Sep 20

Sep 20 A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

Author: Eimear McBride
Publisher: Coffee House Press (original US edition)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Eimear McBride's debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. To read A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable — but it is always a revelation.

Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny — and alarming. It is a book you will never forget.

TL;DR Review

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is devastatingly incredible, but also technically challenging and possibly the most emotionally difficult book I’ve read. But incredible.

For you if: You like to read books in experimental formats, and you are OK with the triggers this one presents.

Full Review

“Do you hear me? Is it ever time for you to understand. I meant I meant that for I never thought you could think you were low. Were lost at the moment when they cut you off. Cut your head out heart brain. It is not I know was not that but to me it was to me. Like I could have seen you in the bright of day. Like the light could have come up from the sea and take you over.”

I read A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing as part of the #ReadingWomen challenge to read all the previous winners of the Women’s Prize. This one won in 2014. Eimear McBride wrote it in six months and then spent ten years trying to sell it. Once she did, it won five awards (including the Women's Prize) and was nominated for three others.

This book is an incredible work of art. It's also technically challenging and possibly the most emotionally difficult book I've ever read.

The novel is not so much a stream of consciousness as a stream of sub-consciousness, told in raw fragments and broken snippets as the narrator takes in the world around her. (See the quote above.) It's the internal subconscious of a girl whose brother's childhood brain tumor looms over everything, so she asserts control over her life and emotions through an increasingly reckless and dangerous sexuality.

I read the first chapter three times (it’s short) to really make sure I understood what was going on, and to get used to the style. And I did get used to it — you end up sinking in. But you also kind of have to get used to reading all the sentences together and then interpreting rather than interpreting each sentence one by one. You have to read it for the forest, not the trees. In fact, if there were ever a book to listen along to the audiobook while you read, it's this one. The author herself narrates, and her personal interpretation of the words on the page was invaluable to my reading of the text. She knows which words are quotes, when the speaker shifts, which words are the ones that require emphasis, which periods to ignore and which to pause at.

I read it in one sitting and was really glad I did — I don't think I could have popped in and out of this roller coaster, emotionally. The ending is really, really hard to read. Disturbing and difficult and raw and also just so impressive.

Ultimately, I was blown away by this one. How did she do that? The narrative skill, the pacing, the trust she puts in her readers. Incredible.

I absolutely recommend this book, but only if you're up for the experimental format and emotionally prepared for the triggers I'll list below. Full review on the blog, link in bio.