The coming-of-age novel tends to follow a formula: the title of Girl in the Making, Anna Fitzgerald’s debut, acknowledges as much. The cover shows a red bicycle that is slightly rusted. I know before opening the book that we will meet our girl in early childhood, and discover the events and experiences that shape her understanding of the world.
Jean is three when she introduces herself in the unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness telling of a child still coming to grips with language. It’s reminiscent of, though less daring than, the opening pages of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and it puts us right there, hiding with her in the garden. Why we are hiding we do not know, just that we are “in the golden honeypot” waiting for Pooh Bear because “the lion is coming”. This sense of threat does not abate. A page later, Jean is four and has been left at home by her mother (“When she goes out I am afraid, very afraid”). We do not know the nature of the danger, but we know that “HE” is a part of it. “HE” and “HIM” are used throughout to refer to Jean’s father, Edmund – in this 1960s/70s middle-class Dublin household he is God, and not the benevolent sort.
