Keynote
A confession from a liar that exposes the interrelation of language, control, performance, intimacy, and love
Book Title
Attention-Seeking Behavior
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
“Attention-Seeking Behavior is, in some ways, in the cerebral tradition of novels such as Teju Cole’s Open City and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. But where those novels simmer, this one boils over with bitter humor, bad sex, class rage, wild rhetorical swerves and metafictional psych-outs, all of which demonstrate Varfis-van Warmelo’s exquisite control over the chaotic proceedings, and make good on the ambivalent promise of her title. This is a powerful, provocative debut novel by a writer who commands, and deserves, your full attention.”—Justin Taylor, The New York Times Book Review
Body
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 Behavior wants to tell you about Normal Ben, the man she’s been seeing: their running jokes, the stories she’s told him. She wants to tell you about the incorrect belief that tiny facial expressions betray a person’s real feelings. She wants to tell you about the time she went to a therapist to try to cure her lying habit. She wants to tell you about the body she found on a walk through the park. She wants to tell you about lies she’s told her demeaning, erratic boss. She wants to tell you about the history of police interrogation techniques, which use deception to extract false confessions. She wants to tell you that all lie-detection methods are phony. She wants to tell you what it’s like to read opposing testimonies in a sexual assault case. She wants to tell you about her ex-boyfriend, who is a liar. But is she telling you the truth—or does she only want your attention?
The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behavior wants to tell you about Normal Ben, the man she’s been seeing: their running jokes, the stories she’s told him. She wants to tell you about the incorrect belief that tiny facial expressions betray a person’s real feelings. She wants to tell you about the time she went to a therapist to try to cure her lying habit. She wants to tell you about the body she found on a walk through the park. She wants to tell you about lies she’s told her demeaning, erratic boss. She wants to tell you about the history of police interrogation techniques, which use deception to extract false confessions. She wants to tell you that all lie-detection methods are phony. She wants to tell you what it’s like to read opposing testimonies in a sexual assault case. She wants to tell you about her ex-boyfriend, who is a liar. But is she telling you the truth—or does she only want your attention?
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About the Author
Credit: Credit: Naomi Joanne Delorme
Praise
“For lovers of unreliable narrators, this slim novel winds its reader into the narrator’s like a deft and lethal spider.”—Caroline Reilly, Forbes
“[A] slim, scholarly, sexy novel. . . . Complex and enigmatic; a book that defies both expectations and definition.”—Kirkus Reviews
“An unrepentant and unreliable narrator propels this serpentine psychological drama. . . . This shape-shifting novel is endlessly intriguing.”—Publishers Weekly
“Attention-Seeking Behavior is a darkly comedic and ferociously intelligent debut that delivers in its attempts to probe inherently unanswerable questions about identity, language, and truth without pathologizing its characters or succumbing to easy answers.”—Devyn Andrews, West Trade Review
