Attention Seeking Behaviour by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo review – a slippery liar’s tale

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.

Grief and trauma pulse beneath the story, as the narrator is haunted by the dead bodies she sees in parks and floating in canals. She says she has called emergency services, but her account is slippery: the harder we try to grasp it, the more it slips through our fingers. Can we believe a word she says?

Attention Seeking Behaviour draws the reader through personal confession and a gripping narrative of misadventures while dating, but the novel loses some of its momentum in its discussions of deceit. An essay on Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System for classifying facial movements to determine deception disrupts the narrative drive. When this bleeds into the narrative, her boyfriend says: “No more. Please.” These sections interrupt the flow and lack the immediacy achieved elsewhere.

In the book’s second part, questions of credibility become more acute. Acting on behalf of a journalist, the narrator copies files at a legal firm relating to a rape case in which a lecturer is accused of assaulting his student. The victim bares her soul, giving first her phone over to the police, then her laptop. Eventually, after police question her for signs of deception, she withdraws her participation in the investigation. The case is closed.

Complainants often anticipate the difficulties of a police investigation. Their testimony is the evidence, their body a crime scene. The narrator says: “We are ambiently aware of what is believable – of what people think is true, whether or not it is real.” Victims of sexual violence are judged in courts and beyond, for what they wore on the night in question, for what they did or did not do in the aftermath. Here lies the book’s genius: it turns the question of reliability back on the reader, exposing the expectations we place on women. Must an account of rape be consistent, coherent or complete to be worthy of belief? Should a woman’s past, including what she has said and done, have any bearing on whether she is believed? The reader may find their own response to the narrator’s story as unsettling as the story itself. The narrator cannot name the trauma that happened with her ex-boyfriend Isaac. Instead, she unravels it “like a police report”, recounting what she said (nothing) and what she felt (numb). The book asks, unflinchingly, do you believe her?

Brilliant and breathless, Attention Seeking Behaviour brings no easy resolutions to questions of memory, truth and justice. Yet, as the narrator tells us again and again, all she wants is to be believed.