Interview: 'I wanted to write a book about joy' – Eimear McBride on her second novel

Having faced rejection for almost a decade, such belated acknowledgement was welcome, but it also created a burden of expectation. "Because of everything that happened with A Girl, there was a lot of pressure and people talking about what they hoped I would do next, or what they hoped I wouldn't do next," she says.

"It took a while to get everyone back out of my head and realise I knew exactly what I was doing and that nothing anyone said was going to make any difference. It took a while to remember: all that pressure has to stay on the outside and as far away from writing process as possible."

Currently on an Australian tour in advance of the The Lesser Bohemians' publication next week, McBride says she is relieved to finally have the chance to talk about the work which has been germinating inside her for so long.

Her new novel follows an Irish girl with a troubled past who comes to London to study drama (as McBride herself did in the early 1990s) and to lose her virginity; very quickly she falls in love with an older actor who is himself gripped by inner demons.

Over the course of the novel, their volatile relationship develops to the point where they can confront their dysfunctionality and progress to something approaching a normal relationship (though as McBride points out, the use of the word "normal" in this context is relative).

Having read them back-to-back, I'd say The Lesser Bohemians feels like a deliberate antidote to A Girl. While both books explore identical themes – sexual abuse, claustrophobic relationships, damaged individuals – the lovers in The Lesser Bohemians are offered a shot at redemption denied to the protagonist in A Girl.

And the style, while similar to that of A Girl, is less relentless, evolving as the main character develops into her adult self. It is almost as if McBride understands that – having been taken to the edge of darkness – we need our faith in the world re-affirmed.

"I did kind of joke with the audience last night that I wrote a cheerier book this time round because I felt I owed it to readers," she says.

"Certainly, I felt A Girl was a book about despair and, when I was writing The Lesser Bohemians, I wanted to write a book about joy. I felt the books were very connected to each other, that they shared a lot of similar themes and concerns, but handled in different ways."

This contrast is emphasised by the way in which the names of the characters in The Lesser Bohemians emerge at the novel's climax, while the main character in A Girl remains anonymous throughout. A Girl is also set in a non-specific time (although certain references suggest the 1980s) while The Lesser Bohemians takes place over three terms in 1994.

"The main character in A Girl is never named because she never succeeds in becoming fully-formed whereas the characters in The Lesser Bohemians are able to make a fundamental change within themselves," McBride says. Their names are first used at the point where they finally share the events that are the most difficult for them to articulate.

Both books involve a succession of explicit and often disturbing sex scenes. In the first, the main character seeks out anonymous, soulless and often violent encounters as a form of self-annihilation; in the second, sex – though still frequently savage – is the means by which the two main characters communicate, confront their history and achieve emotional intimacy. But wasn't McBride – who identifies as a feminist – worried her depictions of sexual violence would be seen as pornographic?

"Sex is notoriously difficult to write about well," she says. "I suppose what I had to keep at the forefront of my mind [in The Lesser Bohemians] was the purpose. The sex isn't there for titillation or voyeurism – it's there because of what the characters bring from the past to their relationship.

"They are not good at speaking about emotions so the way they learn to communicate with each other is sexual. I was conscious of always trying to keep a strong link between the internal life and the physical life of the characters so it didn't seem to readers it was just me saying: 'Oh look, I know how to write about shagging'."

Most of the praise for A Girl was focused on its literary style: its sentence inversions, neologisms and the way it attempts to reproduce language before it is articulated into coherent thought. But both it and The Lesser Bohemians are also remarkable for their unflinching treatment of child abuse. In particular, they address the way victims sometimes feel complicit in the acts perpetrated against them: an unpalatable truth rarely discussed either in literature or the world at large.

In A Girl, the main character believes she is partly to blame for her uncle's behaviour, because she has a crush on him – although she is only 13 when he first has sex with her; in The Lesser Bohemians, the actor is ashamed of the way his body responds to the sexual acts inflicted on him.

"This feeling of complicity victims often have can be utterly ruinous because they don't put the responsibility for what happens where it belongs, but instead take it on themselves and turn it inwards," McBride says.

"I think people feel more comfortable with the idea of sexual abuse being violent or painful and something that is obviously wrong when in fact people who are abused often have physical pleasure. That is difficult, but really important to talk about. They need to know that the body will do what it will do, but if they have been abused, they are not responsible."

It is an indication of how far society still has to travel in its understanding of child abuse that some reviewers described what happens in A Girl as a seduction and as the beginning of a relationship. "That seemed outrageous to me," says McBride: "How any person could think a 41-year-old man having sex with a 13-year-old girl is anything other than rape – I find it pretty despicable actually."

Another regressive attitude McBride has had to contend with is the notion that her work is autobiographical. One reason it took so long for A Girl to be published is that at least one company wanted to present it as a memoir (and many reviews talked of McBride's own brother who – like the girl's brother – died of a brain tumour).

"That's certainly the stick used to beat female fiction-writers: that they are completely incapable of making any kind of imaginative leap, or any kind of interesting imaginative connections; that anything good they come up with must come out of their own lives, unlike men, who apparently have great imaginations and are allowed to flex them without anyone ever querying whether it's true or not," she says.

Past criticism of female authors briefly shook McBride's confidence when she came to write the lengthy section of The Lesser Bohemians in which the actor tells his partner his life story. Would she – McBride wondered – be able to create a male voice which felt authentic?

"I didn't enter into it without some concern about what that would be like and how well I could achieve it," she says. "Again it's that awful thing that is always said: 'women can't write men', whereas no-one ever says: "Anna Karenina is all wrong, because [Tolstoy] has no idea how women feel'. It kind of sits there, even though you know it's rubbish. But it was important for me [to attempt it] because I knew it was right for the book and in the end I think it's one of the passages I enjoyed writing the most and the one I have rewritten the least."

Having completed two novels and seen them published, McBride, who lives in Norwich with her husband and daughter, had promised herself a well-earned break. Instead she has already started work on the third book.

"I swore blind I wasn't going to do anything for a year after The Lesser Bohemians, but apparently it doesn't work like that," she says. "I think I just go crazy if I'm not writing. It's best for all concerned if I sit at the hot laptop and get it out of me."

Once again there will be a hiatus as The Lesser Bohemians hits the shelves, but she says the new novel is already "alive inside her". All she has to to do is keep it safe from "all the chat". With this in mind, she is loath to give too much away. "I haven't written enough to be able to say exactly what it is about yet, but my general feeling is it's going to be a much quieter book than the first two," she says.

The Lesser Bohemians is published this week by Faber & Faber