by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
‘I have never told anyone about this before. There is no way to prove that it happened, but why would I lie?’
The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behaviour thinks you should know about the body she found in the park. She thinks you should know about her sex life, which is fulfilling and systematic. She thinks you should know that she is a writer, that she is ‘complex, creative and nasty’.
But above all, she thinks you should know that she is a compulsive liar.
Trying to break this habit for the sake of Normal Ben, an honest and uncomplicated man, she attempts a sincere reckoning with her long history of deception, its psychological roots and the terrible cost it has exacted on her relationships. But can we believe a word she says?
Funny, sexy, and politically astute, Attention-Seeking Behaviour is at once a personal confessional and a critical history of lie detection methods. Blending fiction and non-fiction – memoir, novel and essay – it wields confession shamelessly while positively embracing the proximity of literature and lying.
‘Sexy, frightening, immaculately written and mercilessly perceptive. It’s also the most exacting, eviscerating self-critique since St Augustine. Left me with a deeper understanding of myself that I sort of wish I didn’t have. I loved every page.’ Luke Kennard
‘I loved Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s Attention-Seeking Behaviour. Aea speaks with such clarity to the mutability of memory and self-narration, and the painful difficulty of breaking out of one’s own patterns and specific self. Her honest look at lying has produced a novel which is both amazingly playful and deeply serious; warm and destabilising, intellectually rigorous and aesthetically stylish.’ Harriet Armstrong
‘With Attention-Seeking Behaviour, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo has done something that can’t be undone. Both an essay on the comforting fantasy of lie detection and a kind of extended stress test on the boundary between literary forms, this book directs itself between the factitious and fictive with the elan of a magician. Quite literally, Varfis-van Warmelo goes now you see me, now you don’t. But its achievement is not only its subject exploration of lies and contemporary intimacy, which feels entirely fresh, but in the way it demythologises the writer as being safe from her own maladaptive predilections. Put another way, this book reminds me living (and loving) are both our diagnosis and our antidote. I can’t think of a recent work that more clearly demonstrates that through literature we can lie to tell the truth.’ Oluwaseun Olayiwola
‘Nimble, rigorous and almost indecently entertaining. A debut to celebrate, one that announces the arrival of a vital new talent.’ Matt Greene
‘Flips the reader-author dynamic on its head. Varfis-van Warmelo takes our projections to co-create a confessional fiction-non-fiction hybrid. Tricksy is high praise for this compelling debut.’ Rose Cleary
‘A truly funny, slippery and daring book that is suffused with enviable sentences, a sense of nowness, and this cynical intelligence that is a joy to interact with. It is a brash novel about deceit and love, companionship and interiority, politics and private jokes, sex and polygraph machines, it is a bold and exciting novel for the weary world of today.’ JP McHugh
AEA VARFIS-VAN WARMELO is a writer and poet, and an editor at Granta magazine. Her debut poetry pamphlet Intellectual Property was published by Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2024). Attention-Seeking Behaviour is her first book.