They felt important to me in a way that few others did at the time. At what point does familiarity shade into overfamiliarity; overfamiliarity into a critical handicap? None of the following commonplaces?
I could go on. Riley grew up on the Wirral but published her debut, Cold Water , while studying in Manchester in her early twenties. Cold Water , Sick Notes , Joshua Spassky , Opposed Positions , First Love — each is told in the first-person by a female narrator who seems set to a different frequency than the world around her. Minor biographical details and supporting characters vary, but the novels all riff on what are effectively the same three characters or four, if you read the American man in Sick Notes , Joshua Spassky and Opposed Positions as the same character, which I do.
My Phantoms marks a radical break inasmuch as it strips this already minimal focus back even further: her usual handful of topics is slashed to just one. Riley — always at her sharpest when writing about contempt — reaches blistering heights. As such, we only get the narrator-as-daughter, rather than a fleshed-out character.
It gives the novel the sort of tidy claustrophobia typical of rooms devised by Bond villains, walls sliding in on each other. But they often stem from that specific moment in life when you venture out into the world for the first time, encountering the inauthenticity and ugliness which governs much of adult life.
Stop saying you love him. Say it when you mean it. This, I remember vividly from my own teenage years: some persistent hunch that connection was rare, that self-reliance was the main thing.
