Author Eimear McBride’s sense of direction is fully formed

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Deep in the grimy underground of London's subway system, Eimear McBride and I are clammy with sweat, crushed by the rush-hour crowds as the train hurtles through hot, dark tunnels. We have spent more than an hour talking in a cafe, and now we chat casually, post-interview, about all sorts of things – the book event she is going to, what she will do at Christmas, where she got the faux fur coat she's wearing (a vintage store find). Her long, auburn hair hangs down the sides of her round, pretty face. She carries an assortment of bags, some with copies of her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing; others with papers.

She also has an overnight case, brown and round with a small looped handle. In from Norwich, northeast of London, where she now lives with her husband and daughter, she is staying the night with a friend. With her coat and those bags, she would have made the perfect, bohemian Mary Poppins – a bit eccentric, but cheery and forthright – if she hadn't stopped in the pouring rain, before we entered the subway, to light up a cigarette under our shared umbrella.

As we approach my stop, I ask if she ever worries about travelling by subway, given the British government's heightened terror alert. Many people won't use the subway. She smiles in a kindly manner, as if the thought has never occurred to her. "Oh, no. Not at all," she replies brightly. "You just have to hope for the best."

The same could be said for her literary career.

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is an audaciously experimental novel, written in a scrambled, impressionistic inner monologue; a voice one critic called "a visceral throb." It tells a story of an unnamed narrator in brutal circumstances – sexual abuse as a child, emotional betrayals, a fanatical, demanding mother, an absent father, a dying brother, defiant, anonymous sex. This is not a book for a beach holiday. Some have called it Joycean. A "migraine in print" is an alternative response.

For almost 10 years, the manuscript sat in a drawer, unwanted by publishers. But McBride never once considered changing it. "I attribute that mostly to naiveté and some foolhardiness," the 38-year-old says. "But I always thought the book was right. It told itself the way it wanted to be told. That was the one thing that stayed with me – that this was the best book that I could write, and I didn't think there was anything I could do to make it better. And I wasn't interested in making it into something that someone else wanted it to be."

McBride listens to her own inner monologue, and always has, it seems. But this girl is not half-formed. She is fully present in her forthright opinions and the clarity of her will. She started out as an actress – leaving Ireland to study at the Drama Centre in London when she was 17. She had this idea, after her father died when she was 8, that acting would render her immune from future pain, she once explained. But when her brother fell terminally ill with brain cancer, shortly after she finished her three-year acting course, "that fantasy was destroyed" and she turned her creative mind elsewhere. She taught in Russia for a few months, and then returned to London, working as an office temp after rising each morning at 5 a.m. to write.

We met at the Liverpool Street subway station. The plan was that we would walk around the neighbourhood while we talked. This was where she worked in office jobs "in the good old days," she says. But it was raining, and she had all those bags, so we sought refuge in a cafe, where she settled in for the interview like a mother catching up with a child, placing her coat carefully on the back of her chair, pulling her pink sweater around her black dress, sipping her tea, leaning in with an expression of interest.

"I didn't want to write like [James] Joyce," she explains, her Irish lilt and a small, knowing smile taking the edge off any defensiveness. "What Joyce did was point me in the direction I wanted to go in." She had read the famous Irish author when she was 25. "It changed everything I thought about writing," she says. "The influence was Joyce, rather than to write a female Ulysses. It wasn't that at all. So when I went into the room and locked the door, I was able to leave Joyce on the landing. I could feel him sitting there, the weight of it. You cannot imitate Joyce."

The writing came quickly, in six months – partly because she had only a small window of time. Her husband, William Galinsky, a theatre director, got a gig in Japan, and when they returned, they agreed she could write full-time, giving up her temp work, for as long as they could make the balance of his fee last. Nothing would dissuade her, not even the fact that just before they had left for Japan, her purse, which contained two years worth of notes on her novel, had been stolen. "I had to start from scratch," she explains. "But the money and the time were a gift, so I couldn't waste it with procrastinating."

She didn't feel she was doing anything radical. "I don't think it's a difficult book … I didn't think anyone would be surprised by it, shocked and appalled that someone would not have any semi-colons in their book! There was so much radical writing, and so I just thought I was taking a tiny step forward."

Nevertheless, publishers rejected it and she returned to office jobs. "I didn't write for maybe two years when I finished." When her husband was asked to head up the Cork Midsummer Festival in southern Ireland, they decided to sell their house in London so she could afford to write full-time again. "I had to decide if I was going to go on [as a writer]," she says. "And to justify going on, I had to think if I could write another one for the drawer. What that would mean and what that life would mean. To subsidize a failed writing career – that's a really big decision and a really hard one."

In Cork for four years, she figured Girl was dead and began writing her second novel. But then her husband met someone at an independent bookstore who wanted to read it. She sent it out. A small firm, Galley Beggar Press, decided to publish it in 2013. It then won a number of prizes, together worth almost $100,000, reportedly. "People see it as a great story of fortitude and perseverance, but I don't think it is," McBride says, laughing at her own assessment of her career. "It's a story of years and years of things going wrong, and one year of things going right, and that could easily not have gone right."

She is now trying to finish the novel she began in Ireland. "When first reviews [of Girl] came out, and there was a lot about the language and 'Will the next one be like this?' I was a bit freaked out. There was a lot of pressure about that. … But now, I just want to write what I am interested in. And I think, 'What are the chances of a book ever doing that well again?' So I am free. The next book will be published, no matter what it is. I don't feel obliged to be the language person."

You just have to do it, hurtle through a tunnel, and not let yourself be afraid.