Boy Parts

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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.’” No matter how good she may be,” adds Greer, “she just can’t outrun other people’s perceptions of her.” For Joyce, Irina is “somebody doing absolutely everything they can to be taken seriously”; her frustrations in this respect are relatable, even as her behaviour becomes increasingly unhinged. Irina’s expression of both her sexual and creative desire stands out: “We don’t often see or encounter women who feel free to express that they like sex in this way,” Joyce says.

But the format has its limitations. Toward the end of the show, there is a climactic scene in a gallery where Irina exhibits the photographs we’ve been watching her create. It’s an event that can make or break her career, and the place is meant to be teeming with people, but Kelly’s aloneness on the stage feels too palpable. Moreover, the production is poorly paced, and the gallery scene feels rushed, which exacerbates a sense of anticlimax. After all that leisurely buildup, the play’s momentum fizzles out in a matter of minutes. Irina is in a rut. She obsessively takes explicit photographs of average-looking men she scouts from the streets of Newcastle while her dead-end bar job slips away; she’s more interested in drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. When she’s offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery which promises to revive her career in the art world, it should feel like an escape. But the news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, drawing in her obsessive best friend and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention . . .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? 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.

O'Neill, Lauren (5 August 2020). "Ultraviolence, Party Chat and Erotic Photography: The World of Eliza Clark's 'Boy Parts' ". 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.

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Co-produced by Metal Rabbit, the play will run at Soho theatre, a venue with a history of solo shows about “messy” female protagonists, such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Liz Kingsman’s One-Woman Show. Greer feels that Boy Parts will be a way of “moving the dial forwards”.

Boundaries are for breaking and if anyone can crash through and reinterpret the fear of our time, Eliza Clark can.’ MSLEXIA How Boy Parts writer Eliza Clark became one of our most exciting young novelists". The Independent. 22 October 2023. 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.

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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. 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.