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# Attention-Seeking Behavior
- URL: https://www.notesonbooks.net/attention-seeking-behavior/
- Published: 2026-10-18T15:20:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-18T15:20:38.000Z
- Description: A stranger’s corpse invented for a new boyfriend, then defended by a liar who would rather be understood.
- Author: Editorial
- Tags: Aea Varfis-van Warmelo, #rating-3, Intimacy, Power, Institutions

Novel · 200 pages · Paperback · 2026 · Graywolf Press

## Who would lie about something like that

[Aea Varfis-van Warmelo](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/author-aea-varfis-van-warmelo/)’s *Attention-Seeking Behavior* is [a love story](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-intimacy/), and its narrator lies. On their second night together, the man she calls Normal Ben asks her for something she has told no one. It does not occur to her to tell him something true. She describes finding a dead man in Battersea Park. He believes her.

The narrator lies by habit, to everyone. She invented a family crisis to get leave from her master’s degree. She is a part-time PR assistant who lies to her boss, Desdemona, for time off. She is dating a dozen people at once and tells each of them a different lie. Ben is meant to be one more.

He is not. The invented body is the ground the relationship stands on. Ben is kind, ironic and easy to read. Every true thing he learns about her threatens the rest. When he says he loves her, she believes him. She believes she deserves it, too.

She would also like to be understood. She calls herself “a very good liar” and adds that “it is nothing to be proud of.” She is not asking for sympathy, she says, then [explains how exhausting it is to be her](https://www.notesonbooks.net/my-year-of-rest-and-relaxation/). Her deepest injury, she decides, is the reminder that she is normal. The title is not ironic.

Their banter is how they court, and at first it is funny. They play a running game of announcing something absurd with “you should know this about me.” It does not develop. He answers her texts with “sorry, that was for my other girlfriend.” Drunk, he fakes collapsing on her on the stairs. The jokes repeat a rapport settled on their first date. They turn infantile. The repetition grates. For readers, raised on dating apps and group chats, the banter may be the draw.

Alongside the affair runs her research into lie detection, addressed straight to the reader. She mocks the psychologist Paul Ekman, who claims the[ face betrays every lie.](https://www.notesonbooks.net/the-stranger/) She argues that expression is learned habit. Then [she turns to the police](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-institutions/). The American Reid technique deceives suspects into confessing. [Britain’s PEACE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEACE%5Fmethod%5Fof%5Finterrogation?ref=notesonbooks.net) model questions them at length to tire them out. She uses all of it at home.

The research has a job behind it. A journalist she calls Anna, whom she admires, hires her to scan the files of a rape case. Lily, a student, accused her lecturer, Michael. In interview Lily’s language turns clinical, nothing like the crude words of her diary. By the second interview she answers questions nobody has asked. Michael answers only what he is asked. The narrator wants a verdict. She finds a letter saying the investigation ceased after Lily withdrew. Why, she has to decide for herself.

Her own past has a man in it too. Before Ben there was Isaac, a painter and a worse liar than she is. She says that when she left him he punished her for it. Her view of what he did changes each time she thinks of it.

The case stirs him up. After a panic attack, Ben asks whether the files are bringing up what happened with Isaac. She says nothing and lets him decide. Later, at a friend’s party, Ben says he does not talk to rapists. Isaac shows him her affectionate messages. Ben goes to her, unsure what to believe.

In the argument that follows, [she interrogates him](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-power/). She tells the reader she is reconstructing his words and that there is no choice but to trust her. She reads his face muscle by muscle. She walks him through the night with Isaac “like a police report,” then demands that he name it. She wants to hurt him, she writes, but more than that she wants him to believe her. When he pushes, she cries until he stops. He apologises again and again. By morning Ben is asking for her forgiveness, and she grants it.

Bodies turn up throughout the book, at moments of sex and exposure. None is explained. They arrive so often that they stop registering. Late on she reports seeing “a couple of bodies” and calls them “nothing notable.” By then the device has worn thin.

In the last chapter Ben asks to see where she found the dead man. She points at bare dirt. He mourns the stranger, and she sees a performance of grief he has no right to. Then she steps over the body to follow him.

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