A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
by Eimear McBride
Summary
An unnamed Irish girl addresses her older brother across the whole of the book, and the first thing the reader must survive is the sentences: broken, pre grammatical, stopping mid thought, capitalised by feel. McBride writes not what her narrator would say but the noise of thinking before speech arrives, and once the ear adjusts, usually within ten pages, the style stops being an obstacle and becomes the point: this is consciousness with the syntax scraped off, and it can do fear, shame and tenderness at intensities ordinary prose cannot reach.
The story underneath is stark. The brother's childhood brain tumour has left him slow, mocked at school, adored by his sister; the father is gone; the mother has hardened into performative Catholic piety that turns every family failure into sin. When the narrator is thirteen an uncle abuses her, and the book follows the long fallout through her teens and college years: promiscuity wielded as self harm, the family home as a place to escape and be dragged back to, and always the brother, whose tumour returns in her twenties and sets the final movement going, a deathbed vigil that strips even the fractured language down to single syllables.
It is a short book and a heavy one, and it does not soften anything at any point. It is best read quickly, at the speed of thought rather than the speed of prose, and many readers report hearing it more than reading it.
Around two hundred pages.
Best for readers willing to meet an experimental style on its own terms and be paid in full, and absolutely not for readers in search of comfort.
Historical Context & Significance
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing won the Baileys Women's Prize in 2014 and had already taken the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, founded to reward fiction that extends the form, which is this book's biography in one line: Eimear McBride wrote it in six months at twenty seven and spent nine years failing to sell it, rejected by mainstream publishers as brilliant and unmarketable, until Galley Beggar Press, a tiny Norwich house, printed a thousand copies in 2013.
The critics did the rest. James Wood called it blazingly daring; the comparisons ran to Joyce and Beckett, McBride's acknowledged masters, and her publisher's account of reading the manuscript, the feeling of having found the real thing, became part of the legend. The prize wins made the case that the experimental novel could still break out commercially, and small press publishing in Britain has traded on the precedent since.
McBride's later novels, The Lesser Bohemians and Strange Hotel, continue the project; a one woman stage version toured internationally. This remains the landmark.