The Performance of Genre: A Conversation with Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

Re:Viewed by Sarah Haas

Spring 2026

RE:VIEW

In Attention-Seeking Behavior, the debut novel from Aea Varfis-van Warmelo, truth is impossible to parse.

Narrated by a self-proclaimed liar, there’s no choice but to follow her discursions—through her relationships, jobs, and research into the dubious science of lying. The absence of discernible truth feels both unsettling and familiar, a simulacrum of the topsy-turvy-upside-down of the post-factual world in which we actually live.

But this time, the chaos is compressed into the personal, into the relatable confusions of the interior. After all, there’s no such thing as the right way to tell a story, or to express a feeling, or to proffer an opinion. Right?

Just like there’s no proper orientation of the Earth in space, no solid point holding up the universe. And yet, in the world, and especially in Attention-Seeking Behavior, there is a spectacular if unverifiable cohesion that’s testament to Varfis-van Warmelo’s literary prowess. By stripping away the veils of genre and veracity, her novel forms an honest, if damning, expression of our contemporary unrealities. 

In April, Brink spoke with Varfis-van Warmelo, a British-Greek writer living in London, about performance, genre, humor, lying, morality, and more. This interview has been edited for length, flow, and clarity. 

BRINK: Did you always intend for Attention-Seeking Behavior to be a novel? 

AEA VARFIS-VAN WARMELO: No. I started out writing a monograph about lying. It was a nonfiction-y thing, to use a technical term, that would also have a memoir element, and the memoir would be artificial. It was very short, and when I sold it to my publisher, I wanted to develop it, and it tripled in length. A lot of what was in the original draft disappeared in that process. Given the degree of invention that’s going on in the book, I sometimes think it would be practically unethical to call it anything other than a novel. 

B: Your previous book, a collection of poems entitled Intellectual Property, proposes the law of intellectual property as poetry’s “dark twin.” In Attention-Seeking Behavior, is lying the evil twin of fiction? 

VVW: In both projects, I’m really interested in legal systems as attempts to create moral frameworks. Sometimes those frameworks reflect what we believe is moral, and sometimes they’re aspirational ideals of moral society. I like the idea that a legal system can be both an empathetic thing, and an extremely destructive, if structured, thing. 

But, no, I didn’t see fiction and lying as proximate. Fiction is more manipulative than it is deceitful, always trying to get your attention. It will do whatever it takes, and then it will reward you for looking at it. But when you’re reading fiction, you don’t believe that everything is true, and some of the fun of it is working that out. I wanted my reader to have the fun of being deceived. It can be quite exciting to be tricked. 

B: Not to quote Knausgaard as if he’s a moral authority but, in the first volume of My Struggle, I think he says something about how the one thing literature can’t do is manipulate its reader. Haha?

VVW: That’s so funny. I don’t know if I agree with that. What do you think? 

B: Well, it’s a distinction I’m glad to be made aware of, and I’ve become much more intentional about manipulating a reader—not less vexed by it, though. And here maybe it’s worth mentioning I write memoir… 

VVW: Yes. When writing memoir, there has to be something worth sharing about the self. You are trying to thank the reader for paying attention in some way. This also means you believe a story has happened to you, so the manipulation in memoir writing is the same as in fiction writing: it’s making someone stay on the page by telling them a story. The way you tell that story can be semiconscious, and also unconscious at times, but here I was using some narrative conventions consciously. 

B: In the past, you’ve talked about the “performativity of form.” I’m curious what you mean by that, and if the term would be well applied here. 

VVW: I mean both the action of the text—the way you’re engaging with what it’s pretending to be—and also the performance of the genre. Sometimes, we fall into little rituals of how to tell one story over another—we prioritize certain pieces of information and we tell them with a certain tone. When I’m writing, I’m thinking about the genre, and how best to perform it, but I’m also thinking about the sonic qualities of the language, how it will sound in your head, the pace at which you will read. That’s why I do lots of long sentences, because the text can trick you with the pace I’ve forced upon you. That’s a little way the text can “perform” itself, without me being there. 

I did acting before I did writing, so I’ve always wondered about how the writing will exist without me. How will the text communicate and perform on my behalf? How is the language going to sustain itself? And, sonically and intellectually, how will a paragraph uphold itself? What genre will the text be performing? How coyly can I remain on the page? 

I think this text is a very playful book. As much as it has quite bleak parts, the narrator is often enjoying the game. There is a performance there. 

B: There is one point when the narrator, Aea (not you), points out that if we did not speak, we would not tell lies or truths. Somehow, it seems, language and veracity are intrinsically linked. You’re an editor at Granta, so I’m curious about how you perceive and work with this link, on the grammatical and syntactical level. What is the structure of a lie? 

VVW: Obviously, I’ve read lots of definitions of lying, and I don’t fully disagree with Paul Ekman’s definition, which is that lying requires the intention to lie. So, in that definition, it is possible to lie without speaking. I could ask you what way something is and, if you knowingly point in the wrong direction, you’ve lied—you’ve intended to mislead someone. This means there is such a thing as the nonverbal lie, but more crucially it means deceit will always require there being two people and an effort to communicate between them. 

There is a lot of study into forensic linguistics and, although I did wonder about the grammar of lying, I didn’t think any semantic definitions of the lie work, since lying is an action, rather than the speech itself. A sentence by itself cannot be a lie—it has to be read or heard—and therefore there is no grammar of lying.

B: In the book, humor is almost as significant as lying, especially if you look at the intimacy in the relationship between the narrator and her boyfriend, Normal Ben. The first time they get together, there are lies and jokes, and then their first fuck. When he comes, she describes it as “very good, it was like a punchline, it was like being understood.” Can you talk about how these two threads, of veracity and humor, come together? 

VVW: Normal Ben and the narrator get along because of their similarity: he’s also always thinking about himself in the third person and operating at a slight remove from how he’s interpreted. He uses that remove—an intellectual exercise in construction where he’s thinking as a comedian—to make a joke. And the narrator has the exact same psychology, always thinking about how she’s perceived, how she can design herself, to make a lie, sometimes via a joke. So they’re both operating at this remove, and they’re both using the same language, and they’re both making jokes, though sometimes to different ends. There is a fabulation, an inventiveness, required in lying and humor. A joke is a kind of false world that is quite fun to inhabit. 

I also really wanted to write about humor because you can use it so well to avoid the truth. The punchline is a way of obfuscation. I wanted to write humor as a tactic of evasion. 

B: In Attention-Seeking Behavior, I was amazed at how complicated the difference between truths and lies became. I’m curious how you think of them now, not definitionally, but the relationship between the two. Is it a spectrum? A continuum that goes full circle? How are you aware of these two extremes? 

VVW: I see truth as a layered and simultaneous thing. Multiple truths coexist and interlock and, sometimes, they contradict each other, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one is less true than the other. Truth can evolve. 

I like to give people a lot of grace for the way they might interpret a situation. Their experience might not always reflect the actual events, but rather that their experience is reflected in the deviations. But despite that grace I do still surprisingly feel hurt, quite hurt, by someone lying to me. Maybe the injury stems from a perceived lack of trust; I worry about why someone would need to do that to me. 

Truth is something that we tell each other, and I don’t think there is such a thing as an objective truth. So now my concept of truth is more about sincerity, whether you are truthfully conveying something to someone. If there’s a sincerity in the account, that’s probably the closest we get to true. We do our best. Truth is a kind of effort, basically. 

B: I love that. So beautiful! But truth becomes so hard to parse. 

VVW: Yes, and I didn’t want the narrator to know her truths, either. For her, too, to get a little lost in her deceits. We’re not really meant to know if she is lying, even as we know she’s using the tactics of a liar to get her way by the end. Which she does. She wins and she shouldn’t have, for either of those characters’ well-being. She wins, and she plays a dirty game to win.

B: It’s so trippy to read this book. We’re given this unreliable narrator, who may or may not be lying when she presents reportage of Paul Ekman, an expert of deceit, who’s actually not an expert, but who nevertheless upholds a familiar concept of lying that feels true. In the layers, there’s a disappearance of the beacon of truth. Why do we need to believe truth exists? 

VVW: I started with this honest intention of looking into lie detection, knowing that the science might be a little dubious, and then I realized just how false it is. I realized the degree to which emotional expression—as in our facial expressions and nonverbal communication—is actually just the same exercise of language as speaking, and that we have learned a vocabulary, albeit visual. We think of facial expression as inherent, but it’s not. It’s learned.  

There is a bit of a glitch when you find that out. You’re trying to talk to people and you start thinking about the fact that everything they’re showing you, every smile, is actually just an exercise to communicate with you rather than an inevitable emotional expression, which means that there is some level of insincerity to everything. They’re showing you what they want you to see. Once you know that it becomes a little bit harder to focus on the truth, or to have it as a “beacon,” which is a really good way of putting it. 

I wanted to write a narrator who has an unstable relationship with truth, but also a really solid relationship with what is conceivable. To be a good liar, she has to think about what is possible and believable. And that’s why she’s a little bit snooty about bad liars who take it too far, who get swept away by themselves, because you have to keep it within the realm of the reasonable. She has a desire to improve, to lie less, but then she discovers, as I did, the extent to which all communication is manipulation. If you suddenly think that lying is an inherent part of communicating, it’s harder to pursue truth, and decency. It damages her. 

The question you asked me earlier—What is my relationship with truth now?––I’m not sure that the narrator and I would have the same answer, even though we have learned the same material. 

B: Just before this interview, it suddenly occurred to me that Paul Ekman might not be real, but the book’s fictional invention. So I looked him up just before we talked, and phew: he is real. Or was. He actually died at the end of last year. 

VVW: Yes, I was quite sad about that! 

B: His death got me thinking about how, in the book, there are many dead bodies, maybe real or maybe not, that are planted as touchstones of fabulation. How curious, then, that as the book intersects the real world, there’s Paul Ekman’s body. So tell me more about how his passing affects you. Did you read any of his obituaries? 

VVW: I know the book goes very hard on him, and I also know that I have judged this man entirely based on his work, or what I perceive as his legacy. In his interviews, though, he comes across as very charismatic, and I get the sense that he really loved the people in his life. He seems like the kind of person I would probably have a great conversation with. And, he was a very good writer, and I enjoyed reading his writing (even if his later work is slightly less elegant and went into this harder, cheaper kind of language that I found a bit tragic). The obituaries I read did a decent job of presenting his life and work while conveying the fact that his science has been questioned and may have caused a lot of harm. I found them fair.

But I don’t know if he knew that the science was wrong! That his conclusion—that emotional expression is universal and can be revealed in microexpressions—is wrong. I’ve read enough to have been persuaded that it’s wrong, but it’s possible he still believed it. I wonder, sometimes, if there might have been a point when he changed his mind. 

B: When I was reading Ekman’s obituary in The New York Times, there was a spread of pictures of him, sitting across the table from a camera person, making facial expressions—mad, about to laugh, pissed. It was such a silly and sweet set of images, and I imagine the creation of it humorously. Just an adult guy, sitting across the table from another adult person, making faces. 

VVW: I think he jokes in one of his interviews that what made him so good at his work was having a really bendy face. And yeah, he really did. 

But this is what’s so odd about it: he’s sitting there, faking the emotion that his work is claiming is inherent and universal. He’s posing for pictures and pretending to have a feeling and then saying it’s the demonstrable example of universal happiness on the human face. He does acknowledge this problem, in his writing, that people smile when they don't mean it. But, if your face is being used to design this facial expression coding system, and your face is faking the feeling, something’s wrong. 

B: Which brings us back to the harsher criticisms of his work. Can you speak to the implications of Ekman’s research on the criminal justice system? Specifically the tendency for policing, especially in the U.S., to coerce guilt rather than gather information in interviews? 

VVW: The reason I focus on Ekman so closely isn’t because he’s done the most harm, but because his studies are referred to in order to justify the harmful policing techniques that were already being used long before he was doing his research. Basically, his work was used as evidence to support a belief and turn it into fact. 

B: In my reading of your book, the fundamental criticism of Ekman is that his thinking was categorical and colonialist. Once you start there, his project becomes part of that too, and so it communicates well with policing. 

VVW: Yes, absolutely. That’s a great way of summarizing it. 

B: To step back a little, then, to a probing moral moment in the book, when the narrator and Normal Ben are on vacation and he asks her a question: 

“I pretended to think for a moment then I told him that I thought the principal question of our time was whether we can resolve the ways we hurt each other, both structurally and interpersonally, from prisons to racism, sexism, ableisms, and whether we have a duty to prevent harm to one another, on any scale. He told me that was wrong, he said it was climate change. I told him those were the same thing.” 

Overall, this feels so right to me. Does the narrator really believe this? Do you? And, assuming you do, what do you do then after this reckoning? 

VVW: How do we resolve the ways we hurt each other? It’s definitely one of my preoccupations, and one of my social group’s, too. But so is climate change, and they might not be so dissimilar! 

I couldn’t put a date to when I truly had that reckoning, but it’s probably been on my mind for at least a decade, so I guess what I’ll do next is more of what I’ve done so far, which is very little other than writing, frankly. As a writer, I’ll probably continue to have a strong interest in legal systems, in their failures and successes. And legal systems are useful to borrow when it comes to structuring a text or an idea. I can lean into them. In some ways they are the best attempt that we have to apply philosophy to our day-to-day life once religion’s been discounted, which in many ways it has. They always offer me an interesting lens for thinking.

But my next book is not about anything like this, it’s about acting. But then again, in my notes for that book, there are, somehow, still some questions about police abolition and prison abolition. So I guess I will always come back to those topics, which have a magnetic appeal. 

B: The title of the book doesn’t come into the text until the end, when the narrator is confronting Normal Ben for not believing an insinuation that she’d been raped. In his disbelief, he does some mental gymnastics to make her into “a person he could understand: an attention-seeking woman—” Why is this the title of the book? Why elevate this aspect of the narrative to such import? 

VVW: It wasn’t the original title. I had a much, much worse title. When I was trying to think of what the title should be, I thought of what the exercise of deceit is. What’s the purpose of lying, for the narrator? One of the most compelling arguments for why people might be compulsive liars is that they are trying to shift the locus of control, but another good reason is just attention. 

It also eventually seemed impossible to write about a woman, and a woman’s relationship to deceit, or the common interpretation of women as deceivers, without talking about sexual violence. Women are so often accused of fabricating stories of sexual violence and obviously, the most common justification for why a person would lie about her violation, is because she wants attention. When you think about it, it seems like the worst kind of attention you could possibly get: being scrutinized and being humiliated in lots of ways. So this is what informed the title—the narrator is an attention-seeker, but when she is called an attention-seeker it’s for the wrong reasons, and those reasons do come as a result of a harmful gender structure she’s (in many ways) trying to outsmart.

So I wanted her attention-seeking to be the kind the reader was on the side of. I hope that the reader wants Normal Ben’s company, and so they want her to pull it off, to keep him around. I wanted the reader to, perhaps reluctantly, support the narrator, want her to triumph, and therefore become implicated in the moral failure that is her lying. 

B: Final question, what are you reading? 

VVW: I like reading really traditional, robust, psychological realism. I find it so instructive. I’m reading Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu and really enjoying it. It’s nice to see a young writer pull off a classical novel like this. 

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Aea Varfis-van Warmelo is a British-Greek poet and writer living in London. Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s first book Attention-Seeking Behavior will be published by Graywolf on May 19, 2026. She is also the author of Intellectual Property, a pamphlet of poems. 

Sarah Haas is an editor at large for Brink. Her debut book, Jealousy: A Memoir (Catapult), will be published in November 2026. 

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