There is a moment very late on in The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride’s marvellous modern love story, when her two protagonists first call each other by their name, an act so poignant that those names remain engraved on a reader’s heart, like initials carved into a tree.
So even though her publisher, Faber & Faber, is not marketing her new novel, The City Changes Its Face, as a sequel, the back cover’s very mention of Eily and Stephen signals that we are back in their world of Camden, in north London, in the mid-1990s, two years on from the tumultuous days of first love, the couple gingerly navigating the wash of an as yet undisclosed crisis in their relationship.
Eily is a 20-year-old Irish drama student, Stephen a successful English actor 20 years her senior, both recovering from troubled childhoods, the significant age gap in their relationship further complicated by the reappearance in his life of his long-lost teenaged daughter, Grace.
While Stephen is putting the finishing touches to an autobiographical film, Eily seems isolated in their new flat, retracing missteps in their relationship in her mind and on paper. So this is a novel about a couple attempting to adapt their past into art.
It’s standard to ask a writer about the embryonic idea that quickened into the finished work. Here, however, the question is, when did McBride realise she wanted to write a second novel about Eily and Stephen? The Lesser Bohemians was published in 2016, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, the RSL Encore Award and Irish Novel of the Year, but it had taken nine years to write, and McBride had known for years that her story was too big for one book.
[ Eimear McBride returns with new novelOpens in new window ]
“I knew from 2010 I wanted there to be another book, set two years later,” she says. “I wasn’t done with them.” Her intention had been to leave it to gestate for a while to give her a bit of distance from the original, but other projects kept presenting themselves. She is happy with the result, however. “There are things you will understand in greater depth.”
This obviously begs the question of whether she is done with them now. “Twenty years ago I’d have been a bit snobby about a trilogy, but there will be a third one. I’ve thought that for a long time. I think there will be three and that’s the end.”
What happens next? “Wait for another nine years,” McBride says, laughing. She doesn’t have a narrative arc for the three books. “That’s beyond me. I can just about go from book to book. I know my own process more now, which is that I don’t know anything and I have to find my way, whereas before I was always trying to make a plan and then everything would just die, because it was too much in position, and it wasn’t interesting to write something when you already know what happens.”
They could be very brutal, didn’t sugar-coat criticism at all. But there was also a tremendous sense of closeness. Nearly 30 years later we have a WhatsApp group
— Eimear McBride
We are conversing over coffee in a Dublin hotel. The author has just flown in from London, where she lives in Forest Gate, in the east of the city, with her husband, William Galinsky, a theatre and arts-festival director, and their daughter, Éadaoin. She cuts a dash in her patterned trouser suit, dark shirt and loose black tie.
Although very much Irish, McBride is at home in London in a way that she never was growing up in rural Sligo. She had moved there as a toddler from Liverpool – the city she was born in, in 1976 – just after the papal visit in July 1979. “My parents told me the flags were all out for us coming to Ireland.” In truth, “we were always blow-ins”.
John and Gerardine, both psychiatric nurses, were from the North but moved to England soon after the Troubles broke out; Catholic colleagues had received bullets in the post. The North, always a cold house for Catholics, had now an added chill factor of sectarian murders.
Her mother is from Belfast and now lives there again. Her father was a farmer’s son from Ballycastle, Co Antrim. “Mum said it was like Victorian poverty. She’d never met anyone as poor as my father’s family – like, they didn’t have any running water; they used to get sent black bread from Canada.”
His parents had died young, so his sister, a nurse, brought him as a teenager to England with her. Having left school at 14, he instilled in his children early a love of reading. Eimear’s brother Cillian lectures in political theory at Queen’s University Belfast; another brother trains film technicians and plays music. But Eimear’s father, a brave man who returned to Liverpool to testify against colleagues charged with abusing patients, died of cancer aged 40, when she was only eight, the first of two devastating blows in her young life.
The family moved to Castlebar, which was “like Paris”, with a cinema and an arts centre – run by Sally Rooney’s mother – where she first saw a Harold Pinter play. McBride took part in feiseanna and attended drama classes at Hawk’s Well Theatre, in Sligo. At 17, having watched a BBC documentary about London’s Drama Centre, she was accepted for a place there to study acting; Ireland had no such third-level course at the time.
It was a radical place, influenced by Stanislavski’s method-acting school and Joan Littlewood, with graduates such as Pierce Brosnan, Tara Fitzgerald, Geraldine James, Helen McCrory, Tom Hardy and Michael Fassbender (two years her junior).
“It was terrible but also amazing, the kind of thing you love when you’re a teenager but you wouldn’t love it if you were 45. They asked a lot and made you ask a lot of yourself and didn’t let you take it easy. Most of it would be illegal nowadays. It was 11 hours a day, incredibly intense but very inspiring.
I don’t think you can ever be the same after; the guilt that for no good reason this happened to someone else, not you; the unfair, random cruelty of that
— Eimear McBride
“You took what you did seriously; culture was something that deserved to be taken seriously. And, yeah, they could be very brutal, didn’t sugar-coat criticism at all. But there was also a tremendous sense of closeness. Nearly 30 years later we have a WhatsApp group.”
She met her future husband there; Galinsky was doing a director’s course. In 2007 he was appointed director of Cork Midsummer Festival, so after 10 years’ living in Tottenham and soul-destroying temping, she began work on what would become The Lesser Bohemians. Absence made the heart grow fonder, however, exile from the English capital turning it into a sort of love letter to London.
But she had already written her first novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, over six months in 2004, a disturbing portrayal of a young girl’s abusive upbringing in rural Ireland conversely written at a remove in London. “I suppose distance gives a fresh perspective and maybe makes you aware of the differences.”
[ From the archive: A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBrideOpens in new window ]
McBride had abandoned acting within a year of graduation, as her 28-year-old brother, Donagh, died of a brain tumour when she was only 22. Slowly the idea evolved that she wanted to be a creator, not an interpreter. Random misfortune had altered her.
“I felt changed by that experience and realised that, temperamentally, I didn’t want to be around people all the time, which is not great if you want to be an actor. I don’t think you can ever be the same after; the guilt that for no good reason this happened to someone else, not you; the unfair, random cruelty of that.
“I think because I lost my father as a child I had created some fantasy idea that that was the bad thing and there would never be any other bad things. And then, when my brother died, that exploded that, so it was not only losing him but losing all the illusions that I had built up in my teen years that you were going to be safe and feel safe in the world.”
Did that make becoming a mother a very vulnerable experience? “I was very frightened. I am a terrible hypochondriac. When my daughter was quite young she was unwell, and that was very difficult. I just couldn’t bear the thought of having to deal with it again. Fortunately, she is fine, but it was very, very hard, and I think for a long time I resisted becoming a parent for exactly that reason.”
Perhaps like the author, Eily in her new novel is having a crisis of direction.
“Eily’s being dishonest with herself about what her intentions are, and she sort of lets her body get her in trouble, because it’s easier to deal with than having to confront the fact that she maybe doesn’t want to do what she was doing with her life any more, and she’s already put a lot of investment into that. It’s difficult to change sometimes, especially when you’re young.
“I remember my cat getting sick, and it just went into the bottom of the wardrobe for three days and wouldn’t eat or drink anything. I thought, He’s going to die, and I left him alone. After three days he came out. And I feel like this is Eily. She just needs to go away from the world and have this kind of time by herself to rediscover where she is.”
McBride’s mother turned to religion to cope with her loss. McBride put her faith in fiction, a way perhaps to explore and deal with the cruel hand fate had dealt her. “I don’t find comfort in communal belief. I hope for the best, but I don’t expect it.”
I imagine her mother is not her ideal reader. “It was certainly tricky. They’re not parent-friendly novels. No one wants their mother to be reading their sex writing. But, you know, she’s taking it in her stride. She has read them all. I think she finds it a comfort, her daughter being a writer.”
Girl’s traumatic subject matter and fractured, modernist prose, which McBride has described as “method writing” and “stream of subconsciousness”, found no takers in British publishing until the tiny Galley Beggar Press, in Norwich, published it in 2013. It won a host of awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Desmond Elliott Prize and Goldsmiths Prize.
Back in 2007, however, McBride’s thinking was: “If I’m going to be a writer, I’ve got to write something different, get it published and then Girl will get published on the back of this.”
Except The Lesser Bohemians took nine years to write. It began as Eily’s story, before Stephen’s character emerged in later drafts and took equal billing. An early draft was 800 pages, which took her a long time to distil.
Once she knew what the book was about it was relatively easy to cut the extraneous details, the bits she didn’t remember when she went away and thought about the story.
McBride has also written a screenplay of The Lesser Bohemians. The rights were bought by Fassbender’s company and are now with Rose Garnett, former head of BBC Film, who invited her to direct it too.
She means no criticism of Annie Ryan, who adapted Girl very successfully for the stage in a production starring Aoife Duffin, but McBride now knows that creative control of her work matters hugely to her.
“It’s not my favourite thing because it’s not my book. I don’t like other people touching my work, but I didn’t know that then. The Lesser Bohemians is my heart’s blood. I just couldn’t let anyone else touch the stuff.”
Garnett advised her to make a short film first to gain experience. The result was A Very Short Film about Longing, from 2023, about a love triangle, starring Joe Alwyn. “Now I just need to find some maverick millionaires.” As for her directing style: “Panic-stricken at first, but, no, I found it fascinating, very stressful, but I really loved it.
“When you write films you have to make a choice about what the film is about. Rose Garnett said to me that a novel can be about a lot of things but a film can only be about one thing. Of course, it had to be Eily and Stephen, so everything had to go around that.”
Ironically, despite her success as a writer, McBride now finds herself back in a world where she is creating work that is not getting produced.
“This is exactly my life. Everything is kind of stuck in slow-development hell.” At least now it’s not her artistic vision being rejected, it’s just the nature of the industry. “Yeah. And I can also do other things. When it was Girl that no one was buying, there was nothing else you could do.”
The age-gap relationship appealed to her because it meant Eily “didn’t have ready access to him the way she would have if it was someone from her own year. But, also, I always felt that they were like distorted carnival mirrors of each other – one is tall, one is small – given that they have these similar backgrounds at work in two different parts of life. He’s living with it all his adult life and the choices that he’s made as a result of not dealing with it. Whereas she’s at the beginning of her adult life.
[Edna O’Brien’s] childhood and my childhood were not so different in the way that my daughter’s and my childhood are radically, completely different. It did feel like reading myself in a way, permission for all the shocking things that she says in [Country Girls] , which still seem shocking, exciting, forbidden. And wonderful
— Eimear McBride
“There is also the sexual element. Sex is a huge part of the storytelling process. I asked myself why it kept recurring. Then I realised it was to do with character development. There is that part of Stephen that has been thwarted that would really like to take care of someone. They’ve got a sexual intimacy before they’ve got a shared emotional language to describe it, the thing that actually allows them to become emotionally a couple, which is kind of back to front.”
But then he falls in love and reveals his deepest secret, which makes him vulnerable. “She can break him in a way that he can’t break her. Because he’s her first love, and she’ll get over it and he won’t get over her. In The City Changes Its Face they’ve moved beyond the fatherless-daughter, daughterless-father element and are on a more level playing field, but then his daughter arrives. That’s very complicated for him because they are so close in age and for her because there is another girl in his life that he really loves, even though it’s in a different way.”
Both books shift from focusing on Eily’s story to Stephen’s in the latter half of the book. In the first it takes the form of a confessional monologue, inspired by Stavrogin’s confession in The Devils, by Dostoevsky. “I was intrigued by this. You think a character is one type of person, and then you find something else inside them which changes everything that you think about them. I like that with Stephen’s story.”
In her new novel, Stephen, Eily and Grace watch and discuss his film. “Ekphrasis is the description of a visual work of art as part of a literary work. I had never seen it done in a novel about a film before, where you have access to the character’s internal life. It also helps Stephen separate Eily and Grace as Eily and he share a creative relationship.
“This passage devotes 60 pages to what was told in a paragraph in the first novel, and the story Stephen tells is different. I was interested in how things transform from actual life into art. Do you have the right to change it? And how can you not change it?”
What are her favourite love stories? “It brings out the teenager in me. Cathy and Heathcliff: a relationship can be very troubled but also true. The Transylvanian trilogy by Miklos Banffy is a great set of books, on one level fiddling while Rome burns but also the most beautiful love story, with an understanding of women’s suffering very unusual in a male author, particularly at that era.”
Reading Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls at 14 introduced McBride to the world of the body. “It was so close to my own experience even though there was 40 years between us. Her childhood and my childhood were not so different in the way that my daughter’s and my childhood are radically, completely different. It did feel like reading myself in a way, permission for all the shocking things that she says in it, which still seem shocking, exciting, forbidden. And wonderful.”
McBride was working on a BBC adaptation of the Country Girls trilogy when Covid hit; it ended up abandoned because of a backlog of productions. She had shown the first script to O’Brien, who had given notes in return. It was a big disappointment for them both. “I have very happy memories of sitting in her kitchen and drinking champagne, eating bread.”
James Joyce is her other great influence. “The monster?” she says. “Ulysses changed everything. I was 25, and it just opened the doors for everything. I just thought anything is possible, which is why, when I wrote Girl, I was so surprised people seemed so shocked by the way it was written. Well, it’s not like this hasn’t happened before. So it’s like they’ve kind of forgotten modernism existed. I didn’t realise you could just decide a whole movement was over.”
McBride was awarded a Samuel Beckett fellowship that resulted in Mouthpieces, three short radio plays, which again involved the actor Aoife Duffin. “I wouldn’t have said that he was a big influence before for me. The most obvious influence is on Strange Hotel [her 2020 novel], yet that’s probably where I was trying incredibly hard to write something that had nothing to do with Beckett because I was doing the Beckett fellowship.”
[ Strange Hotel: A meditation on loneliness, ageing, sex and mortalityOpens in new window ]
But perhaps what is most interesting is the way McBride’s works are in conversation with themselves.
“I feel as though both A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and Strange Hotel exist as little islands of their own, whereas, maybe because of all the years of writing The Lesser Bohemians and The City Changes Its Face, that’s the continent.
“I didn’t mean to write Strange Hotel. It just sort of came about and interrupted writing this. It was a bit of a rebellion maybe. There’s a sense in Strange Hotel of wanting to step back from emotion. It’s a book about someone who’s trying not to feel anything and protecting herself and won’t let anyone in.”
Eily is sequestered in her flat. Is that a striking parallel?
“I think if you wanted, maybe that’s Eily in 20 years’ time in Strange Hotel. It might be there’s certainly some crossover in the story, yeah. All of the books, they do feel very connected to me. You know in Lesser Bohemians Eily dreams about the girl from A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.”
Obviously, Girl and Eily are not the same person, but are they in some sense from the same universe or community?
“I think so, which is why I’ve never written a lot about Eily’s childhood and background. You only get what she tells Stephen. Because I felt as though perhaps I had already written that story. And it isn’t the same character – obviously it can’t be, because of the way Girl ends – but I think they come from the same root.
“That’s why the language is different in The Lesser Bohemians. It’s very broken at the start, but by the end, because the character is growing and healing, Eily is the person who will survive.” The language heals, but “the girl can’t, so language breaks down”.
The City Changes its Face is published by Faber & Faber
