Grime, Passion, and Addiction: Eimear McBride's The City Changes its Face

Dr Frances Devlin-Glass, Director of the annual James Joyce celebration Bloomsday Melbourne, sees Joyce's Modernism at work in McBride's novel. Chris and Frances find McBride having fun with language, the written sentence, and even typesetting at the same time as she explores the complex relations between recovering addict Stephen, his much younger partner Eily, and Stephen's daughter Grace. Chris and Frances discuss formal experimentation too: the plot centres on Stephen screening an autobiographical film. McBride embeds the screenplay in The City Changes its Face alongside studies of the characters' reactions. Through the fuss over the film, and the reunion with Grace, the sexually assertive Eily becomes jealous over Stephen. McBride invokes her range of inventiveness to portray Eily's anguish. But would a fan of Molly Bloom want Eily to be a stronger feminist?

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