A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
Hardcover, read July 2016
It took me about two months to finish this book, because I had to take a significant break in the middle--work, life, whatever.
“And he came, this grandfather, like bolts from the blue. Not a bit of warning just a rap on the door. No one expects the Spanish inquisition late Saturday afternoon. Would they drive four hundred miles without checking you’d be in? Be he did because you wouldn’t dare not. Not be in, indeed.”
I tore through the first 60 pages in a weekend. I was at a work conference spending a lot of time waiting between panels, and we were on the beach! So I read of course, and got beautifully sunburnt of course. It was an incredible experience: the writing is impossible, unreal. It’s not sentences. It’s hardly English in places. It rejects any and all grammar, and takes a great deal of mental and emotional energy to penetrate, but when you do, you’re there. You’re all in, you’re her, you understand what was previously incomprehensible, you are a part of this half-formed thing.
“That night we’re hunting. Pup to pup. Drunk up that. Do you feel? Better now. Better tan before. And some nice young man’s mouth some nice young man’s hands up my skirt in the toilets open up my thighs. Mind. All my life is hassle and all of this is fine. Singing toora loora, toora loora lay.”
I’m writing my thoughts out because, after those first 60 pages, I vehemently recommended this book to a few people who had been putting it off. I still recommend it, but more cautiously. It’s more than intellectually difficult. This book affected me physically--from distress, from empathy, from hate. It’s not the publisher’s responsibility to put a trigger warning on books, but I’ll put one with my recommendation: sexual assault, abuse. I almost wrote “graphic,” but that’s not quite right. Because nothing is described from the outside, because it’s all her, it’s all how she experiences it, but it’s visceral, it’s all the intensity of description meeting all the horror of experience.
“There’s no room for him in me. Or thing we did. Million million years ago fell off the planet. Good. Safe within my healed up eye.”
I hate the jacket copy for this novel. “Chronicles a young woman’s tender relationship with her dying brother... and goes on to reveal her harrowing and isolating sexual awakening.” It is never tender, he is only sometimes dying, there is never an awakening. It is about grief, obligation, guilt, self-loathing, independence, toxicity forced and chosen, consent. It’s awful. It never gets better. But I’ve never read, or heard of, a book that ploughs so forcefully and fearlessly into how awful girlhood, womanhood, can be; how confusing sex can be, even for women who want it; how lonely it can be to just exist, sometimes.
I didn’t discover feminism until I was about 22 years old. I knew about a history of feminism, sort of, and my mother is a strong, stubborn woman who taught me to be strong and critical and independent. (I think sometimes she’s still surprised at her success.) But I didn’t understand what feminism is now. I didn’t understand rape culture, I didn’t understand misogyny, I didn’t understand the patriarchy. I struggled with depression and anxiety and eating disorders rooted in guilt and pressure and--mainly--confusion. Confusion about sexuality and individuality and obligation and desire, right up into my early 20s. (Lol who I am kidding. Right up until forever, but now I have better resources and a better support network.) This book captures that overwhelming confusion and all the havoc it can wreak in just over 200 pages of chaos.
So yes, I certainly recommend it. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, this book may help you. If you are familiar with what I’m talking about, but not intimately, this book will be difficult but immensely rewarding, I think. If you are, like me, a fellow half-formed thing slowly building up the rest of you, if you know what it is to be half-formed and propelled by dreams and terror, then this book will be awful. But it is a form of solidarity I’ve never encountered before, gut-wrenching, painstaking. And all that bundled up in one of the most incredible literary feats of my time?
Well.
