Novelist Eimear McBride has revealed that she started writing her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, before her first even had a publisher.
Speaking to today's Observer, the 39-year old novelist recalled the nine years she spent trying to find a publisher for her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. The recurring rejection of the novel by publishers caused her to feel a “terrible social shame” only forgotten when she was intensely involved in the writing of The Lesser Bohemians.
After inauspicious beginnings, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing was eventually published in 2013. It subsequently won the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction in 2014, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. The stage adaptation won three awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents, McBride wrote A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing in six months when she was aged 27. The Lesser Bohemians, took her eight years to write and explores the relationship between an 18-year-old Irish drama student and the older actor she meets in mid-1990s North London. Set in a series of bedsits and squats, the tale is described as “a story about love and innocence, joy and discovery."
“For three years after writing Girl, I didn’t write at all, " declares McBride. "I thought I should try to be a productive member of society. But then I moved back to Ireland and had to decide whether or not I was a writer. And I realised I’m not equipped to be anything else. I saw that even if I was going to be a failed writer, that was probably the best I was going to manage . .and I made my peace with it – as much as you can.”
The new novel inevitably required the treatment of the sexual bond in the core relationship. “Writing about sex is very difficult,” says the prize-winning author. “I did not set out to write lots of sex scenes – they kept recurring and I realised they were intrinsic to the story of the relationship.
"And yet, I wanted it to be the opposite of pornography – even literary sex can be pornography. In this novel, it was the characters’ way to speak to each other about what they could not verbalise.” The Lesser Bohemians is published by Faber & Faber.
