A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Eimear McBride

2013 • Galley Beggar Press

Whether or not the reader finds redemption in Girl depends on what they understand by redemption. For [one reviewer] it seemed to mean a happy or at least hopeful resolution, which the reader will certainly not find. As the novel itself states, ‘There is no God here’, so redemption in any Christian sense is automatically precluded. For me, though, redemption is about transcendence, of the past, of the situation and of the self, consciously achieved through the will of the individual, all of which does occur by the end, in my opinion. And while I am not as good an atheist as I would like to be, this idea is significant to me. In the year after my brother died I remember reading all of George Eliot and finding a great deal of comfort in her ideas about the individual’s capacity for transformation. Now the reader may not find that the girl has become – and I shudder to say it – ‘a better person’ by the end of the book but she has, undeniably, become herself.

— Eimear McBride

Novel English Language

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Eimear McBride

2013 • Galley Beggar Press

Whether or not the reader finds redemption in Girl depends on what they understand by redemption. For [one reviewer] it seemed to mean a happy or at least hopeful resolution, which the reader will certainly not find. As the novel itself states, ‘There is no God here’, so redemption in any Christian sense is automatically precluded. For me, though, redemption is about transcendence, of the past, of the situation and of the self, consciously achieved through the will of the individual, all of which does occur by the end, in my opinion. And while I am not as good an atheist as I would like to be, this idea is significant to me. In the year after my brother died I remember reading all of George Eliot and finding a great deal of comfort in her ideas about the individual’s capacity for transformation. Now the reader may not find that the girl has become – and I shudder to say it – ‘a better person’ by the end of the book but she has, undeniably, become herself.