Self-told tales reveal identity
Sometimes when I interview people, as a reporter, they can be quite hard to understand. Sources can have strong accents, difficulty speaking due to neurological or physical disabilities, or they can just have complicated stories that stretch their ability to explain a narrative out loud.
They can forget crucial things and remember them in the middle of digression that has nothing to do with the matter at hand, or email me a radically different version of the same story two hours after I’ve sent the piece to press. Often they are just very old, and operate on a different understanding of time to the rest of us.
Usually we will have to work together to translate the body of a source’s tale into standard news style, but only rarely is it impossible to include a person’s own words in the finished piece. Story and plot can be passed on separate to words, but words and speech convey a person’s identity in a way that nothing else can. They’re precious.
The value of self-told tales is apparent in Irish writer Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Written in a kind of stop-start mixture of short sentences, repetition and localised vernacular, her style can be hard going at times, but it adds so much depth to the experience.
Here’s the first sentence, as an example: ‘‘For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you.’’
McBride’s anonymous female protagonist continues this way for the rest of the book. She makes longer strings of words when upset – ‘‘They come like locust clusters of bees on me land on me don’t ssh I know don’t don’t move or the you what makes them angry let no you don’t sit,’’ – but unlike Alice Walker’s famous The Colour Purple there is no gradual ascendance into standard prose.
The story itself is presented a little out of focus, secondary to the experience of being inside the protagonist’s head. Dealing with desperation and family love, it begins with the story of how her brother was disabled by the removal of a brain tumour, and then expands into an exploration of the sorry world she lives in.
There’s a terrifying Catholic mother, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, self-destructive behaviour and several deaths. It’s not a tale for the faint-hearted, but it is original and rewarding; The Guardian’s Anne Enright called McBride a genius.
I won’t be forgetting this one anytime soon.