A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride + I Have Blinded Myself Writing This by Jess Stoner

Full disclosure before we begin

Since reading I Have Blinded Myself Writing This and reviewing it on PANK, I have been in contact with the author Jess Stoner and follow her on Twitter. However lovely I think she is, the book is what matters here, and it thrilled me on its own, like a jolt of lightning hitting a tree. But I thought you ought to know.

I have also to declare an interest in the publisher of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing – they are currently reading my ms, Kilea. So if you don’t trust me to write an honest review, I’d say go and read Anne Enright’s spot-on take in The Guardian. But do come back here. Necessary Fiction helped me secure a copy for review and I was much taken with it, so it was straight on to my literature of the girl list from the start.

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The best ghost stories are always the ones about haunted people. Girls haunted by their own erasure. By place. By elemental suffering. Both these works above are deeply haunted most of all by loss and loss’s giantess handmaiden, grief.

As mentioned above, I have written before about Jess Stoner’s I Have Blinded Myself Writing This. And it was hard then, because it was a work that took my breath from me and left me at the coffee table looking down at the object – the covers made to imitate an American jotter, marbled black and white with details of sheets and page numbers, only the quality of the paper, the typed title and the name of the press (Short Flight/Long Drive) giving it away – sitting, giving myself a moment to recover from the boom of harm, a sea tide receding. I’ll relate the story and throw a few quotes at you, and then you have to go and buy it, that’s our bargain, ok? Ditto for Galley Beggar Press, who publish A Girl, but I’m saying it quietly and trying not to appear slick and self-interested. It is out of love. Support girl lit brilliance, support small presses.

So. I Have Blinded Myself Writing This is about a girl born with an affliction – every time she is bruised, or hurt enough to break the skin, she loses a memory. It might be something insignificant (losing a day) or huge (forgetting her brother, the one who raised her, has died, is never ever coming back again) Sometimes the text is prose, sometimes it breaks into poetry, and the poems are of a broken bough sort, as if they have submitted to this great weight of grief and vanishing, and we are left with shattered hanging branches:

How an Absence Becomes a Presence

Ben is like a phantom limb.
There is the pain.
And here am I.
See the limb on the sidewalk.
The only way to feel what’s not there is if.
There’s pain in it often.
At night I would try with one lost hand to grope.
For the other.
It’s the image that will stem.
The flow of time gains weight.
As we get older we lose.
More limbs whose weight we cannot bear.

In amongst the devastation is rumination, discourse on reinless questions– on what is a memory, what is a person, are they their memories, how do animals remember, do places hold memory, or only us – more insistent and utterly necessary questions than philosophy in its abstractions tends to be (at least, to this writer, who struggles to pair linguistically complex musings to vital need). Alongside the devastation, the story, and the questioning texts are diagrams of brains, images of coiled phone line, obliterated sections. For all this, I Have Blinded Myself is a whole. A shattered whole that describes real feeling. An experimental piece that succeeds in giving us ‘a fragrance of understanding’ as Anne Carson puts it. Perfume of broken cherry blossom, if that isn’t to twee an image. Insert your favourite.

The narrator is in this state of constant self-loss, but never forgets Teddy, the love of her life, the one who takes the role of memory-provider. And it seems like the hardness will be bearable. But what else comes in the door of life, what else will hurt you like nothing before? The narrator falls pregnant – and then everything falls.

I tell Teddy I once had a dollhouse because I know he will then go to the store because he wouldn’t have thought to get one. When someone says memory is a scaffold, that’s when they’re nearest to it. Something temporary to hold. Those who find it unsettling aren’t wrong. Who wants to watch their loved one hover above the earth to replace a window? But if it’s the only way, we’ll find a way to deal. We’ll pretend our partner is hovering ignorant of physics. Teddy’s worry about having a daughter is temporary like that kind of gravity. He will find his way to friendship necklaces and bras that aren’t bras yet and Halloween costumes of lace floating over legs. He’ll pretend he always knew and that the ground was always in sight.

Pregnancy is a liminal time, and in a life with memories like ‘dirt roads in my brain, and sometimes they’re washed away when the sky opens’ proceeds a dangerous obliteration of the self. Against this Teddy and our heroine stand braced. The gravity of living in hope or denial, whichever, both. The use of a girlhood object, a dollhouse, to link with hope an imaginary bright spot in the past to the uncertain future, an attempt to stabilise with scaffolds that are squared on nothing.

I am haunted by this book. By the self-harm in it. By the power of it. How it speaks obliquely of our losses: memory, the self, as life progresses. It asks essential questions, at the same time it is the story of a life. A girl growing up, in love, in grief, in motherhood, moving fragmented through these states. And in the second book, we find something in kinship to the first. It too is a story that is fragments, that is grief, and even, also, the love of a sister for her dying brother (in the story above, always dying, again and again in her mind as she is retold of his death. In the story below, a different, sustained pain of bereavement):

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Now, a quick summary of the plot will not do it justice. The style is the heart and the skeleton both in this case. What’s the plot but the skin – surface, even if an important surface. However: a girl and a boy grow up with their abandoned mother in rural and then small town Ireland. The boy has a brain tumour, which goes into remission after an operation; he is left with a lower IQ and motion disorders, and at school his sister, as if it is her job, bears the shame of his non-comforming body, flinching at every taunt aimed his way. The mother is a guilt-lashing, frustrated, deeply religious woman who beats her children – she was herself a product of an abusive home.

Cycles of behaviour, cyclical punishments and harms. The girl is raped by her uncle, in a way that leaves her bruised and sick with a sense that she is the sordid one who must carry the secret. When the girl gets older, she uses sex to diffuse the taunts against her brother, and older still, casually runs through men like change. The uncle returns and the power balance tilts. The sex grows violently, grossly transgressive. The brother begins to turn for the worse. Dying guilt, sibling guilt, child guilt, rape guilt. There is no saying this is an easy book. It is utterly important though for what the power with which it describes the inner life of the girl, never named.

Everyone is nameless here. The closest we get is ‘you’, reserved for the brother. It repels him – ‘you’ being the Other, not-me. An angry ‘you!’ shouted in accusation – as well as draws him near – ‘you’ for the known, the one I address directly, how there are two of us here making an ‘I’ and a ‘you’:

I dream of creeping under. I dream of underground where the warm earth is where the fire goes. Where we’re asleep creep you and me in holes. In burrows rabbits safe from rain. Roots growing caverns round our heads. And blind as mice popped out and new and cling and soft our bright pink skin. Who’s there? There’s no one. You and only me. We sing. We lilt our chamber. No one is coming. And we lie. A thousand years of sleep. And get beards wrinkle old and small we. Troubleless in our deep. Eat the earth-worms fat slugs things within. But I dream. Roots come growing. Slowly and tangle in. And roots come more. And fat and thick. And roots come fast. Roots fast in. Roots seek us. Catch us. Roots that want our head. Our eyes. We move about. The trees will have us. Have our brains for. No one in. That the trees will have us. Roots growing in the bursting through our skulls. Through in through our brains. Seeking out our noses. Seeking out our eyes for. Strangle. Choking out the air. Mangle organs. Tangle pain with us. The worming earth. Grown through.

What do you see here? Shakespeare. King Arthur. Fairy tales. And genius phrases: ‘We lilt our chamber’ and ‘And roots come fast. Roots fast in’ – marking with an unexpected economy a shift from ‘fast’ as speed, and ‘fast’ as holding strongly. I have seen reviews that say you have to learn how to read this novel, but for me it’s not the language that is difficult at all – the language with its orality, its aurality, its sticks and eddies, its intense flash-fiction, flash-flood flow. No, what’s hard to read is all the heartbreak, the overwhelming, saturating feeling – the instability of a grief-wrecked, guilt-squirming life, an instability that is only part textual. It is the girl’s behaviour that throws the eyes away from reading. Her choices, which are self-destructive and made so clearly the only road she knows how to take. In a marsh, any stone is a stepping stone, but not every stepping stone leads you out of the marsh, some lead you only deeper.

And this is a waterlogged novel, a novel that takes you right to the edge of the membrane of water, the one that separates you from me, the mind up in the breathable air to the water that muddies and silences. It is written in a way that could be called stream-of-consciousness, but not of consciousness of a whole mind. The senses are there intermittently, but broken from complete realisation (though of course, no novel could get a hand on every piece of sense-data in a way that reads like mimesis to any and all readers). We could say, the stream is littered, contaminated and self-contaminating. Shattering like an ice-thick black arctic river might. It is a text that oozes in that way, grinding and harsh.

But hardest: it is the mind of a girl. Hardest, it is the grief of the girl. The struggle against a violent life without much kindness. The only succour to be found is in a relationship that had grown complicated, in taking this relationship back to a foetal, fairytale stage.

What to say of a novel that haunts you, contaminates you with its grieving?

Say: childhood is a land of grief. Say, life as a whole is not the explosion itself but the length of time it takes for the sound to reach our bursting ears. Girlhood is, also, relational. One cell to another, one person to another, upon another, one memory to another formed or reformed years later, a connectivity, or a web (which sounds more sinister and sometimes should). How can a life be weaved and shattered at the same time? To have existed, to have been made, but not present as it was. Not in control of your body or the things that it does, or are done to it.

I suppose this is not in fact a question just for girls to ask. Still, I relish reading it in female writing. How many years did I go without existential questions by women, girls, being legit? I Have Blinded Myself Writing This does not seek to solve the questions of existence and neither does A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. They are inner-deep, risky and delving works that take something that could be represented light and plastic – the girl – and give her facets and allow for her pain and confusion. That allow the reader to follow the tangles sliding, warping, stinging down. Or hold these pieces in their hands after reading, just a shattered as it is possible for literature to make you.

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Questions:

1. Do you have a brother? Older, younger? Write a poem about him. It probably hurts, doesn’t it. Well if not, tell us something true as well as bright. Be prepared either way to share with the class, or don’t.

2. Talk about the function of grief in women’s writing. Quote a poet but not the ones you are bringing to mind now. Choose someone usually happy, and find out their grief-poem. If the poet is still alive, write to them and ask them to write you a poem of loss. Keep the form letter their agent sends you stuck to the fridge as a reminder of – something.

3. ‘misery lit’ is a term often bandied about, especially for works about childhood suffering. What makes something ‘misery lit’ and how does a work escape the term? Do you even believe it’s a relevant word to use?

4. Write a comparative essay comparing the use of memory in both of these texts. Watch out, this is probably a difficult task. Don’t start writing it the day before it’s due. You’ll make yourself ill.