An Interview with Eimear McBride
Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025
Eimear McBride is the author of the novels A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), The Lesser Bohemians (2016), Strange Hotel (2020), and, most recently, The City Changes Its Face (2025).
The City Changes Its Face picks up the story two years after McBride’s second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, both set in London in the 1990s. It follows the tempestuous relationship between Eily, a young theatre student, and Stephen, an established actor. The City unspools over the course of a single, turbulent evening, while the narrative is punctuated by flashbacks to recent events. Significant interruptions from the past include a visit from Stephen’s daughter Grace (who is not much younger than Eily), and a dramatic shift as the novel’s style switches to a screenplay of sorts – Eily and Grace watch an autobiographical film Stephen has made about his life, that touches on themes of addiction, abuse, and self-harm.
McBride is known for her linguistic playfulness, her interest in modernism, and her inclination to explore messy, ethically fraught narratives. Her virtuosic debut novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, recounts the harrowing story of an unnamed girl and the terrible abuse she suffers. The novel’s opening lines give a sense of McBride’s idiosyncratic style, ‘For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say’. The language is not formally experimental for the sake of it, but, as Jennifer Hodgson has noted, ‘draws upon and transforms a modernist inheritance in order to respond to timely questions, such as: how can we speak about the unspeakable aspects of female experience? And how can we create a new language with which to do so?’.
McBride has also written Mouthpieces (2021), three fragmented pieces which stemmed from a fellowship in the Samuel Beckett archives at the University of Reading, the non-fiction essay Something Out of Place: Women & Disgust (2021), as well as writing and directing A Very Short Film about Longing (2023), which, unsurprisingly, is a very short film about longing, starring Joe Alwyn, Natalia Kostrzewa, and Lashay Anderson. In Tolka Issue Four we published a piece by McBride entitled, ‘Quark (or Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top and Bottom)’, written in response to the work of artist Niamh O’Malley.
Our conversation took place in a café in Bristol in February 2025. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
— Liam Harrison, July 2025
Liam Harrison (LH): The City Changes Its Face continues the story of two characters from The Lesser Bohemians, Eily and Stephen. What made you want to return to them?
Eimear McBride (EM): Before I had finished writing The Lesser Bohemians, I knew that there was going to be more. I had images and scenes that didn’t fit in to it, because I really wanted to keep that novel within a single college year. The Lesser Bohemians was published in 2016, so it’s taken a long time to get here.
LH: You’ve said The Lesser Bohemians took nine years to write, while A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took you around six months. How long did The City Changes Its Face take?
EM: In 2018 I wrote about 6,000 words and that was the start of The City, and then I got caught up in other things so I just left it alone. I made A Short Film About Longing in 2022, with the knowledge that there was going be some kind of film in the new book, and eventually I came back to it. So, it probably took about two years.
LH: Was calling The City a ‘standalone sequel’ – a novel readers could come to completely fresh as well as being a kind of sequel to Lesser Bohemians – your idea?
EM: That was probably more the publisher Faber than me, because of course I can’t think of it as a standalone novel. But I was aware when writing it that I didn’t want people to flick back and forth to The Lesser Bohemians. When I handed it in at Faber, they had new people on their staff who hadn’t been around when The Lesser Bohemians was published, and they still understood it, which was very handy!
LH: I’ve read that you wrote the first draft of The Lesser Bohemians in a form of conventional social realism, just to work out the story, before then playing around with the form and style.
EM: Yeah, I wrote a hundred drafts of Lesser Bohemians.
LH: That’s mad.
EM: I investigated every scene and itch – every time someone lit a cigarette. I got to the end and was like, oh god I’ve written this giant book, and then I realised it was just a giant sketch. I had to go back and write it properly. Because I knew the characters, I felt like that weight remained inside the text, but the reader didn’t need to be bothered by having every detail explained to them.
LH: It seems like every time you write a novel you’ve approached it radically differently. Whether it’s taking six months or nine years, or rewriting it in contrasting styles…
EM: I don’t do it on purpose! I plan to start everything in the same way, but then each book just has its own requirements. Like with the long film section in The City, I really hadn’t planned that. I thought there would be a couple of scenes and it would really only be about the reaction shots of the characters in the room. But as I started writing I realised it didn’t work because the reader can’t be invested if they don’t know what it is they’re looking at.
LH: You’ve mentioned your short film already, A Very Short Film about Longing. What prompted that?
EM: I did it so that I could get the go ahead to direct the adaptation of The Lesser Bohemians, which I wanted to do, but I was told you don’t know anything about films…
LH: I know lots of authors don’t necessarily get too involved in writing screenplays, or want to become a director
EM: Directing and screenwriting weren’t things that I always wanted to do, but after the theatre adaptation of A Girl a Half-formed Thing, I realised I didn’t want to hand my work over to anyone else again. I thought that production was great, but I just didn’t like somebody else having the say over my work. When Lesser Bohemians was optioned, I said to the film company, you can option it, but I have to do the adaptation, even though I had never done any adaptation. They were very good and said, given the nature of the prose, it’s probably just as well.
LH: After the televised version of Normal People, Sally Rooney said she wasn’t up for working on adaptations anymore, perhaps from the point of view of control – wanting either to very involved or to have some distance from it.
EM: You have to either be right in or right out. With the theatre production of Girl, I was half in, and that wasn’t a good place to be. I should have just said here you are, do what you want with it. Not every novelist is interested in adapting their writing, or can adapt, whereas I come from a theatre background. Beckett is often spoken about as a control freak of a director, but it’s really Beckett the novelist that can’t give anyone else any control.
LH: Yeah, he has his actors moving in such precise mathematical ways. It could just be a novelist’s refusal to relinquish control.
EM: I felt even more aware of that, after reading more of his novels, and having done the Beckett Fellowship [at the University of Reading]. Then I’d look at the plays and see them as the work of a novelist, and that’s why he has to control every last element of them.
LH: I was thinking about the theatre when I read The City Changes Its Face. Especially in the scenes set in the present or ‘Now’, when things feel stuck in Stephen and Eily’s relationship, and there’s an almost claustrophobic atmosphere in this never-ending evening. I wasn’t thinking of Beckett, but it does feel theatrical…
EM: No, I don’t think Beckett is an influence on The City.
LH: Did you think about the novel in theatrical terms?
EM: I’m not sure. I did think about that black box idea. There’s a Margurite Duras play called La Musica. I read it as a teenager, and it’s about two people discussing their relationship over the course of three acts while they’re in a hotel. I reread it when I was writing The City and thought this is terrible! But I liked the idea of having people stuck in a confined space over a confined period of time. It’s similar with the film scene too. I like that, when you force drama out of something which you could easily pass over but instead go right inside of it and explore it fully. It prevents the story from being trapped inside the single room, and allows more air into it. It would be hard to write a whole novel with just two people in a room, it would get tiresome.
LH: You’d go a bit mad eventually.
EM: You need those moments of release.
LH: I felt that the second half of the novel begins to open a lot more, and has those moments of release. Also, the traumatic stakes of the story are off-set by Eily and Grace going out and getting drunk. There’s fun stuff happening alongside the dark stuff.
EM: I’ve always liked the fun stuff. All my books have that but no one ever remembers it!
LH: I wrote a PhD chapter on Girl, which was all about trauma. I then re-read the novel one day and realised it isn’t all doom and gloom!
EM: There are jokes! There are definitely jokes.
LH: People just remember the trauma, Eimear.
EM: What can I do, I’m stuck with that now. ‘Trauma queen’.
LH: You’ve mentioned this might not be the end of the story for Eily and Stephen. Is there a cheeky little trilogy?
EM: I think there will be. There’s one more book.
LH: You’ve said that Beckett is a novelistic theatre director, but has your novel writing influenced how you approach film and vice versa? When talking to people in film do you feel like you’re coming at adaptation from a very novelistic perspective?
EM: People do consider my adaptation work a bit different. I mean the obvious crossover is the interest in character and that’s the same in film adaptations as is in novels. I don’t think it has changed my approach at all. Obviously with a film, you have to be more technical. The film passage in The City is completely different from the rest of the book because it had to be completely visual. When depicting the film, it could only be what you could see, and trying to create drama that does not have access to the inner state of the characters.
LH: Which is interesting because as well as being ‘trauma queen’, you’re also known as ‘stream-of-consciousness queen’…
EM: And this was a step away from that.
LH: Which must have been tricky, though your work does like to push limitations, and I can imagine the challenge also being the fun of it?
EM: Absolutely the fun of it! It’s the pleasure of it. If I was doing the same thing over and over I’d start to feel shit about it. But you can create a new problem for yourself that you have to solve. It’s a bit like the Oulipo – there are certain rules to break and follow. With my books, the rules are never arbitrary and they come out of the circumstances of the plot or the character. Nonetheless, there is a rule and that rule has to be obeyed.
LH: Were there other films that were inspirational for the novel?
EM: I rewatched all of Kieślowski. I have such kinship with his characters. They’re always flawed but trying, and I love that. He doesn’t allow you to just sit and hold judgement, he asks more of you, he asks you to reach into yourself, and have more understanding, more compassion, more empathy, and not to let yourself off the hook in your interaction with these characters. I think about his films, particularly the Three Colours trilogy, when I’m writing.
LH: ‘Flawed but trying’ is a very good description for a lot of your characters!
EM: Pretty much all of them!
LH: Your characters can be very frustrating for readers. I’ll often want to tell them, ‘stop fucking around, you’re drunk, go to bed’. There’s a kind of visceral intensity when reading your novels, which is partially stems from anger at the characters’ actions, while also being deeply invested in them.
EM: That’s the thing, you can’t like everyone all the time, and people who you love will really piss you off sometimes, and that’s part of the totality of the character. When you think of Eily, she’s twenty years old, and suddenly there’s another woman in Stephen’s life and she’s insecure. They’re both not always good at articulating how they’re feeling.
LH: You’ve mentioned that Stephen is Eily’s first love, with all the intensities that carries. There’s also the power dynamics of their age gap, and Stephen holds a lot of power, while Eily holds her own, and there are various powerplays running throughout the novel.
EM: There’s even more of that back and forth in Lesser Bohemians, where at the start Stephen seems to have all the power, and by the end he appears to have none. In The City, if Eily and Stephen split up, she would be upset for six months, while he might never recover from it. Obviously, there is an age gap, but it’s not a book about an age gap. If you arrive at it with just that in mind, oh no, terrible age gap, it misses the entire point of the book.
LH: I was surprised at times when Eily would say, ‘I’ve got class in the morning’, and I’d remember how young she is, because she is not infantilised throughout the novel.
EM: No, she isn’t. I get very annoyed about the infantilisation of young woman, as if MeToo was just about liberating women to make the choices that are already socially approved, rather than the choices they want to make, whether you approve of them or not. The age gap plays a role in the novel, but that’s also about the age gap between Eily and Stephen’s daughter Grace.
LH: Which has less to do with age and more to do with the relationship dynamics.
EM: And class, and the past, and history, the inescapability of ourselves.
LH: You’ve spoken before about the way we write about our lives and the way we incorporate the people we know into art. There’s a very discourse-y version of this discussion, which relates to autofiction, telling the truth, and authenticity, while The City tries to approach these questions from a different angle.
EM: I’m more interested in thinking about these questions than pushing an opinion. Eily sees Stephen become someone else creatively, and she wants that for herself. That causes difficulty, as it is going to take her elsewhere in her life. The problem is she finds it hard to admit that. I am interested in that question, if you’re making something that’s very close to you, what you owe other people who are part of the story, and how much you can let yourself off the hook.
LH: Yeah, there are questions Grace has about Stephen’s past, and the ways he might have used other people’s personal tragedies as content for his film.
EM: There’s also a question of romanticization, of plucking stories out of obscurity and putting them on show.
LH: Your writing often brings me back to the same Beckett quote, ‘form is content, content is form’. We see it in the way the language in Girl starts to break down replicating the violence in the girl’s life, or in Strange Hotel when the narrator says, ‘maybe I should stop fucking around with language, it’s not improving matters at all’. The disintegration of language in both books is concerned with the way content and form capture one another, but not necessarily in a way that can be reduced to ‘Joycean’ or ‘Beckettian’.
EM: If I mention Joyce as an influence, as another Irish writer who is interested in language, then there’s no escaping it when it comes to labels. When you’re first starting out as a writer you don’t think too much about it…
LH: You mention once that you started reading Ulysses on a bus, and then it haunts you forever!
EM: There’s no escaping that! Influence is a hard thing to get away from. With The City I might finally have done it, because it’s so much its own thing. Lots of things were an influence, but there was no one great influence. Whereas with Strange Hotel, I was really trying to not have an influence, and ended up writing the most Beckettian thing I could possibly have written! I’m very fond of that book. It got a hard time, but I really liked it because it was a two-fingers to all the people who were like, oh, her impenetrable prose. And I was like, well, here, you’ve got capital letters, clauses, punctuation, and it’s still really hard to get in to. I found that very satisfying.
LH: It goes back to the question of what gets labelled ‘modernist’ or ‘experimental’ in contemporary fiction. You give people punctuation and they’re still not happy.
EM: The City is about stripping away all the things that get in the way of understanding. You just have to give it a little bit of attention, and get used to it. It’s not Joyce, I’m not playing literary games, I’m not planting puzzles, I’m not creating obstructions to understanding, and I’m not trying to show everyone how clever I am. I just want to communicate at a different level, and that’s why it is written the way it is.
LH: Do you think people are more receptive to innovative styles of writing now than they were when you first tried to publish Girl? Do you think there’s been a shift at all?
EM: They’ve been more receptive to me! Things couldn’t have been less receptive at the start!
LH: The bar was low!
EM: People are more receptive now, but there’s also been a backlash against it. Some people want stories with easy moral judgements, like, that’s a bad person, that’s a good person. It can be very nice to read, but the prose is a bit ‘MFA’, and it’s comforting to certain elements of the literary culture, who don’t like to feel unsure about something, and can’t pontificate about it. Whereas, if you offer them something they’re not completely sure about, where they have to bring a different part of themselves to react, then they get very annoyed about it. After Girl was published things opened up a lot, but now they might have regressed again.
LH: Are there other authors who you feel like are writing particularly interesting things at the moment?
EM: No, only me! I read a fantastic novel by Charlie Porter recently called Nova Scotia House. I was blown away by it. I just could not put it down. It’s a gorgeous book.
LH: I read that after you had written Girl, a publisher asked if you would publish it as a memoir. That has always stuck with me, for the ridiculous levels of misogyny. When I’m trying to teach students about rejection, and what they can expect, it often stands out to me as a horror story. Have times changed at all since then?
EM: I think so. A publisher would be hard pressed to request that from a writer now, and there have been so many scandals. That was twenty years ago and it was a very different world of publishing. Though you never know… These days, a lot of young writers are pressured to conform to particular styles, so there’s a lot of interchangeable writing. It’s writing that is tonally smooth, well-constructed, by an author with a gift for language, a good eye, who notices things… but I just don’t care. There’s also a sense of disconnection, perhaps stemming from social media, and you get lots of books where people don’t seem to know who they are, and not consider that to be a concern.
LH: We can’t all be Rachel Cusk.
EM: I find it quite tiresome. I don’t want to read about generalities. I want to read about specifics. If I’m introduced to two people, I want to understand what it is to be those people. Show me that. If you can’t show me that, then you don’t know who that person is, and that person doesn’t know who they are themselves. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but my characters across all my books, they really fucking know, for better or worse, who they are.
LH: What’s to blame for all of these interchangeable books?
EM: There’s always the same publishing problem that when a certain book is successful, loads of imitations are just churned out. Social media silos people off from other kinds of writing too, and it has a pervasive puritanical morality, which means lots of people shut things out before they get a chance to explore them. A lot of young people are afraid of what their peers will say about them, and not without reason, but you’ve got to get the fuck over it. Get off your phone and sit down and write the thing that you want to write, and don’t think about all the terrible things everyone will say, because they will say them anyway, so you might as well write the thing you want to write. I’m very glad that I’m not trying to get published for the first time right now.
LH: I think you’d be published very differently as a debut writer now. I don’t know what your book covers would look like, but they’d be very different! It also goes back to your point about challenging moral certainty.
EM: Because moral certainty only makes shit art! You have to let yourself go, and write the thing you have to write. You cannot censor it, otherwise you just have dead, pompous prose.
The City Changes Its Face was published by Faber in 2025.
Liam Harrison is an editor at Tolka. He is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
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