Early in her novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), Eimear McBride’s unnamed narrator Girl describes her first pint, “a Guinness for want of not knowing what else,” after moving to Dublin for college (83). She is egged on by a new friend, a chatty type with “big red gums” who is fond of talking about her famous father’s globetrotting. As in the rest of the work, the scene moves back and forth in Girl’s consciousness between thought and speech, the words of one and the words of another.
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