My Phantoms

June 7, 2021
Riley (First Love) returns with an affecting story about the complicated relationship between a daughter and her two parents. Bridget, the 40-something narrator, cut off contact with her father when she was 26 and limits her interactions with her mother, who left her father when she was two. Still, memories of both parents—their self-involvement and staggering immaturity—come back to her vividly. The narrative begins with scenes of Bridget’s father, who, on court-ordered visitations when Bridget was 10, regales her and her older sister with dubious tales of accomplishment, such as acing job interviews by putting his feet on the desk of his potential employer. (“It is strange when somebody lying, but somehow you’re on the spot,” Bridget reflects.) The recollections shift to a series of encounters with her mother, Hen, who, after another divorce, has settled into a kind of frenzied gadabout, keeping herself busy with volunteer work and “daft crushes,” in Bridget’s view. Riley’s incisive dialogue and astute observations of family dynamics offer a sympathetic and painful perspective on both estrangement and the choices people make in order to survive parents who maybe should have never been parents at all. The result is a fine addition to Riley’s notable body of work. Agent: Alice Whitwham, Cheney Agency.

July 1, 2022
Short and sour (and grimly comic), this is a portrait of toxic parents, the mother in particular, as narrated by their daughter, a woman inevitably shaped by lifelong proximity to manipulative elders. In her seventh book, noted British writer Riley once again applies her meticulous method to intimate relationships, working with pinpoint precise dialogue and close focus to convey an immersive, intense sense of character (generally flawed). In this new book, the territory is a family foursome: father Lee Grant, his wife, Helen, and their two daughters, Michelle and Bridget. Bridget narrates, dwelling first on weekends spent with her father, whom Helen left after seven years of marriage. A vainglorious, unpleasant bully--mocking, cruel, infantile--Lee is a father whose presence is at best to be endured, as both girls learn. Helen's self-absorption is based on a different, less boastful, but equally problematic presentation: a kind of indignant, disappointed expectation that life has not delivered the normality she deserved. Her exhausting world of self-delusion is sad and false, and adult Bridget makes it her business to stay away from it. But the novel's larger part is devoted to interactions between Helen and Bridget, at dreadful annual meals and then a longer visit Bridget must make to her mother's apartment while Helen recuperates from an operation. Constant humoring is Bridget's preferred mode, interspersed with occasional teasing, hedged in by high barriers, like never introducing her mother to her flat or her live-in boyfriend. "Do you want me to tell you why, Mum? Why I have to keep things separate? How many sentences do you think you can take on that subject?" This unspeakable, unbreakable connection continues even as circumstances change and worsen, and Riley tracks matters to their quietly lacerating conclusion. A supremely discomfiting parent-child horror story delivered in pointillist style.

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