Rebecca Watson on The Lesser Bohemians

Getting into someone’s mind is a dangerous business.

Consider poor Kylie Minogue who, as far as I know, has never managed to get an unnamed “Boy” out of her own. She’s tried, but she just can’t—he’s now literally all she ever thinks about.

Given the clear risks, I was worried about reading Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians, a book that attempts to get into the mind of an 18-year-old Irish girl who falls in love with an older man in 90s London.

Thankfully, I had the brilliant Rebecca Watson to guide me. She’s an expert in the process (as her first novel little scratch proves).

Indeed, welcome to The Library of Lazy Thinking Podcast, with me, your host, Glenn Fisher.

In each episode, I'm joined by a guest from the world of books to talk about a specific book they'd like to put in the library.

There's no plan and no agenda, just two people lazily thinking about literature.

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As I say, in this fifth episode, my very special guest is celebrated author Rebecca Watson. She discusses her pick for the library, the 2016 novel The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride.

About Rebecca

Rebecca Watson is a novelist. Her first book, little scratch (2021), was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize and adapted into a play with sell-out runs at Hampstead Theatre and New Diorama. Watson was chosen as one of the Observer's 10 best debut novelists of 2021 and as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Her second novel, I Will Crash, was published in July 2024 to critical acclaim, with the Observer hailing her as a 'one-of-a-kind storyteller'. Her non-fiction has been published widely, including in the Guardian, the TLS, Granta, and British Vogue. In 2022, she presented a documentary for BBC Radio 4—where her short stories have also aired.

About Eimear

Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemians won the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of 200 critics, academics, and fiction writers, McBride was named one of the ten best British and Irish novelists writing today.

Links to obscure (and not so obscure) things mentioned in this episode

* Order The Lesser Bohemian’s and Rebecca’s latest novel I Will Crash from my local independent bookshop in Sheffield here.

* A good interview with Eimar McBride can be found on YouTube here.

* The episode about My Phantoms with special guest Aidan Cottrell-Boyce can be found here.

* Find Rebecca Watson on Instagram here.

* Find Glenn Fisher on Instagram here.

* Find The Library of Lazy Thinking on Instagram here.

About the Library

The Library of Lazy Thinking is a place to hang out and learn more about books. The library is free—like all libraries should be. But if you’d like to support the library, you can make a small monthly donation by becoming a paid member (and get an exclusive The Library of Lazy Thinking bookmark). All donations go back into the library, helping to organize live events, exclusive merchandise, and more podcasts.

About Glenn

Glenn Fisher is a writer—wait, Glenn Fisher is me. I’m the one writing this. Let’s drop the third-person act. My writing has been published in online literary journals Lunate, The Paris Bitter Hearts Pit, 3am Magazine, Dogmatika, and Litro Magazine. I write about books and interview other writers and creatives here in The Library of Lazy Thinking. I live in Sheffield and work as a freelance copywriter. I had a best-selling non-fiction book published on the subject called The Art of the Click. It was published by Harriman House and shortlisted for Business Book of the Year. It has been translated into Simplified Chinese and Korean too. I also have a dog called Pablo. He is harder to translate. Indeed, most of my life revolves around trying to understand his often unreasonable demands.

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