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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