British-Greek author Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s debut novel, *Attention Seeking Behaviour*, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, explores themes of memory, trauma, and the reliability of narrative through the lens of an unnamed young woman narrator who shares the author’s name. The work opens with the narrator’s confession that she has never previously told her story and describes herself as a compulsive liar, complicating the reader’s ability to trust her account.
The protagonist is a postgraduate poetry student on hiatus who navigates unfulfilling jobs and transient sexual relationships she describes as a form of “solitude.” Her habitual lying serves multiple purposes—ranging from manipulation and flirtation to self-preservation and even inflicting pain. She draws a distinction between her lies and those of fraudsters or scammers, dismissing the latter as detached from reality, while viewing her own fabrications as somehow more authentic.
Underlying the narrative is a palpable presence of grief and trauma. The narrator is haunted by visions of dead bodies encountered in public spaces, which she reports to emergency services. However, the veracity of these claims remains ambiguous, further destabilizing the reader’s trust. The novel’s first section combines candid personal confession with episodic encounters in dating and work, though its pacing is interrupted by digressions on deception. Varfis-van Warmelo includes an essayistic exploration of Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System, which classifies facial movements linked to lying. These passages, sometimes breaking narrative flow and prompting protest from the narrator’s boyfriend, inject a clinical element that some readers may find disrupts the momentum.
The novel’s second half intensifies its focus on issues of credibility, particularly within the context of sexual violence. Acting for a journalist, the narrator copies documents at a legal firm relating to a rape allegation against a university lecturer. The victim undergoes intense scrutiny, relinquishing her phone and laptop to police but ultimately withdrawing from the investigation, leading to case closure. Through this plot thread, the novel interrogates societal and legal expectations placed upon survivors of sexual assault, highlighting how testimonies are judged not only on coherence but also on personal history, behavior, and perceived credibility.
Varfis-van Warmelo’s narrative challenges readers to examine their own assumptions about truth and belief. The narrator refrains from naming the traumatic event involving her ex-boyfriend Isaac, instead recounting it in a fragmented, emotionless manner that mirrors police reports. This approach underscores the tension between the need to be believed and the difficulty in presenting trauma consistently or comprehensively.
*Attention Seeking Behaviour* offers a complex, nuanced meditation on the gaps between memory, narrative, and justice. It resists easy answers, urging readers to confront uncomfortable questions about trust, the nature of truth, and the ways society evaluates survivors’ stories. Central to the novel remains the narrator’s repeated plea: above all, she wants to be believed.