Kill Your Darlings Podcast: Goodbye 2016

It’s time to wrap up this oh so interesting year, and what better way than to reflect on a few of the better things that happened? In this episode we gather holiday recommendations from the Kill Your Darlings team, speak with Eimear McBride about The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and share some of Omar Sakr’s poetry with you all. Have a fantastic break and see you in 2017 for more interviews, readings, discussions and general enthusiasm from the Kill Your Darlings Podcast.

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TRANSCRIPT

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Alan, what would you recommend to people?

Alan Vaarwerk: I would recommend, this holidays I’m going to be catching up on pretty much everything that I’ve bought but not read over the year, but this year, but I would recommend The Dragon Behind the Glass by Emily Voigt, which is like, it is a book about, a non-fiction book about a rare tropical fish called the Asian aruana, it is about pet detectives and about explorers and it’s kind of a mix of reportage and adventure and history and memoir and it’s amazing, it’s really, it’s incredible, it’s really good.

KYD: Hello and welcome to the very last Kill Your Darlings podcast of 2016. It has been an interesting one, but they have been a few high points and we will be celebrating today as I hope you all are in the lead up to the holidays. We have an Eimear McBride-heavy episode today, and interspersed you will find recommendations from the KYD staff, guaranteed to make your holidays great. The first of those was from Alan, our online editor. You will also hear some poetry from Omar Sakr, whose readings at the National Young Writers Festival was certainly one of my favourite parts of the year. But first, here is Eimear McBride, discussing her novels A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians.

The first thing that you are struck with reading your work is, it has quite a unique voice, which probably, I think, has been mentioned in every interview, so sorry about that. But how did you arrive at that voice, was it developed purely for A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing?

Eimear McBride: Well, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is the first thing that I ever finished, I have been writing ever since I was a child, and I was always very interested in language and what it could be made to do, but really it was reading Ulysses when I was 25, was kind of, you know – the blinkers came down and I realised that you could do whatever you wanted with language, as long as you had the sort of talent for it, you could do whatever you wanted with that form, and language was there to be played with, it was not there to be respected like a museum piece, I suppose. And so when I came to write Girl, I just sort of, you know, it just happened and I just let myself do whatever I wanted, and paid a bit of a price for that afterwards, but yeah, I mean, language is everything, I suppose.

KYD: You mentioned in terms of paying a bit of a price for it, there was some difficulty in getting the book published at first – was it the language that you felt, looking back, that caused it to be somewhat of a difficult propositio