Gwendoline Riley Is Haunted by Herself

Gwendoline Riley’s novels are not exactly easy to read and they were not, it would seem, easy to write. “I have to get to the point where my only two options are: to do the writing or to kill myself,” Aislinn, one of Riley’s autobiographical-seeming narrators, explains in Opposed Positions (2012): “My aversion is commensurate to my will, so it’s tough. Every word gets to be like a steamer trunk.” Aislinn’s mother begs her to find “any kind of job” to “take you away from endless introspection and obsessing over your childhood”. It’s not a bad description of the novelist’s vocation, a novelist of Riley’s commitment at least (she has just won a Windham-Campbell Prize). In 2007, aged 28, and already on her fourth novel, she described what she does in similar terms: “It really is picking at scabs and lying awake and mulling over things that it would really be much more cheerful not to mull over.”