Eimear McBride’s Literature of Desire

Responses to Eimear McBride’s work – whether rapturous or puzzled – often begin by considering her formal innovations. The story  of her success is a heartening one. An odd, seemingly unsellable book, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, for which McBride took nine years to find a publisher, jolted to remarkable literary heights in 2013 thanks to several prizes and sparkling reviews. Her daring prose style was part of what made her success so cheering: evidence that the reading public is still eager for a novel that not only comforts or entertains but challenges and uproots expectations. Hers is prose in which sentences judder and disintegrate and run over each other.