Boy Parts

Product Information

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.

Key, Alys (30 July 2020). "Eliza Clark's impressive debut, Boy Parts, has shades of Fight Club and American Psycho". inews.co.uk. Stanford, Eleanor (21 September 2023). "A 'Really Online' Writer Looks Beyond the Internet"– via NYTimes.com. 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 ] 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. 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]verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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.

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? 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.” She had a short story She's Always Hungry published with Granta in 2023. [14] Awards and grants [ edit ]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. 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”. How Boy Parts writer Eliza Clark became one of our most exciting young novelists". The Independent. 22 October 2023. Carelli has settled in Crow, we learn, to investigate the torture and murder of 16-year-old Joan Wilson at the hands of three girls – Dolly, Violet and Angelica – from her school. Not every reader will make it through the opening scene, which describes Joan’s horrific death after the other girls douse her in petrol and set her on fire. Initially the crime drew little media interest, most likely because it took place on the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum. But three years later the “true-crime industrial complex” is turning its attention to Crow, spying a new opportunity to exploit human suffering for entertainment that’s “tailored to our basest instincts”. By contrast, Carelli hopes to “do something worthy”, intending to honour Crow and its still-grieving community by writing about the town as much as the crime itself. 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.”

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

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”. 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. 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? Have her parents read it? “They have not,” says Clark. One, because it’s so explicit and she feels grossed out by the thought of their doing so. And two, she’s worried they will think she based Irina’s parents on them. “Her mum’s this absurd harpy and her dad’s this weird, spineless, Freudian … and my parents aren’t like that! I suppose I’m going to have to let them at some point. It’s just, as far as my parents are aware, I’ve never had sex, I’ve never taken drugs, and I definitely don’t know what the member of a man looks like.”