In Gwendoline Riley’s novels, conversation only makes people feel more alone. Read RachelConnoll14's profile from our Fall Preview issue
— now set to be released in the U.S. by New York Review Books — that she has begun to reach a wider readership. In both of these, subtly distressed female narrators who share certain biographical similarities with Riley look back over their personal histories of disquieting interactions. Ina writer in a troubled but loving relationship with an older man interrogates how her life has evolved and stabilized since her breakdown over a previous affair.
This can make Riley’s work sound of a piece with other recent novels that use plainly autobiographical material and eschew plot — novels in which the intricacies of using a web browser can stretch for pages. But her books stand apart. Riley has a spy’s attention to detail and a great and terrible power to re-create tics, pretensions, and the painfully recognizable human tendency to wallow in delusion. Her first-person narrators are crafted as blinkered and unself-aware.
Riley’s friend Houman Barekat, a critic, describes her writing as “filmic,” with a focus on scene setting. “She has this incredible ear for a bit of telling detail,” he said. “She’ll tell you an anecdote about some interesting social interaction and she’ll just pick out a particular kind of phrasing that a person had used, that had stuck in her mind, and you find yourself thinking,“I love writing dialogue. It’s something I could write a lot of,” Riley told me. “I have to really pare it back.
When I told her I found the books hilarious, she said, “Okay, I’ve got this terrible thing when someone says that: I scowl and say, ‘They’re not supposed to be funny.’ And if someone says, ‘Oh God, it was so hurtful,’ I say, ‘It was supposed to be funny.’ ” I asked how it is that every person I know who has readclaims to see their own parents in the characters. Shrugging, she said, “It’s the whole argument about being specific to be universal, I suppose.
Riley was born in London in 1979, grew up on the Wirral Peninsula near Liverpool, and moved to Manchester to study English literature when she was 18. She always knew she would be a writer. “I was fascinated by the idea of being able to evoke things,” she said. Four years later, she publishedwhich charts the ill-fated romances of Carmel McKisco, a 20-year-old barmaid in Manchester who is estranged from her family and spends her time reading and daydreaming about escape.
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