Attention-Seeking Behaviour

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo is a writer and poet, and an editor at Granta magazine. Her debut poetrypamphlet Intellectual Property was published by Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2024).Attention-Seeking Behaviour is her first book.

‘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‘Attention-Seeking Behaviour is a book to be read for its sentences alone. Each line reveals the author’s control over fiction’s delicate veils, shaping a mercurial, lyrical reality that embroils the reader into an eerily unstable sense of certainty. Through quiet inversions, diminishments, and disillusions of account, Varfis-van Warmelo offers a voice that is all brain, all mammal—suspended within the mechanics of social life, yet governed by a vulnerable, perhaps universal will to power. The result is painterly and polymorphous: a book that does so much more than seek attention, it renewed what I now hope to find in the contemporary novel altogether.’ Eve Esfandiari-Denney‘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‘At once a faultless expression of emotional truth and a work of heart-breaking precision and quality. You come away wondering if you’ve ever said an honest word. Human interactions feel stranger and yet more real. Mostly the effect is you end up wishing immediately for more work—a lot more work—from this exceptional writer.’ Ben Pester‘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.’ John Patrick McHugh‘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 ... [T]his 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‘I may well be a liar, but this is compulsory reading. Nabokov, Fleur Jaeggy, Ann Quin and the dark voice in your head whip themselves up into an ambivalent frenzy, only to leave you lying and alone.’ Kimberly Campanello‘Defiant, evasive and cunning, with the precise mechanics of a puzzle box, Attention-Seeking Behaviour sets a new standard for confessional fiction. In interrogating her narrator’s own testimony alongside the slippery nature of testimony itself, Varfis-van Warmelo invites us into the grey areas but doesn’t deign to show us around. And rightly so. It left me raw, exposed, blinking, unsteady on my feet, totally thrilled.’ Vida Adamczewski‘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 frighteningly bizarre love story for our dark times.’ Sara Baume‘A self-portrait with lies, this sharp, hybrid confection, at once disturbing and funny, finds its place somewhere between Ed Atkins or Edouard Levé’s anti-memoirs and the best episodes of Mindhunter.’ Camille Bordas‘A totally compulsive read: daring, witty, incisive. I couldn’t look away. It’s a story about compulsive lying that feels radically truthful; a revelatory account of intimacy, interrogation, sex, and the act of self-narration.’ Naomi Booth