knee-jerk. People aren’t responding in a nuanced way, they aren’t taking the time to think about other sides of the arguments and that creates a sense of flight or fight in people.
Do you think things will change, that platforms will start to regulate content or that the tone of discourse will soften?
I think the whole ‘be kind’ thing is a bit weird because it doesn’t really seem to translate. It seems to translate only into being kind to certain people. The people that you agree with politically and if you don’t agree with them politically then you can just throw them to the dogs. ‘Be respectful’ would be a lot more useful. To not always assume the worst and to allow for plurality of thought. It feels as though people are being channeled to adopt either all of these beliefs or none at all. You can’t pick and choose. You can’t have nuanced, different views. It’s all either very left-wing or very right-wing and I don’t agree with that. I don’t fit into that and I don’t feel like most people do. But people are being frightened into taking much more hardline positions than they might feel is natural to do for them. Respecting difference, difference that we don’t agree with, is more important than being kind. To not assume that because you don’t agree with them that they are a terrible human being. To be able to separate out who a person is from their set of beliefs – we have to allow for that.
No we are living in a more secular society, has social media become a new kind of religion?
People embrace sets of political views in a way they once embraced religion. These are the articles of faith and you have to agree with all of these or you’re out. It is an evangelical age and people like a leader. And you can see that very clearly in the last ten years. All around the world people falling into position where they want someone to come and tell them what to do. You see that with Trump but you see it with Greta Thunberg as well – suddenly a child is the blessed leader. I agree with her aims but there is something very weird about people having to find this one person who becomes a totemic figure. Because no one person can do that – look at Aung San Suu Kyi. She was the great hero and now she’s the great villain.
We also live in a culture that lionises youth over every other age group: this is the end result of that. It has been driven by younger people, of the generation below me. Of course, when you’re young you want a cause to die for, you want to feel passionate about everything. But when you’re older you have a sense of perspective and you know things are not quite as simple as that.
What have you been enjoying reading recently and what writer would you recommend?
A book I read recently that I loved is Claire-Louise Bennett’s new book Checkout-19. I think she’s amazing. I like it when I read a book and I think, ‘I wouldn’t know how to write that’. I enjoy that. Her mind works in an interesting way and she is able to make interesting connections and, in a lot of ways, it reminds me of Ann Quinn, but I much prefer her to Ann Quinn. I find Claire-Louise really riveting. There is a humanity in her writing.
What are you working on at the moment?
Over the summer I did make a start on a novel, which I didn’t think I was going do. It’s different again – it’s different from Strange Hotel, different from Lesser, different from Girl. That’s the thing I love about writing: everytime is like the first time. I don’t know how this one is going to be and I don’t get any comfort from having already written a novel, because it doesn’t seem to help. I don’t have a formula of ‘this is how I get a novel written’, apart from sitting down and writing. That’s the magic formula.
Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) won The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Goldsmiths Prize, The Folio Prize, The Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and The Desmond Elliot Prize. Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (2016), won The James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize and The RSL Encore Award. In 2017, she became University of Reading’s inaugural Beckett Creative Fellow during which she produced Mouthpieces, a triptych of miniature plays which aired on RTE Radio 1 in 2019. Eimear published her third novel, Strange Hotel, in 2020 and her most recent book, Something Out of Place: Women & Disgust, was published in August 2021.
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