Boy Parts

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a b Ashby, Chloë (22 July 2020). "Eliza Clark: 'I'm from Newcastle and working class. To publishers, I'm diverse' "– via The Guardian.

Do you know what happened already?Did you know her?Did you see it on the internet?Did you listen to a podcast?Did the hosts make jokes? 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.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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. 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. Arbuthnot, Leaf (23 June 2023). "Three schoolgirls torture and kill a fourth – but that's not the whole story"– via www.telegraph.co.uk.

It is interesting to me how she perceives herself and how she perceives others perceiving her,” Kelly adds. In so many encounters Irina has, she has to shapeshift. “A major ingredient in the story is her gaze and the gaze in general,” which is something they are exploring in the rehearsal process, mindful of the fact that performing the monologue alone to an audience brings an extra dimension. On stage, she adds, “there’s nowhere to hide”. 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.’” 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] Director Sara Joyce, actor Aimée Kelly, playwright Gillian Greer and novelist Eliza Clark. Photograph: Rebecca Need-Menear 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?

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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.

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.” Stanford, Eleanor (21 September 2023). "A 'Really Online' Writer Looks Beyond the Internet"– via NYTimes.com. 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. 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.”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). 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”. 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. 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. 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.”

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.” Staff Writer (15 June 2023). "Brand new adaption of acclaimed novel Boy Parts to premiere at Soho Theatre". 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. 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.Cummins, Anthony (24 June 2023). "Eliza Clark: 'I'm more primary school teacher than enfant terrible' "– via The Guardian. In a New York Times interview in 2023, she spoke about being "really online", [6] later telling The Independent that "the internet has been such a big part of my life but it’s taken years of work to disengage from it, and realise that it was actually a really negative influence". [7] How Boy Parts writer Eliza Clark became one of our most exciting young novelists". The Independent. 22 October 2023.