Difficult People

Difficult people are a staple in Gwendoline Riley’s novels First Love and My Phantoms, published in the United States this month by New York Review Books. Two narrators, Neve and Bridget (though they might well be the same woman), are both in strange caretaker-like arrangements: Neve with her husband Edwyn, and Bridget with her mother Helen. Neve and Edwyn were married “against both of our instincts” shortly before First Love begins; their early relationship is built on morning kisses and cuddles and squeaky pet names like “little cabbage” but, as Neve notes, “there have been other names, of course.”