Understanding Your Past Won’t Liberate You
In the world of Gwendoline Riley’s novels, a parent’s love is not to be trusted. What should come innately here seems skewed and conditional. A reader gets the clear sense that nothing—not even this supposedly pure emotion—comes without a cost.
Such tension is at the core of her novels, as difficulties in her narrators’ present lives are set against familial discord and fraught relations between parents and children. Riley has earned a devoted readership in the U.K., but her work has been slow to gain attention in the United States. Her two most recent novels, and , have just been published here simultaneously; they both feature heroines looking to their erratic parents and unhappy childhood for clues about the strain in their adult relationships. Yet these novels raise a skeptical eyebrow at
