by Devyn Andrews
May 19, 2026
Attention-Seeking Behavior: A Novel by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo; Graywolf Press; 200 pages; $12.75.
Of course, we can never know for certain what the poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have thought about autofiction and the role of narrative in today’s post-truth world when he coined the term “suspension of disbelief” over two hundred years ago. But, based all I’ve learned about her recently, I suspect that the narrator of Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo’s mesmerizing debut Attention-Seeking Behavior would forgive the scenic route I am about to take to her introduction in order to mine this literary hypothetical for thematic content.
Describing lyric poems as linguistic mechanisms by which a speaker’s “inward nature” is communicated to the outside world through a “semblance of truth,” Coleridge reflects in Biographia Literaria that engaging with literature requires listeners (and readers) to willingly and temporarily overlook the artifice of an invented text in order to access its greater, more universal resonance. To Coleridge, this suspension of disbelief – this acceptance of surface-level falsity in the pursuit of deeper human truths – is nothing less than a demonstration of “poetic faith.”
And while it is certainly true that our world has changed dramatically since the Romantic era, I found myself continually returning to Coleridge and these questions of truth and disbelief, stories and poetic faith as I devoured Attention-Seeking Behavior: Where is the line between fact and fiction, and who gets to decide where it falls? Can there be subjective lies? Degrees of dishonesty? Such a thing as an objective perspective?
Can truth ever be rendered through a deceptive medium, or are words always destined to fail us in the pursuit of certainty, even if language is the only thing we truly believe in?
Thankfully, this is a mere book review, so I’ll defer those totally casual and completely answerable questions to Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo, whose wholly original debut tackles these kinds of philosophical inquiries with agility and aplomb. A relatively slim book that moves at a breakneck pace, Attention Seeking-Behavior is a psychologically-driven character study that fundamentally challenges readers’ conceptions of fiction and fact while showcasing new possibilities for the novel’s form.
The story is narrated by a young woman living in contemporary London, an aspiring writer with a searing sense of humor, a deep fascination with language, and (by her own admission) a serious problem with compulsive lying. At the outset of the novel, the narrator is on “temporary-but-likely-to-become-permanent leave” from a master’s writing program due to a “fictional family crisis”; she spends her time at a smattering of part-time jobs, and derives a sense of structure from her dating habits (involving two people per week, with a maximum of two dates per person spaced two weeks apart), a practice which she describes as “incredibly stabalising.” Loosely following the narrator’s investigation into her habit of lying alongside the development of her relationship with a man she hilariously refers to as “Normal Ben,” the novel’s alternating chapters shuffle between scenes from the narrator’s life and findings from her borderline-obsessive research into the dubious practice of taxonomizing and decoding facial micro-expressions, the pseudoscientific underpinnings of lie detection testing, and the sordid history of modern interrogation practices. The resulting story is a kind of hybrid combining aspects of creative nonfiction and the confessional novel into an utterly unique, philosophical exploration into what it means to be a storyteller, and who we choose to believe.
Varfis-Van Warmelo’s use of first-person unites these sometimes disparate narrative threads across the work as a whole, and the distinct and unforgettable voice of our narrator impressively permeates the “nonfiction” chapters to the same degree as those taking place in the fictive present. The way the narrator’s forays into bits of history often parallel the way she describes her own memories, with a kind of sardonic wit and enticingly blasé sense of intelligence. For example, of a particularly controversial American psychologist, she writes: “Paul Ekman set out to prove that facial expressions were universal and innate just like any good scientist in the 60s would do so: with a sizeable grant from the US Department of Defense.” Pages later, when describing her dating partners, she notes: “I met most of these people using three dating apps, which I maintained and monitored with remarkable verve in a way that unpleasantly suggested to me I had some project manager potential.”
There are moments, too, where the narrator seems to be speaking on both the findings from her research and her own experience with pathological lying simultaneously: “if our bodies and faces communicate against our will,” she ponders about a study on micro-expressions, “they know the truth better than we do, and truth is, therefore, a default condition, and there is, therefore, a correct and default way to be a person. Anyone who does not conform to this is concealing their feelings, and that makes them a liar.” In this way the novel is intriguingly metafictional, with a smartly-plotted internal logic— readers naturally intuit the nested, essay-like sections as a crucial part of the narrator’s attempts to honestly understand herself and her behavior through writing, rather than an authorial intrusion by Varfis-Van Warmelo for the sake of thematic development.
It is also immediately apparent from the novel’s first word (“you”) that Attention-Seeking Behavior’s writer/narrator is aware of her audience; brilliantly leveraging first-person’s capacity for direct address, Varfis-Van Warmelo allows the narrator to speak straight to her readers. The narrator confesses (and then demonstrates) her extensive lying almost immediately in the story, creating a productive tension between her forthcomingness and her unreliability that fuels the novel on both formal and narrative levels. The repeated phrase “you should know” also appears in sentence constructions across the work, breaking the “fourth wall” to remind us exactly what it is we’re doing with Varfis-Van Warmelo’s book in our hands in the first place: that is, gleaning truth through fiction, irrespective of its believability.
At its core, 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. Varfis-Van Warmelo covers an ambitious amount of thematic territory in just 200 pages with a cutting poignancy, offering deft treatments of issues related to gender, social conformity, otherness, and sexual violence. And while there is infinitely more to note about the fascinating latter half of the work , Attention-Seeking Behavior is exactly the kind of novel that comes to life most in those moments of discovery that occur when we read, having suspended our disbelief in exchange for those semblances of truth which reach us when we surrender to the coincident powers of language and narrative. That is to say, those who lend Varfis-Van Warmelo a little bit of poetic faith definitely won’t regret it.
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Let Her Fool You: The Truth of Lying Women in Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo's Attention-Seeking Behavior
FICTION
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Devyn Andrews is a graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago Program for Writers. Her work has been published in Cutthroat, Memezine, and elsewhere. Previously, she lived in Boston and Sacramento.
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