Boy Parts

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When Eliza Clark’s debut novel came out with an indie publisher in 2020, nobody imagined that her second would be among the most eagerly awaited of 2023. Her rise from obscurity to literary celebrity began when fans on TikTok made Boy Parts a cult hit. It was complete when, a few months ago, Granta magazine named the 29-year-old author one of the UK’s best 20 novelists under the age of 40. Those experiences, visible in Boy Parts, made Clark crave a nine-to-five office job. Applying to local arts organisations led her to the writing development agency New Writing North, which encouraged her to try for its mentorship scheme; next came stints at Mslexia, the magazine for female writers, and the writing charity Arvon. Clark credits that CV with showing her how precarious and rejection-laden writing can be; it meant she entered the industry under no illusions. Yet her goal was always to write full-time and buy a flat – which made it a “no-brainer”, she says, to quit Influx for more money at her current publisher, Faber, despite her gratitude to them for giving Boy Parts a platform. Boy Parts is fiercely current, peppered with pop culture references. Clark, who is in her twenties, has perfectly pinned down the way conversations between progressive young people can end up being a scramble for the moral high ground. Irina is au fait with current gender politics and other social issues, using them to justify her work, but she can also be transgressive of them, telling Flo to shut up when she objects to her using cocaine on moral grounds or judging her friend’s weight gain. Cummins, Anthony (24 June 2023). "Eliza Clark: 'I'm more primary school teacher than enfant terrible' "– via The Guardian. In 2023 her second book was listed by The Independent in a discussion of recent novels using fiction to examine the true crime genre. [8] Publications [ edit ]

Director Sara Joyce, actor Aimée Kelly, playwright Gillian Greer and novelist Eliza Clark. Photograph: Rebecca Need-Menear Instead of English, she studied art, first in Newcastle then in London. No good at drawing – or so she felt – and “too shy” (unlike the narrator of Boy Parts) to ask people to pose for photos, she found that what she most enjoyed was writing a dissertation on how Michel Foucault’s ideas of surveillance play out in the online era. By day, she sold posh undies at Agent Provocateur, having previously worked in bars. Returning home on graduation meant pulling pints again (“there’s not a lot of luxury retail where I’m from”), but this time she wasn’t able to blag a drink on shift – a perk she’d enjoyed in London – and the bouncers were useless: “I’d be dead sober, there’d be a man sexually harassing me and my manager would be like, ‘Well, he’s a paying customer.’” Part of me does think that London is this complete capitalist cesspit where all of the money goes and where dreams go to die,” she says, deadpan. “But at the same time I do really like it. I love how varied it is, in terms of the stuff you can do and the people who live here.” O'Neill, Lauren (5 August 2020). "Ultraviolence, Party Chat and Erotic Photography: The World of Eliza Clark's 'Boy Parts' ".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.

Consent has become part of mainstream discourse, with universities leading consent workshops and Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in training on sexual harassment earlier this year. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that we are seeing more and more authors exploring the “grey” areas where one or more characters are left with a sinking feeling in the bottom of their stomach that something wasn’t OK about a sexual encounter; from a non-consensual blowjob in Holly Bourne’s How Do You Like Me Now? (2019) to Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), where Marianne is studying abroad in Sweden and has a BDSM relationship with Lukas, who forces Marianne to pose for him naked and tied-up, the camera lingering on the bruises on her wrists. When Marianne begs him to stop, Lukas ignores her. “You asked for this,” he says. But while these novels look at females harmed by men not respecting their consent, in Boy Parts it is Irina who ignores Eddie from Tesco’s evident discomfort as she violates his boundaries in the way that others have repeatedly violated her. 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.” a b Ashby, Chloë (22 July 2020). "Eliza Clark: 'I'm from Newcastle and working class. To publishers, I'm diverse' "– via The Guardian. 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.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]