Eimear McBride: It's loaded being inside a woman's mind !

Being in the midst of  real,live authors that you only ever knew through their books is an unforgettable experience for a bibliophile! Here I am with Eimear McBride. Here's the story:

It’s ironic to hear the author of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing and winner of five awards, including the Baileys Prize 2014 and the Goldsmith Prize 2013, talk about feeling like a failure. But that’s what Eimear McBride had to go through when her book—written in just six months— waited nine years to get published, eventually emerging  into the sunshine with the help of a small publishing company, Galley Beggar Press. 

Me:How does it feel to have your book rejected for nine years and then suddenly receive all these awards?

Eimear: Wonderful ! (Laughs) It’s wonderful to not feel like a failure anymore. With all the previous rejections, I understood that the book might never be published but I was still a writer. My duty was to keep on writing. It was very hard to keep on, despite thinking I was writing another book for the drawer. I feel insulated by my failure. This session (which she addressed along with Eleanor Catton) talked of ‘early triumphs’ but it was no early triumph for me! I feel incredibly old! (grins mischievously)

Me: How did you come to choose the unusual ‘stream of consciousness’ style for writing your book?

Eimear: I was very interested in it for historical reasons, you know, James Joyce’s Ulysses was written in the same style, and there are a lot of historic examples. But most of all, this book is about a woman’s mind. It’s very loaded being inside the mind of a woman. A woman should be able to speak her mind. And that’s what I wanted—to lay bare the mind of a woman.

Me: Is this book autobiographical in nature? Does it have some elements from your own life?

Eimear: Well, I lost a brother that way. Quite early… to illness. So in a way that loss is reflected in the A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing. But the boy in the book is not my brother, I haven’t modelled him after my brother, and the girl is not me either. The book isn’t really autobiographical. Just this one thing.

Me: There’s a lot of controversy around the Baileys Women’s prize—people question the need to have a women’s-only award at all. What is your take on this?

Eimear: I think we do need a women’s award. Sexism still exists. A women’s prize needs to be there until sexism has been stumped out. Because people talk about books on a common platform—they don’t really talk about what women are writing, what they are speaking out about. So yes, we definitely need a women’s award, because there needs to be something to level the playing field. 

(From Jaipur Literature Festival 2015)