Gwendoline Riley’s Biting Realism

When Bridget Grant, the narrator of Gwendoline Riley’s new novel My Phantoms, was a child, her favored state was a dissociated one. She speaks with her mother as if from a script, presenting a series of prompts—about her mother’s childhood, her school uniform, her divorce—to which the other can quickly provide “the right answer, an approved answer.” Whenever Bridget and her sister Michelle are forced to spend time with their father, they learn “to sort of fade out of the moment” when he goes off on one of his comic routines, as if averting their eyes from a wild animal’s challenge.