Eimear McBride is the author of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, which won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize, the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, and many other awards besides. Her second novel is due out from Faber later this year.

The evening began with Eimear reading from the very opening of Girl — it starts in the womb, Eimear told us, “so good luck to us all.” After this first reading, Amy Sackville said that she’d been wondering how the book would sound out loud, but that it turned out to have a great orality. Eimear said that she reads her writing out loud as she writes it, and that rhythm is definitely something she considers — although she has worried if other people hear the rhythm as she does. She records her own audiobooks, she says. A way of keeping her stamp on her work — of making sure it’s read as she wants it to be.

She spoke later on about the stage adaptation of the book, which was at Edinburgh in 2014 (and is about to start a run at the Young Vic). She had been very skeptical about at it first. In the book, everything is supposed to happen inside the girl — you never see her. How could you put that on stage? But then — the language really does work very well out loud. It’s a one-woman show, and while Aoife Duffin is from a very different part of Ireland from Eimear and so speaks the language very differently, Eimear says she knew within ten minutes of seeing her perform that it would work, that she could be happy with it. She understood the language, Eimear said. And she knew how to get that across.

Amy asked Eimear how she writes, and she told us the story of how she wrote Girl. When she was 27, her husband gave her six months of writing time — when she didn’t need to do other work. She wrote three drafts in those six months, very quickly. And then she started to send the manuscript out, and — “Nobody was clamouring!” She received lots of very nice refusals, but nobody was willing to publish her book. Finally, after years of this, she put it in a drawer, and stepped away. She didn’t write at all for three years — she was temping, and had no headspace for it. And then she moved to Norwich, and through a series of events, during which she kept expecting everything to fall through — Galley Beggar finally bought and published her book. It took 9 years from Eimear beginning the book to its publication.

In response to this long journey to publication, Amy asked next if she’d ever thought that what she was doing might be too experimental, but Eimar said that she thought she was writing in a very well-established tradition. She didn’t realise that the publishing industry thought that modernism was dead for all time! And so the difficulty she had in finding someone to take the book on might have been a sign of a lack of imagination in publishing. She hopes that her book might have started to crack a once-closed door open again.

Next she told us that she’d first wanted to be an actress, and she’d trained at the Drama Centre in London — a process that was all about destroying and then building yourself back up. But she realised pretty quickly after graduating that she didn’t want to be an actress — she wanted to be a writer! She wrote lots — none of it was any good, she said, but it helped her. When she was 25, with a terrible job in the city, she decided that all that would help her would be to read Ulysses. She started reading it on the Overground to Liverpool Street. That journey was 20-minutes long. She looked up from the book to get off the train, and thought — Oh shit. Right. She threw out everything she’d written already — it turned out, Ulysses told her, that she could write anything she wanted. She wanted to do other things with language. Later on, Amy asked if Beckett had influenced her too, and she said yes and no — but “I quite like an impoverished vocabulary used to thumping effect.”

And two years after that, she wrote A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing. She said that she had to leave Joyce “outside the room” when writing — she didn’t want to be too heavily-influenced by him. But he was important. She knew she could do what she wanted to do. If you want to write anything of any worth, Eimear said, you write about what you can when you can. Publishing seems to forget you can write whatever you like, despite all of these great novels in which the writers did exactly that. They will tell you how to write if you let them. You have to try to keep your integrity — hang on to what’s most important to you. Don’t lose sight of it. Later on she added that every writer will decide what they’re willing to sacrifice, to give up. But, for example — she had publishers say that they’d publish Girl if they could publish it as a memoir. Which it isn’t! And which she described as  being — kind of evil. And some writers might have taken that, because they want to be published.

In the end, she said, she didn’t know if Girl was good, but that it was right as it was, and she wouldn’t be persuaded to change that.

Asked whether her training at the Drama Centre has helped her write, Eimear said that the acting classes had, in some ways. They helped her understand how to create a character. It’s a very physical process for her — not literary. It’s about how — the physical situation affects them in every sense. She thinks of it as what happens inside an actor’s head when they create a role — “method writing”.

The second reading from Girl was from about halfway through the book — the section beginning “I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed.” The voice of the book develops with the narrator, and this sounds very different to the first section she read — but it’s still recognisably the same voice, with the same kind of rhythm. It really does sound great read out loud — if you like audiobooks, this is one you should buy.

The first question from the floor was from Alex Preston, who asked about how much the success of her book felt like a vindication. She said that it felt more like a relief than anything else — relief that she hadn’t just turned out to be a bum, which she’d kind of made her peace with. She’s had her moments, but it’s more important just to keep writing. Faber had originally turned the book down, but after its success at Galley Beggar they had taken it on for the mass-market paperback, which was interesting for her. Indie presses can take the risks to put a book out, but when it starts to sell well it can be difficult for them to meet demand. This kind of deal allows them to keep an interest in her book, get some money, while somebody else takes over the production and sales.

Amy asked if the editorial process is different at Faber than it was at Galley Beggar, as Eimear’s next book (which is at the editing stage) is being published by Faber. She said that Galley Beggar had been a bit more casual about edits, and that she and Sam (Jordison) had spent more time in the pub, but they’d fought about edits he wanted at the beginning and end. She didn’t want to change the ending, and although she worked on some of the language in the opening she wouldn’t change the subject of that either. So it’s different this time in that she doesn’t go to the pub with her editor, they have serious meetings. But it boils down to the same thing – “Change this!” “No.” / “Change this!” “Yes.”

A question from the floor asked about whether the publishing machine had affected the writing of her second book, or whether she’d been able to ignore it. Because of the long time it took for her first book to come out, though, she already knew everything about this one. The final rewrite was hard — she found herself second-guessing her publisher, and readers in general. Do they want something the same, or different? She just had to remember that that’s not what you write for — you don’t write for good review. They’re nice, but if you want to be read in 100-years’ time you write what you want to write. And the publishing industry is still old-fashioned, and scared, but there has proven to be an audience for experimental works. She hopes they can realise that “readers aren’t as stupid as they think we are.” Because there’s a lot of adventurous, interesting work out there. And we want to keep reading Eimear McBride’s books for as long as she keeps writing them!

The first reader of February was Katharine Norbury, pictured here with her first book, The Fish Ladder, which was published by Bloomsbury last year. The Fish Ladder is a memoir, travelogue, book of nature writing, and more besides. There’s poetry, and folklore, and family history, and illustrations of birds, fish, landscapes. Katharine’s daughter drew and painted the illustrations, and she’s also very present in the book as a character. It’s interesting and strange, Katharine said, when art strays into life.

To kick off the reading and discussion, David Flusfeder asked Katharine how she had started writing the book. She said that it had happened by accident when she was living in Barcelona, separated from her normal work as a film editor. There was a long summer holiday — 3 months — spent in Wales, for a while just with her young daughter, and she started keeping a journal as she expects other people might take photographs. Almost as a scrapbook. So it started out as a record of the holiday for her to give as a gift to her daughter — not for publication. But, she said, then things started to go wrong — she was diagnosed with cancer not long afterwards — and the journal changed as she wrote it. At first it was a very private book, written with no readership in mind. And then it wasn’t.

Katharine read from two sections of the book. First was a section about salmon returning to the Mersey for the first time in two hundred years, from near the beginning of the book, which turns into a story about how she visited, almost providentially, the convent in Liverpool where she was born and how she learned there about the nun who had looked after her as a newborn. Because The Fish Ladder is not just a traditional memoir, it’s able to be more associative like this — she can write about fish feeling the pull back to the river, wonder what calls them, and then talk about her own life — how she felt “a pull, a draw, as though something were listening” that made her turn around, back towards the convent, and discover her own past.

David asked Katharine if she had a model, or a shape in mind when what she was writing changed from a journal into a book. She spoke about how she had been thinking of a travelogue — how The Odyssey is her favourite book, which had something to do with it. She loves the idea of story of a traveller voyaging out. And so then once more things started to happen, this was the idea she stuck with. The travelogue as a form adds discipline, it isn’t too emotional. And although she was writing a memoir which contained stories about people still living, stories that happen in the present, the travelogue doesn’t call for too much to be revealed about those people. The revelations can belong more to memory — to discoveries about the past.

She also chose to write and edit with a 5-act structure in mind, because she grew up in the cutting room, editing films, and it’s a structure that is ingrained, that she knows how to work with. And so, a certain point, her work fell very naturally into that structure. She said that it felt filmic to her — a story with a crisis, a big set piece, and a resolution. She spoke about editing as the most important part of the process of her writing. She wrote everything down and then carved away what didn’t fit the story, or her structure. She’s naturally an editor, and was able to become detached from her writing — at one point, when working on the 4th draft, she changed the whole manuscript into the 3rd person. She said that this makes it much more plain to her what isn’t interesting, and should be left behind. The final book, of course, is back in the first person. But this was a necessary step — a necessary distancing from her own work. A question from the floor prompted her to discuss this at more length, and she said that she edited it as if it was a documentary. It was the first thing she wrote, and she thinks this structure would have shaped whatever she chose to write — but it helped her, and didn’t force her to change her story or hurt her story. It worked with what she wanted to put down, and not against it.

She also spoke about how the ending of the book — a scene with her mother — originally wasn’t going to be included, but it mirrored the start of the book so well that she had to. This isn’t a loss, or about being forced to write something, but about knowing what you need to write, what will work best. It pushed for her to go deeper.

A question from the floor asked if trauma was important to her writing, and she spoke also about how she almost didn’t mention her miscarriage in the book, and ended up writing it in 14 days before the deadline. It had felt like an absence. She felt the need to make something out of it — to do something. “So I made a book.” The writing and editing process sounded very involved and necessary — as important a part of the journey as her walking had been. As memories came to her at different times, in different places, so did different realisations about moments in her life that she couldn’t leave out.

One of the casualties of editing was that Katharine had to lose 35,000 words. When asked if she felt the loss of them, she said that they are actually lost, due to a dead computer, and can’t entirely remember what they were actually about. She could theoretically retrieve them, but losing them was actually like a huge burden being lifted — a great relief. They were stories that needed to go, because they didn’t fit the shape of the book, and now there was no easy way to put them back in, to give into temptation and weaken the whole.

Katharine’s second reading was from a section about her childhood holidays, and her Auntie Marge, and the way we see more when we examine our old memories — things we perhaps missed at the time (especially if we were children), or didn’t want to see. Somebody asked if recollection has always been as vivid for her as it seems to be in the book, and she said that a lot of the memories — especially memories about her Auntie Marge — were memories that she didn’t even know she had until she visited the right place — a particular riverbank — and the memories were triggered. This, she said, is partly why the travelogue form fascinates her. The journey shapes her memories — it’s integral, it really does structure everything.

She also spoke about how a character called Mr Yields in the book has the same name as he did in real life, but spelt differently — she didn’t realise until the book was published, and somebody told her that she’d got it wrong, because she’d never seen it written down before. This is what writing from memory is like — things change, but we can still get at the truth of it all the same.