Aea Varfis-van Warmelo: ‘There is no such thing as a reliable narrator.’
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One of the many things that so excited me about your book was its treatment of lying: such a private, often shameful thing, but, at least in my experience, a seemingly inevitable (and disturbing) part of daily life! What drew you to lying, as a topic?
Both in my writing and in my personal life I find trickery funny. I don’t think I owe anyone total transparency, and I often find people’s performances of guilt excessive, but when I experience it myself I find it profound and terrible. The difference between having feelings and performing them is significant, and for a long time I felt I wasn’t very good at the latter, but I eventually got better, played along, and in the process acquired a sort of snobbishness about others being bad at expressing themselves. It seemed pretty evident that communication was a kind of game we played, so when people laid it on too thick I felt like we were both losing something: if I played along I’d been conned, if I rejected it I was a bad sport.
When I started taking writing seriously, in my early twenties, I was thinking of texting in a similar way. I was always enjoying how texting was putting on a pretence. I liked how a breakup text could have these awkward structures, like substituting ‘because’ with ‘as’ and ‘I’ with ‘myself’, because its author was trying to borrow formality to present conclusiveness, or to indicate they were taking it seriously. I remember receiving my first of these messages and laughing because it felt like a child putting on a suit. So I tried to play this game in my writing – I liked disassembling English’s personalities and putting them on, then undermining them, often in an effort to tell some morbid story. I’m inclined towards morbid things, which is embarrassing to admit because I’m largely well-adjusted and often pleasant otherwise, so this morbid inclination always feels a bit teenage. Probably this embarrassment, and some residual anxiety about performing real feelings badly, is what made me write in this way, like a parlour trick: deceiving the reader and backfooting them. It’s simultaneously a method of control and avoidance.
I am terrible with deadlines – they bring me shame and distress, and I never, ever meet them – but I’d also never be able to write without them.
But it took me years to realise that all of this was an exercise in deceit – that what I was interested in was communication’s failures, and how deceit compensates for it. I also realised that I believed all my efforts to communicate, by virtue of requiring effort, contained a seed of insincerity. This seemed a pretty damning conclusion in which all my insincerity amounted to was me being slightly more charming at parties. So, suddenly, without realising how I’d quite got there, I found myself both a liar and someone sympathetic to the cause. Once I committed to the topic it felt like an infinitely rewarding well of information revealed itself to me.
I love the way you interweave the narrator’s life with essayistic sections on lying and lie detection. At what stage in the writing process did you decide to include both of these forms, and which form came first, in your conception of the novel?
From the start! On a practical level, I wanted to write about the pseudoscience of lie detection using a form that is closely aligned to veracity and therefore best-placed to discredit deceit. But I also wanted the book to engage with, and lateralise, methods of knowledge production and distribution. My life, like my narrator’s, is made richer by the things I read and research, and my mind is often changed in simple and blunt ways: I read an article, I learn something, I behave differently. My mind isn’t always changed by the subtle revelatory interactions fiction trades in, so I didn’t want to have to try and sift everything I had to say about lying through a fiction sieve.
I also wanted my reader to have an active and investigative role in assembling the text, and in understanding the narrator. The way that people form and make arguments can be very revealing, so I wanted the reader to be able to move beyond reading her thoughts and experiences, and to have to understand her through the work she produces too. I also wanted her essays to be her best effort at telling the truth. Her writing is spurred on by discovering injustice, and I find it interesting that her efforts to reassert a moral order make her an imperious, caustic and determined writer.
Since the book came out I’ve had more chance to talk about why I included the essays and I noticed that as I answered I kept thinking of how letters and diaries are used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. I was clearly struck by the construction and pleasure of reading an in-text artefact that is written by a character and the position it puts me in as a reader. It’s obviously influenced me, but it tickles me that I didn’t recognise that until now.
I was fascinated by the role of the dead bodies the narrator keeps seeing. I especially loved how she interrogates her emotional responses to seeing those bodies, and reveals herself to be ‘feigning humanity’, right at the start; faking it even though the bodies are imagined. Where did the idea for the dead bodies come from?
One day I sat up in bed and thought I must start this book, somehow, anyhow, I must write something down, and the first thing that came to mind was this image of a dead body in a park, waiting to be found. I am terrible with deadlines – they bring me shame and distress, and I never, ever meet them – but I’d also never be able to write without them. That morning when I sat up in bed and wrote ‘when I found the body I didn’t scream’ I was about a week away from a major deadline for the book and I had absolutely nothing to show for it, only very abstract notes towards this untitled book about lying. I suppose when I sat up I must have been thinking about how writing a candid liar also meant writing something confessional, and that writing ‘I am a liar and I am ashamed of this so I will tell you the truth now’ was extremely boring, so I must have had an urge to circumvent this by telling the reader a lie that is simultaneously confessional. But when I sat up I didn’t know what I’d write once I touched my keyboard. The image slipped in somewhere in that motion, involuntarily.
There is no such thing as a reliable narrator, and efforts to achieve real truth often destroy it.
As the novel progressed I became very interested in these images being involuntary intrusions for the narrator too – a person who is so cerebral and intent on making you think she has a profound familiarity with her own thoughts, but is nonetheless unable to explain or understand these images that afflict her. I interpret them as a kind of deferred suicidal urge, and that by deferring them to a different body, the narrator is protected from how much she craves harm and an escape from herself. It was even fun to write these graphic scenes, at times. No doubt some credit can be given to the internet, and perhaps being exposed to illness as a child (which does teach you something about our innate instinct to identify and fear when a body looks wrong), but the fact is that one day I sat up in bed and thought I must write something and the first thing that came to mind was the image of a dead body, and I don’t know why.
It’s kind of funny to me that this involuntary element then came to represent the psychological spine of the book: an insincere vulnerability, where the narrator can confess to horrors and by confessing create the illusion of being impervious to them.
The novel is so distinct on a sentence level, and so beautiful. I loved the way the style and structure covaried with the narrator’s mental state too – the long, visceral and also very beautiful line where the narrator is sleeping with other people after ignoring Normal Ben is one of my favourites in the book. Could you share something about how you produced this voice, and, perhaps, some of your influences stylistically?
I’m so flattered by this question! I’m always so pleased to hear when someone enjoyed those passages, because I know they ask a lot of a reader.
In tandem with my playful – or parlour-trick – approach to form as a younger writer, I was always keen for my language itself to align thought, feeling and speech. This urge stems directly from my love of theatre and acting. My experiences acting created a direct bond between punctuation and breath, and I love the mental effect you can achieve for your reader just by altering punctuation or using parataxis. I love how many readers have told me they involuntarily held their breath as they read those sections. So the impulse originated in theatre, but the qualities of language itself – the sound and pleasure of it – were then heavily influenced by the sonic beauty and pleasure I found in T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. It’s hard to overstate the impact Not I had on me, and I suspect on my deathbed I will reflect on my greatest literary influences (and then, perhaps, my loved ones) and Not I will still be top of my list.
I loved the role of humour in the novel – the narrative voice itself is very funny, and the conversations between the narrator and Normal Ben too. What made you decide to attend to jokes like this in the novel – not just within the narrative voice but within the relationships you’re writing about too?
I think all of my relationships have been built on a common sense of humour, so it just seemed impossible to write a credible love story without these people laughing together! But I also needed Normal Ben to be a perfect foil for the narrator: he had to be someone decent, honest, forgiving, and also someone who can diffuse the risk of a lie escalating to hysterics. This was all achieved by giving him a sense of humour, and once I started thinking of how this man might perceive and process the world, I realised that a healthy sense of irony and play is fairly similar to how a liar views the world. Like the narrator, Normal Ben also reflects on his own life with a conscious remove to determine how to narrate himself, and will sometimes rearrange or exaggerate details, except his purpose is almost always to make someone laugh.
I am making things up about myself, and you should be embarrassed if you fall for it.
The narrator is also funny though, and this partially because of the structural similarities between lies and jokes. They are each made of two parts – the set up/the punchline, the lie/the revelation – and so humour becomes a liar’s sleight of hand, where facts can be rearranged and truths can be substituted with jokes by following an iambic rhythm of set up/punchline, lie/another punchline.
I’m not sure if this resonates, as perhaps it’s more of a subjective reaction or a feeling, but I had this sense that a state of not-knowing was important to the novel. I felt this in the way that several of the essayistic sections seemed to include unresolved elements and questions, and I felt it in the novel’s emotional landscape too. For instance, I was especially struck by the moment when the narrator is doing some work for Anna and – during one of their interactions – has a feeling ‘of something like triumph, something that felt like hatred, but I wasn’t sure for whom. The feeling passed before it could be fully named.’ And of course, without spoiling it, the unknowable or undefinable quality of certain experiences becomes especially crucial at the novel’s end. I wondered if I’m right to feel that not-knowing or at least things that can’t exactly be verbalised are important to the novel, and if so, could you say a little more about that?
I love this question. You’re absolutely right on all counts.
I don’t think we can know everything about ourselves. Our memories are fallible, we can’t always understand the source of our feelings and when we try to we tend to get it wrong, we aren’t that good at distinguishing between images we invented and images we actually saw, and we are so averse to not-knowing that we will (sometimes involuntarily) fill in the gaps with whatever makes sense, and what makes sense to us is not always rational or based in fact, which means we are generally compensating for ignorance with bias. The result is that every effort to achieve truth relies on a composite of perception, memory, interpretation (biased) and imagination. This means that there is no such thing as a reliable narrator, and efforts to achieve real truth often destroy it.
I was interested in lie-detection methods as essentially bias-confirming machines, and because they represented a scientific effort to compensate for a state of ignorance. I have sympathy for the creators of these methods since they appeared to be labouring under the naive believe that truth achieves justice, when I think we are now ready to accept that there are many crimes where there is no such thing as truth, and where there is no justice. In these cases, the truth, even if there is one, even if we could detect it using these methods, would neither correct the injury nor prevent its reoccurrence.
This isn’t to say that pure ambiguity is the way forward – the narrator’s life is corrupted by her lack of a moral compass, but in some ways ambiguity also rescues her from some of the worst feelings she could have. If a feeling can pass without being named, then it’s been robbed of its endurance. Normal Ben, on the other hand, has a pretty steady moral compass, and a fear of ambiguity, so I sometimes thought of their relationship as pitting an empiricist approach against a deontological one. I liked that Normal Ben, as a lapsed Catholic, might retain some of the moral instructions that religious education gave him, and uses it to guide his behaviour. The tragedy is that he’s probably ceased to believe that confession guarantees absolution.
I was so interested by something you said, in another interview, about the protagonist of Attention-Seeking Behaviour being a sort of ‘shadow version’ of yourself. I’d love to hear more about what it was like to write a character who draws on aspects of yourself, but is of course also a fictional construct. What was that process like psychologically, and what made you want to focus on a character who was sort of half-you, half-not you?
I wanted the text to perform lying and that necessitated me lying about myself. I don’t lie compulsively (although I appreciate few people will believe this now), but I found it easy to imagine a parallel life where I had interpreted some of my biography differently – had reached different conclusions about experiences that were painful, or even pleasant, and resorted to lying compulsively. This was mostly a case of locating the nodes of insecurity in my life and imagining them bloomed. Or to use another metaphor: these are the sore teeth I like to bite down on. If I were ten times more insecure about being loved, about producing significant work, about having influence, intelligence and autonomy, then I would certainly be a liar. Once I had a shape of this shadow version’s mind, I was able to imagine the events of the book, which are mostly fictional and describe things more likely to happen to her than me.
But there are two more reasons I did this, and one is that I wanted to make good on the promise at the beginning of the book, where the narrator says she knows the consequences of confessing to being a liar. I wanted to put myself on the line, and make the consequences real. People sometimes lie to preserve their reputations, but I wanted to lie to damage mine.
And this damage was crucial, and leads to the second reason I did this: I want the reader to be punished for reading my work as direct autobiography. I do not want them to leave my writing and feel like they truly know me – I want them to know my argument, but I don’t want them to think they know my real life. I am making things up about myself, and you should be embarrassed if you fall for it.
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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. Attention-Seeking Behaviour, her debut novel, is out now with Peninsula Press.
Harriet Armstrong‘s debut novel To Rest Our Minds and Bodies was published by Les Fugitives in June 2025, and is published or forthcoming in French, German, Spanish and Turkish translation. Her short stories have been published in Forever Magazine, The London Magazine, Granta, HEAT, Kismet, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. In 2024 she was a Resident at the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts.
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