Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize, this compelling interrogation of memory, justice and truth offers no easy answers
The Goldsmiths prize-shortlisted debut from British-Greek author Aea Varfis-van Warmelo opens with a confession: “I have never told this story before.” The narrator, who bears the author’s name, goes on to tell the reader that she is a liar. From Humbert Humbert’s self-justifying account of abuse in Lolita to the devastating misinterpretation at the heart of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the trope of the unreliable narrator exposes the dangerous gap between the stories we tell and the truths they obscure. In Attention Seeking Behaviour, the reader is asked to examine their own capacity for trust.
A young woman aspires to be a writer – yet she has paused her postgraduate degree in poetry. She works unfulfilling jobs that demand little from her and has a lot of sex, which she describes as offering her “solitude”. She does all this while lying compulsively. She lies for fun, to flirt, to steal, for sympathy. She lies out of a desire to hurt others, but also to preserve her own privacy. Lying is, as the narrator claims, universal, though success at lying is not. She regards fraudsters and scammers with derision: they are “divorced from reality” and give her “second hand embarrassment”. In her eyes, her own lies are somehow purer.
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