A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

That just was life.

Usually when people talk about ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing, they mean little more than that there are a lot of run-on sentences and not many full stops. Eimear McBride is one of the very few writers to have really wrestled the English language into a new form to tell her story. Here there are many full stops, but they occur in the middle of. During. Splitting thoughts and. Off shearing different slices of idea. Sentences fracture, glance against one another and refract in different directions. The effect is kaleidoscopic, suggesting by turns the clouded thought process of disease, the raw edginess of compulsion, or the mangled simultaneity of regular daily anxieties.

Crumbs on the carpets and insects bite my show more back I don't care for. Nicer is not what I am after. Fuck me softly fuck me quick is all the same once done to me. And washing in their rusted baths and flushing brown with limescale loos amid the digs of four a.m. before I put my knickers on. Say stay the night but I am gone. Down back stairs fag glued lip sore on and wait for, get the night bus home.

Within the coarse immediacy, McBride scatters these little nuggets of poetry: amid the digs of four a.m. There are many flashes of Irish, and creative English coinages (she describes ‘high sky and snackish air’). Multiple voices intersect within paragraphs, even sentences. And McBride uses these effects quite deliberately in the service of her story, which concerns childhood abuse, family trauma, addictive compulsions, sexual self-destructiveness. The overall effect is something like James Joyce meets Sarah Kane.

He hurt my arms. You open your legs. I. I've haven't stopped thinking about you for a moment he says. Shame I didn't think of you at all. Do it. Not until. What? You hurt me. He pull by the hair. How you like it? Does that hurt? No. Then what? I want. Words drown like water. Make me know what you mean. What? When you miss me. What words are when. Get. Jesus. Over. He goes somewhere else inside. Does that hurt? Yes. A lot. A lot and relieves me for a while.

Usually I avoid books about these subjects, and I especially resent being made to relive the worst moments of someone's trauma when I feel it's mainly a form of therapy for the author. It's not like that here. Though the book deals with some very upsetting issues, it never asks for sympathy. The narrator of Girl is not a victim: she makes her own choices, even if we often find them difficult to understand. Sometimes, despite the dense prose, she can be ruthlessly direct (‘Hurt me. Until I am outside pain,’ she says at one point; and elsewhere, ‘The answer to every single question is Fuck’). And the central relationship she has with her sick brother is as raw, as real, as anything you'll read.

I won't pretend this is a light read; it's pretty gruelling. But you put it down convinced that you've read something great. show less

OMG my brain hurts! A Girl is a Half Formed Thing by Eimear McBride is a stream of consciousness novel that explores some very basic themes, a coming of age story about family relationships and lost innocence. This novel was very difficult to read, both due to content and style of writing. It’s uncompromising, intense and intelligent. I have never hidden the fact that “stream of consciousness’ is not a style that I easily take to but I would say that this author uses this genre to it’s full effect.

The book is a first person monologue given by an unnamed girl growing up in Ireland. The story is full of emotional betrayals and physical abuse. She is the “I” of the story while the “you” is always her disabled brother who show more suffers from the after affects of brain cancer. Other characters that are referenced are the absent father who abandoned the family, her ranting Catholic mother and her abusive uncle. Her life unfolds in a series of raw, unfliching episodes.

I had to read this book in small helpings as I could feel my eyes start to glaze over after a couple of pages and I would disconnect from the story, luckily this was a fairly short novel that I could read in short bursts. And while I appreciate the stylistic, tortured writing, I cannot totally applaud it as reading it was such a struggle. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is certainly unique and deserves our attention, but not a book that I appreciated or enjoyed. show less

About two thirds of the way into A Girl… comes this paragraph:

“In the waves. I am the waves by the city in the sea. I’ve come out. To be in the cold. To see again for a long way off. Out there somewhere is. New York. What if I could go? It would be so. So far I cannot even see.”

The narrator is a young adult at this point. Still her world is small. This feels less like a desire than an expression of how proximate her perceptions still are – they are contained within the experience of the body/mind and extremities.

The page before comes this, she is on the phone to her uncle who is significant to the unravelling of this young girl’s life:

Hello. Are you still there? His voice tiny diamond cutting strips out of air.

At first show more I thought this metaphor clumsy. Until I read the next page and remembered that the world around the narrator is close in on her. So of course the air around her is dense, so dense only a diamond can cut through it. It’s as though she experiences the world with a higher density of gravity than the rest of us. Emotions, perceptions, sounds, sights, touch all compress her.

Proprioception is one of our senses, the one we never talk about and the one we never know how to pronounce. It is the sense we form early in life, as babies, of the immediate world around us. Watch a baby in a crib thrashing its arms and legs around uncoordinated, it is learning how to define itself in its own surroundings, as though reaching out towards the outer reaches of itself. Eventually we learn where those places are - where the tip of our fingers, our knees, the tops of our heads and our noses are in space. Then we no longer think about it. It is part of us. When someone loses that sense, say when the brain is damaged in particular locations, they may move and jerk like an insect on its back, they have lost their proprioception. The boundaries of the self is damaged and incapable of fixing itself.

This proprioception sense helps me understand the idea of the self as a location with a boundary. We cultivate boundaries so we don’t get harmed (physically and emotionally) and can go about our business. So it’s kind of the outer limit of our consciousness and sense of self. Every other person has the same sense of space and self around them, we think. With our narrator, this has broken down. The self and its awareness of the space around her was broken from the age of thirteen. Then the body, mind and all the ideas of personal integrity disappear. The narrator since thirteen has become not quite themselves, or another way, not grown up. Without boundaries, the body and self is available for abuse. The narrator can receive and can even instigate it. Her integrity was breached so to speak, she has lost the version of the self that was forming as a young teenager. She becomes an agent in her own self-destruction.

The effect on the page is that the space around our narrator in A Girl… is always close, as though we’re watching a life on a screen in close up.

Fragmentation is the norm for our narrator. The sense of self is bits and pieces, hence the bitsy, piecey, disconnect of data bits.

Qualia are the little units of experience data processed by our neurons, the sights sounds touch thoughts experiences of our immediate world all getting processed into something we want to place an understanding around. A little like narrative in a work of fiction.

Victoria, the teenage character from the comedy TV show Little Britain expresses herself in endless monologues of bits and pieces of her views and perceptions. She is the epitome of solipsism; the world doesn’t exist outside her immediate perception of it.

This immediate world is what we’re exposed to here, not Victoria’s reverie of comical diatribes, but a narrator whose voice and expression of her world is fixed at a point sometime in early teens. Trauma often fixes us into the age when an event happens to us and we don’t grow past it, forever in a state. So all those data bits we receive are processed through this fragmented ‘narrative voice’ too.

Perception, our sensory experience, isn’t received in sentence form and if it was, it’s syntax would be everywhere. The normal parts of speech placement - subject object verb noun adjective need a well formed socialised self to place them in order to articulate clear sentences. But literary narratives don’t need to do that. They can express an approximation of the inner world of the self. So in literature a story can take place with a disrupted syntax. If you listen to someone whose first language is not English tell a story in English, you experience this. But you can fill in the spaces with proper prose and know what they are saying, or you can just get the story from the bits that are there. If you listen hard enough. Similarly, if you listen long enough to street talk, teenage talk etc, all those sub-genres of language, you eventually work out the narrative that at first seems incomprehensible. You get into its flow.

Of course, to see the world the way our narrator does is not unusual. It is how a child experiences before they can articulate in a socialised way. Or just imagine spending a day encountering no one, living out an endless stream of thoughts and perceptions. You only need to order them when you encounter another person, you are OK in your own non-syntactical, grammatically disordered world. But when someone enters the room, you know you have to pull those thoughts back into a grammatical order again. Unless you have lost that ability and all of those thoughts exist right at the surface incapable of getting out.

Trauma may be the primary cause that keeps the narrator experiencing the world and herself the way she does. Though she’s more than a medical case history.

In A girl…, we are taken out of ourselves into a new world not our own. Once you get into the flow of the language, you willingly enter another dimension. When there, it’s not so different from how the world is experienced daily anyway by most of us. When we accept that we want to experience another’s world, we might be transported into one of the many possibilities of being human. show less

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a both deeply beautiful and deeply unsettling book. Although the structure of the novel itself is in fact fairly conventional and linear, the language is anything but expected or conventional. There are few coherent sentences, and yet the story itself has a coherent flow if you allow the words their own space and their own musicality. I suppose one might think it the author was attempting to write in a stream of consciousness mode, but that is not exactly it. More likely the language seems to be attempting to explore that indistinct bridging between the inner primitive instinctual reaction and conscious thought. The language of the novel seems to float in shifting sands between the rawness of instinct show more and the music of poetry. In fact I would say this novel is far easier to read if you approach it as it was an epic poem. Then the language can capture something elusive, and beautiful, in the story, even though the story itself is tragic. Another point, even though one feels one knows the main character here, this too is an just an impression. We read, and think we know the narrator's thoughts, but just as we ourselves are more than just our instinctual selves, so too this narrator, but we never really see her fully, just as we are never told anything about the physical being of any of the characters. It is a haunting novel of pain and suffering and love, but also of knowing and not-knowing, and as such, I think it will remain with me for a long time show less

I almost didn’t make it past page 3 of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. I mean, what do you make of prose like this?
He says I can’t be waiting for it all the time. I’d give my eyes to fix him but. The heart cannot be wrung and wrung. And she like calmest Virgin Mary sitting on the bed. Hands warming up her sides for. What’re you saying? Breath. Going? Leaving? But he’s just stopped dying. This one’s to come. Please don’t no I won’t stop you. could never make you do a thing. You’ll support us. Aren’t you great? Oh the house is mine. It’s for the best. For who you me? Board my body up. I’m not for loving. Anymore. I’ll live for housework. Dressing kids. And you for mortgage new shoes spuds. Can’t live short hope show more but gas bills long and paid on time too. Oh so kind. Aren’t you the fine shape of a man.
It took some effort to understand the first chapter of this book in which the girl, still in utero, describes her older brother’s brain tumor and surgery, and the devastating impact of the boy’s illness on his parents’ marriage. And things don’t get any better once the unnamed girl enters the world. Her family is poor. Her brother’s intellectual development is slow and he is teased by classmates. Her mother is deeply religious, and convinced of the power of prayer to solve all of life’s problems. The girl becomes a victim of both verbal and sexual abuse, and lacking much-needed emotional support, she adopts extremely unhealthy behaviors as an adolescent and young adult. Eventually you can see a climax building, and it’s not pretty. In fact, it’s pretty devastating.

This book is unrelentingly bleak. Nothing good happens. Ever. But once I got past the choppy, disjointed writing style I found it surprisingly effective at conveying a mood, a tone. I was immersed in the girl’s world and could almost literally feel her pain. It’s not a book I’d recommend to just anyone, but if you are intrigued by its experimental nature and can deal with some very disturbing themes, you will be rewarded. show less

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD (NOT THAT IT MATTERS ALL THAT MUCH FOR THIS KIND OF NOVEL)

This novel starts at the birth of the narrator, in the first person, and quickly moves to her childhood, in disjointed, stilted sentences. This fits well with a child's language, but strikingly this style continues as the narrator becomes a teenager and then an adult. The girl is Irish, in a deeply Catholic family, with an older brother who nearly dies in childhood because of a brain tumor that causes a little palsy and mental slowness for the rest of his life. Her mother, terrorised by her father for raising children who don't know their prayers by heart, in turn takes things out on her own children with disturbing violence. When the narrator is 13, she show more is attracted to an uncle who selfishly sexually takes her. There's no doubt this is abuse, but it both psychologically damages and frees her up, and she becomes sexually very promiscuous from that moment, including, years later, deliberately towards this uncle again. The last 3rd of the novel is largely taken up by her brother, in his early 20's having cancer again and eventually dying. On the day of his funeral, she manages to get raped twice - once very violently by a virtual stranger and a second time by her own uncle again, and helped by her mother just shouting at her for selfishly ruining her brother's moment like this, she ends up deliberately drowning to finally find peace.

As the above indicates, there are some rather standard plot lines here: the clash between religion and ugly death, the abusive mother, the sexually exploitative uncle, a family death, and so on. But there are a few key factors that elevate this novel some way beyond the set of tropes it might otherwise have been.

First and foremost is the style. Many sentences miss out the last word or phrase. Grammar is butchered, mainly to compress the content. Words are played with often for their double meanings. Occasionally a deeply eloquent highly poetic sentence will burst out. But mainly the style is a semi-stream of consciousness way to enter into a dissociated, distanced mind, numbed by so much trauma. It is a strikingly novel approach, and for its creativity alone should be applauded. Definitely there are times the style is haunting and powerful. And yet I felt some of these devices - especially the unfinished sentences and deliberately ungrammatical phrases - were ridiculously overused. It worked well in infancy, but didn't ring true, or really reveal much of anything in the later sections. And the jostling of passages between eloquence and incoherence just felt inconsistent rather than varied to me.

Then there is the plot itself. Like the style I wanted to see something creative and original in the plot, and I largely was disappointed. I'm not interested in the battle between religion and rationality anymore - it's too obvious a question to be answered. Death and bereavement are always powerful topics, but I again felt I learnt nothing here. The only really interesting relationship was between the narrator and her uncle. This definitely is raised beyond the caricature into something more complex and nuanced. But even here there are times that I feel McBride overplayed her hand. There is one scene where she basically asked to be hit until her nose bleeds that so closely resembles Blue Velvet (which in itself was not totally convincing) that I felt awkward for the similarities. And when her uncle rapes her - during her own brother's funeral, after she is bleeding so badly she'll need stitches and has clearly already just been raped - that didn't seem to fit with a man who did, at times, seem to see her tenderly.

Finally I took slight issue with the title. It is a wonderful title, but it advertises a certain kind of book I was looking forward to, but which this is not. Basically I was hoping to gain insight into a female world where they are always classed as second class citizens compared to men, where this is a man's world, even now, and women are constantly battling to fight off exploitation and prejudice. Granted this novel communicated the sexual exploitation part of that equation brilliantly, but there's so much more here it could have covered, instead of spending so much time focusing on the dying brother, which has little to do with the trials of females in a man's world.

So sadly this novel is very much a mix for me - occasionally electric scenes told with a stunningly original style - but also stylistically not pliable or sophisticated enough to be flawless by any means. And finally the stereotypical nature of the plots and characters isn't completely shed in various places, especially when the novel borders on melodrama. show less

To say this demanding, brutal, and fractured novel is not for everyone is a terrific understatement. With a style inspired by James Joyce and a bleakness that Cormac McCarthy would be right at home with, it's no surprise that it took almost a decade to find a publisher, though once it did it took in a number of awards: Irish Novel of the Year, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmith's Prize for fiction that "opens up new possibilities".

Essentially, the novel is about a young woman who suffers from a series of emotional and physical abuses and her own self-destructive behavioral responses to this abuse. Her father abandons the family before she's even born, while her toddler brother has a cancerous brain tumor. Her mother show more reacts by submersing herself in obsessive religiosity. Her uncle rapes her when she's 13. She comes of age and escapes to the city, acting out in self-harm but at least free to grope towards something better, but then her brother's cancer returns and she goes home and it all goes rotten.

The novel is written in fractured style, ignoring any and all good rules of grammar. This makes reading it hard work, except for those times when it feels like as the reader you get in a groove and can flow along with the rhythm of the words, understanding meaning on the conscious level, yes, but also catching meaning that seeps up from your subconscious. This didn't always happen for me and when it didn't the book felt like a struggle, but when it did, the book felt like genius. The fractured syntax could be said to reflect the protagonist's damaged state of mind, and this is very effectively the case as the story arc descends into greater horror and the writing becomes even more garbled and inchoate.

To illustrate the style, here's what I thought was a sterling passage describing what you might say was the beginning of her existence as a sexual being, around puberty:

Like smoke in my lungs to be coughed out. I'd throw up excitement. What is it? Like a nosebleed. Like a freezing pain. I felt me not me. Turning to the sun. Feel the roast of it. Like sunburn. Like a hot sunstroke. Like globs dropping in. Through my hair. Spat skin with it. Blank my eyes the dazzle. Huge shatter. Me who is just new. Fallen out of the sky. What. Is lust it? That's it. The first splinter. I.

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