Lexical prowess and experimental narration may often deter even the avid reader from engaging wholly with a text. Ulysses, for all its groundbreaking contributions to modern literature, still lays untouched on bookshelves around the world because of the amount of active participation the text requires from its reader. It would come as no surprise then that a text so engrained within the Irish tradition as Eimear McBride’s debut novel from 2013, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, may, on first glance, discourage readers with its fragmented and stream-of-consciousness narrative style as well as its use of slang. However, readers may ultimately find solace in the way McBride crafts a story that demands close reading. That is not to say that the book is easily read by any means, but the emphasis on sentence-level detail consistently draws the reader inward. As Sinead Gleeson’s 2013 review for The Irish Times outlines, ‘[the novel] doesn’t keep the reader at a distance. We are expected to pay attention, certainly, to immerse ourselves in its shifting voices and stop-start rhythms, but it hugely rewards that dedication’.
This, in Gleeson’s terms, collection of ‘shifting voices and stop-start rhythms’ that forms the crux of the text provides valuable insight into McBride’s unnamed narrator. Growing up in a conservative Catholic household without a father, McBride’s narrator expresses the struggles associated with maturation and the visceral familial rifts that result. The text is narrated in the first person and addressed to her brother, her elder by two or three years, who suffers from a brain tumor while they are both young children. This sibling relationship develops alongside the narrator’s own individual growth, as the reader learns of how her budding sexual identity outwardly affects her relationships both with her dogmatic mother and socially ostracised brother. The text relies on the coalescence of external dialogue and internal musings in order to provide well-developed portraits of the narrator’s progression from early childhood, into adolescence and through young adulthood.
After an unconventional sexual awakening in her early teenage years, McBride’s narrator juxtaposes her own maturity with that of her older brother’s. She notes, ‘We were moving off now. From each other. As cannot be. Helped. I didn’t help it from that time on. Young know. All that…Who are you? You and me were never this. This boy and girl that do not speak. But somehow I’ve left you behind and you’re just looking on’ (61). McBride underscores not only the complex nature of sibling rivalry but also the way in which her narrator feels she’s responsible because she ‘left [her brother] behind’. Readers experience this relationship shifting as the siblings growing from teens to young adults and social forces begin drawing them apart further.
By the novel’s conclusion, we still find the narrator feeling responsible for her brother and the way in which her family and society wrongly identifies him. She additionally reflects on how her own choices have ultimately affected her brother’s life. In this way, the narrator’s sexuality–while primarily driving the narrative and contextualising her own struggles –grows somehow entwined with her brother’s ability to effectively grow up. The narrative is foremost a lesson in the importance of interpretation and perspective. Socio-sexual discovery for the narrator manifests itself differently for each of the other family members.
I could not have chosen a more thought-provoking text as my first post-MA coursework read. Beyond the numerous prizes this texts has accrued, McBride creates a story that both haunts and liberates the reader with narrative interiority that is reminiscent of Woolf and Joyce. It is no surprise that the text has since found its way onto literature course syllabi worldwide.
a cursory review 