Boy Parts

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Irina takes erotic photos of average looking men. Always behind the lens, she watches, she moulds, and she stalks. These boys are putty in her hands, just the way she likes it.

Staff Writer (15 June 2023). "Brand new adaption of acclaimed novel Boy Parts to premiere at Soho Theatre". O'Neill, Lauren (5 August 2020). "Ultraviolence, Party Chat and Erotic Photography: The World of Eliza Clark's 'Boy Parts' ". Boundaries are for breaking and if anyone can crash through and reinterpret the fear of our time, Eliza Clark can.’ MSLEXIA Let’s play a word association game, shall we. If I say ‘model’, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Perhaps you think of a tall, leggy Victoria’s secret model. Maybe you think of transgender model Munroe Bergdorf and her racism row with L’Oreal . Or maybe your mind goes to Canadian fashion model, Winnie Harlow , whose vitiligo gives her a particularly memorable face. In any case, I’m guessing the image that came to mind was of an attractive woman.

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Written when she was 24, in eight months of weekends off from a day job at Newcastle’s Apple store, Boy Parts has so far sold 60,000 copies, she says: strong numbers for any literary debut, especially one from a tiny independent house such as north London’s Influx Press, which said yes to Clark’s cold pitch after she was snubbed by 12 agents. The book went more or less unreviewed – coming out in the plague summer of 2020 didn’t help – yet steadily amassed word-of-mouth buzz. About a year and a half after publication, Clark began to notice an extra digit on her royalty cheques. “It was TikTok. I don’t use it, so I had no idea. One of my friends said, it’s everywhere, there are videos about it that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views.” Irina is in a rut. She obsessively takes explicit photographs of average-looking men she scouts from the streets of Newcastle while her dead-end bar job slips away; she’s more interested in drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. When she’s offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery which promises to revive her career in the art world, it should feel like an escape. But the news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, drawing in her obsessive best friend and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention . . . one of ten recipients of the Women’s Prize x Good Housekeeping Futures authors, identified as one of "the most promising female authors under the age of 35 and under who are exciting, boundary-changing, and inspirational". [4] The one-woman show format is apt, in a way, since the story revolves around an unreliable narrator. By standing in for all the other characters, Kelly as Irina has complete control over the narrative, and the absence of any other physical presence gives a literal expression to Irina’s self-absorption. The three years Penance took to write were, she says, akin to pulling teeth, unlike the pleasure she got from Boy Parts, a mischievous satire narrated by a predatory photographer whose images of her male victims are hailed at a hip London gallery as edgy roleplay. “People who’ve read it maybe think I’ll be more of a wind-up merchant when they meet me, but I’ve got more of a primary school teacher energy than an enfant terrible vibe,” Clark says.

Now the Clark pipeline is running hot: as well as several screen projects she can’t discuss, she’s writing another novel (“a kind of speculative fiction thing”); in the autumn, there’s a stage adaptation of Boy Parts (which has also been optioned); and next year there will be a story collection “bouncing around” sci-fi and horror (one of the stories, She’s Always Hungry, is in the current issue of Granta; if you’ve read it and were left puzzled, Clark says 2,000 words were lopped off the end “in a way that may not be clear”, her admirably level phrase). Abuse in the fashion and art industry is rife, with countless stories of predatory photographers luring young men and women into their ‘studios’ where they are asked to undress and then the unthinkable happens. Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts is an electrifying look at the relationship between photographer and subject, which turns the more typical gender and power dynamic on its head and in doing so asks some fundamentally feminist questions about sex, gender and power.So much for Penance’s narrator; but what of its reader, engrossed by his uncannily realistic account of human misery? Penance answers Boy Parts’s question – art or porn? – by suggesting that the distinction isn’t always so clear. Slyly, it wonders if readers of Granta-endorsed literary fiction are so different from mere voyeurs. And would they ever pay attention to a town such as Crow-on-Sea unless drawn by morbid curiosity? verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ a b Ashby, Chloë (22 July 2020). "Eliza Clark: 'I'm from Newcastle and working class. To publishers, I'm diverse' "– via The Guardian. For Greer, a key part of the novel’s appeal is the way Irina’s volatility and her photography are intertwined. “She wants her art to be evidence of her power, evidence of her threat. Her work is a way of proving to the world what she is capable of doing.” However, says Greer, Clark also shows how easily her work gets swallowed by “the machine of capitalism and the patriarchy of the art world”. Throughout the book, the sense of what is real becomes increasingly blurred. “We’ve deliberately tried to honour that ambiguity,” says Greer. Joyce hopes audiences will leave with different ideas of what Irina is or isn’t capable of doing: “I’d like it if they argued about that afterwards.”

Carelli has settled in Crow, we learn, to investigate the torture and murder of 16-year-old Joan Wilson at the hands of three girls – Dolly, Violet and Angelica – from her school. Not every reader will make it through the opening scene, which describes Joan’s horrific death after the other girls douse her in petrol and set her on fire. Initially the crime drew little media interest, most likely because it took place on the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum. But three years later the “true-crime industrial complex” is turning its attention to Crow, spying a new opportunity to exploit human suffering for entertainment that’s “tailored to our basest instincts”. By contrast, Carelli hopes to “do something worthy”, intending to honour Crow and its still-grieving community by writing about the town as much as the crime itself.Not just personal connections but geographical connections, too – publishing is concentrated in London, and the ability to live and write there relies on being able to afford it, while also having the time and space to be creative. Clark began writing Boy Parts in 2018 after working in a string of bars and retail jobs and receiving a grant from New Writing North, as part of a fund dedicated to talented writers aged between 15 and 25. Still, the one thing that has tripped Clark up is the thought that people might project Irina on to her. “I’m a nice person,” she says. “And I’m very concerned about whether I’m liked or not.” How far can you go in the name of art? For Irina, nothing is off-limits. She’s a photographer who takes pictures of young men, with a particular preference for guys that are unprepossessing, shy and biddable. Irina’s “thing” is capturing male vulnerability, so she photographs her subjects in compromising poses; she takes liberties with consent, and violates their dignity in increasingly troubling and violent ways. Director Sara Joyce, actor Aimée Kelly, playwright Gillian Greer and novelist Eliza Clark. Photograph: Rebecca Need-Menear

She had a short story She's Always Hungry published with Granta in 2023. [14] Awards and grants [ edit ] Cummins, Anthony (24 June 2023). "Eliza Clark: 'I'm more primary school teacher than enfant terrible' "– via The Guardian. Co-produced by Metal Rabbit, the play will run at Soho theatre, a venue with a history of solo shows about “messy” female protagonists, such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Liz Kingsman’s One-Woman Show. Greer feels that Boy Parts will be a way of “moving the dial forwards”.Irina is the antiheroine of “Boy Parts,” adapted from Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel of the same name, and running at the Soho Theater, in London, through Nov. 25. It’s an engrossing and darkly funny one-woman show, but doesn’t quite make the best of its provocative premise. The American Psycho comparison is apt in many ways, one being that Irina can get off scot-free because she’s hot. “People always conflate beauty with goodness … I can just cry a bit, talk like I’m daft, tease my hair up like a televangelist,” she scoffs. Clark is interested in the way people treat others better when they are dressed nicely or are conventionally good-looking, and how that manifests, “even casual things like getting free stuff at Pret”. Any lingering suspicions that Clark is a mere provocateur will be banished by Penance, which – though it won’t appeal to all tastes – is a work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence. There’s none of the lazy writing that occasionally blemished Boy Parts (where one character is “pretty as a picture and thin as a rake” and, a few lines later, “flat as a board”). Whereas most contemporary novels feel like variations on a few fashionable themes, Newcastle-born Clark seems oblivious to the latest metropolitan literary preoccupations. How many writers, for instance, would set their much-heralded new work in the unglamorous leave-voting northern town of “Crow-on-Sea”? It’s here that, a bogus foreword informs us, the action of the book we’re about to read – Penance by true-crime journalist Alec Carelli – takes place. Arbuthnot, Leaf (23 June 2023). "Three schoolgirls torture and kill a fourth – but that's not the whole story"– via www.telegraph.co.uk.