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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/24/eimear-mcbride-women-are-really-angry Her modernist debut explored the trauma of a young woman, while her latest novel examines the loneliness of middle age. The novelist talks about powering fiction with fury “There are a number of occasions in my life when I have felt very broken,” Eimear McBride says. Her blistering first novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, published in 2013, was steeped in what McBride has called “the much feared ‘Irish’ themes of sex, death, family, guilt and religion”, and written in the much imitated “Irish” style of James Joyce. It led to her being hailed as “a genius” by Anne Enright, and it went on to win many awards, from the Goldsmith prize for experimental writing to the more mainstream (then Baileys) Women’s prize for fiction. Her 2017 follow up, The Lesser Bohemians, a darkly passionate love story between a young drama student and a much older actor, returned to the subject of childhood abuse. But while her debut was “about trauma right there in your face”, she says “Lesser Bohemians is about the life after, how it affects you, where you go.” And now her third novel, Strange Hotel, obsessively examines the scars of heartbreak, “but from much further on”. We are hunkered over coffee in our coats, the only customers in sharp winter sunshine outside a cafe in St Pancras station, our conversation interrupted by echoey announcements and the whoosh of the train from Paris. This proves a fitting setting to discuss Strange Hotel, which follows an unnamed woman as she checks into a series of hotels around the world: she unpacks, smokes, orders room service and maybe has sex with someone she meets. And she thinks. Or tries not to think. Written “in the gaps” of a year-long Beckett creative fellowship at Reading University, it is inevitably “infused” with the spirit of Beckett, “the idea of the mind devouring itself, which is a lot of Beckett”. And a lot of Eimear McBride. “Apparently so.” Continue reading...
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