Attention Seeking Behaviour
‘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.
About the author
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.
Judge David Sexton on Attention-Seeking Behaviour
"When a liar says they are lying, what should you believe? Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s remarkably accomplished debut makes lying and lie-detection the very subject of the novel, expounded as well as exemplified. The manipulative narrator of Attention-Seeking Behaviour brings brio worthy of a Muriel Spark heroine to telling us what she thinks we should know about her promiscuous, deceitful life in London now."