Mind Picker: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

From the author blurb: Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in the west of Ireland. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and spent the next nine years trying to get it published. After resisting all suggestions to edit her book into something more marketable, an independent press took on the challenge, and since its publication, Girl has won many prestigious awards and upwards of $100k in prize monies. So what's the hubbub?

As I was reading this challenging book, I was thinking it had an oddly disjointed stream-of-consciousness construction, but that didn't seem to be quite right; Girl is unlike anything I've read before. According to this article, it was actually written in a "stream-of-cognition", using language to access the kind of thinking that happens before we turn that thinking into language. Action is immediate and unprocessed, written about in fragments and abrupt clauses, totally ignoring the higher ordering of formal language. I must confess that I found this wearying but I never found it boring -- there's an emotional truthfulness that redeems the work the reader must engage in, and since this is an emotionally charged book, the rewards were often found. I'm going to quote at length in this review because the format and language are as much a part of the book as is the plot.

In broad strokes, this is the appalling life story of an unnamed narrator; no people or places are named except for her mother, Mammy, her pervy uncle, Uncle, and we are quick to realise that the pronoun "you" is used exclusively for the narrator's brother. The brother had a brain tumour removed that led to physical and mental challenges and their father abandoned the family; both happening before the girl was born. The fragmentary nature of the early passages made sense as the girl was experiencing them from the womb:

You white-faced feel the needle go in. Feel fat juicy poison poison young boy skin. In your arteries. Eyeballs. Spine hands legs. Puke it cells up all day long. No Mammy don’t let them.

McBride has said that she was inspired to explore modernism after reading James Joyce, but this is no Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo, but then again, McBride's narrator never had baby tuckoo's sheltered infancy. Buckling under the stress of being a single parent (and feeling the added pressures of the expectations of her family and the Catholic Church), Mammy is caustic and abusive, as in this scene after her judgemental father has visited:

Right then. Right the pair of ye. Do you see what you've done? Are you pleased with yourselves? What did I say about forward rolls? What did I tell you about keeping your knickers covered? She is jumping up the stairs. Take one and two. Crack my eyes are bursting from my head with the wallop. Blood rising up my nose. Drip my head forward. Drop of that. She gets my hair. Listen. To me. Listen. What you've done. Shaking me smack and smack my head. Dirty brat. Shivering. Sharp with rage. Get away from me and push me over to the banisters.

You. Panic. Mammy sorry that I sorry I didn't know. Your hands can't keep her off. She knows all the duck and weave we've done before. And hits you on your ear. On your cheek. That hard. Ah Mammy sorry. Sorry. Sorry please, all you say. She have you by the jumper. Slap you harder. Slap and slap and slap. Push you in the corner. Mammy. Mammy. Getting red face. Getting sore face. Slap again she. Slap again. Screaming. You imbecile. You stupid. I cupping all my blood nose in my jumper. Crouch. You. Bold. Boy. You. Stupid. Stupid. You'll never manage anything. You're a moron. He's right. You're a moron. Hail Mary. How hard can it be? Hail Mary. I've had enough of you. The pair of you. And you. You'll have to go to handicapped school. No Mammy Mammy. Slap you. School for morons is where you belong and you can live there and you can do what you like and I'll never have to put up with you again. I've had enough of you. Both of you. Selfish spoiled brats. Do you hear me? Enough. Morning noon and night and this is what you do to me? Handicapped school do you hear me? Slap slap. Your nose weeping while she pulled you by the hair and then a hard one. A really hard one. Hard down straight upon your brown head. I hear it. Mammy my head. Mammy my my don't Mammy hit me anymore on my head. Holding it, your head, all bent down. Feel it throb you. The shock like sacrilege. Mammy not my head anymore, putting out your palm instead. She didn't then all at once. Pushed you back on the floor. Went into her room. Went into the dark closed curtains of it and shut the door on us.

As the narrator was three-years-old in this scene, I still accepted the fragments (and note that Mammy's speech is recorded as proper language, even if the formatting is still jumbled) and expected the language to evolve as the narrator matured -- but it doesn't; this is fragmentary "stream-of-cognition", beginning to end. Even though Mammy makes threats about sending the brother to "handicapped school", she is perpetually in denial about his condition, and it is later at public school that the narrator first realises that her brother is "different", and that realisation makes for a barrier between herself and her family:

We went to school. We went on the bus. In the cold lunch break they are kicking football on the muck pitch. You run. Run. Run. That bad eye I know cannot keep up with a ball nor does it see one of them and his doing you for the crowd. Behind your back. For their laughter is a mighty thing to invoke. Your little limp. Sometimes the way you shake your head. It's brilliant that the worst one on the whole field doesn't know it. See him do it. For their roaring. For their great lads fun. He does your voice like a think tongue. Pass it here lads after you say it. They kick it to keep you to and fro. No one's playing. Only you now but you don't know. Round of laughing. I see you stop them. Something twigging within. Look around. To the clumps of them doubled-up in two quaking squealing. Happy pigs getting fed on you. The way your hand hangs down or you stumble on a ruck. He smears a muck bit down his forehead for the scar that you've got. Jesus f-ing spastic Christ. And you were saying, what is it? Hey lads what's going on? The more they look the more they laugh. You now getting all het up. Can smell the joke descend on you. How did you get your scar again? A knife. A knife? Oh was it? Very funny. I heard you got your brain cut up. Did not. That you're brain-damaged. I am not. You're a brain-damaged liar. No listen you said. Handicapped. Ugh they're sticking tongues in their bottom lips. You stumbling towards them. Not thinking. Thinking how to stop them say at this. In the mud you stumbled over. Caught yourself. Stood back up straight. Listen. Listen lads. All they say is uuuuuggggh. I could kill them for this or you. I could roar. I could cry. I do not. Anything at all. Just stand feel it worse and worse.

This disconnection that the narrator feels makes her a target -- first for the pervy (married-to-Mammy's-sister) Uncle, and then for all the boys in school, and it feels tragic but honest that this is how a thirteen-year-old girl, from a history of abuse and oppression, could become the schoolyard slut, seeking degradation to muck up her outsides to match her insides. This fractured mind matched the fractured sentences, and I still was waiting for the character to mature out of it, as when she moved away to college:

City all that black in my lungs. In my nose. Like I am smoking am not but still. I’ll have a creaky bed up in some woman’s house. For too much a week, that I don’t guess. Will do. Maybe soon. Unpack my socks and. Oh. That’s being lonely. Lying here. Head and feet not knowing where they’ve come to. The rest and. Both of ye. And shocking. That.

By this point, I realised that the fragments were permanent, and as the narrator engages in progressively more dangerous and violent sex, it's obvious that the damages from her childhood were also permanent. As her family life becomes increasingly catastrophic, so too do the girl's thoughts become increasingly disjointed:

Stick it ionthe don’tinside wwherhtewaterisswimming htroughmynoseandmouth throughmysense myorgands sthroughmythrough. That. A. My brain. He. Like. Now. Ithink i smell of woodwherethe river hits the lakebrownwashfoamy up the bank side Isee allcreaturesthere fish ducklings inthespring spring water going throughmyveins sinktheocean seeoutfar my salt my. Sea firsttime. Ahhhh pisses.

Hopefully I've quoted enough to allow other readers to decide on their own whether A Girl is a Half-formed Thing will be their cuppa tea; this won't be for everyone. Anecdotally, I've noticed that women reviewers (the pros and on goodreads) have rated this book higher than men, so I'll throw that out there. As for me, this never became the book I was expecting, but I'm finding it unforgettable -- it touched me on a deeper level and I can't resent McBride for making me work for that (I am fairly haunted by the image of the little boy and girl -- after their Mammy beat them up above -- who then went into the darkened kitchen to warm her up a can of tomato soup as a peace offering; an offering she took as her due before shooing them to their own beds, hungry. I don't think this would have been as affecting in a straightforward style of writing.) And to be clear: while McBride may have been influenced by Joyce, this is no Finnegan's Wake; the style takes some getting used to, but it's not incomprehensible, and the effort was worth it for me.