Date Finished: February 21st 2024
I remember hearing about Gwendoline Riley because one of the presenters of Backlisted Podcast kept going on and on about her brilliant she was, resulting in her name lodging in my brain. Fortuitously spotting her name during a bookshop browse, I picked up My Phantoms which sees Bridget reflect on the relationship between herself and her mother, a relationship fraught with immaturity, miscommunication and neglect, resulting in cruelties on both sides.
“She painted a beguiling picture, if you were susceptible to that kind of thing: lonely only child; breathless little girl who had to do this and had to do that. I was not susceptible, but then nor did I ever quite feel that I was the intended audience when she took on like this. There was some other figure she’d conceived and was playing to. That’s how it felt. Somebody beyond our life.”
“My father was of a piece with the rest. And his company was something to be weathered, that’s all. He had a claim on me – on us – which no one was disputing. Which, in fact, my mother, as was her way, seemed quite excited to uphold. So it was ‘Lock!’, ‘Seat belt!’, and then try to let the hours flow by. I’m not sure I ever thought of him as a person, really. He was more just this – phenomenon. A gripper of shoulders. A pincher of upper arms. If I was wearing a hat, a snatcher of hats. If I was reading a book, a snatcher of books. Energised bother, in short. And yes, legally mandated.”
Riley is fantastic at evoking the unique madness of families and their continued inability to communicate. Bridge’s father is a narcissist, a man who seems to be fabricating his own myth in real time with zero regard for anyone’s interest in it, merely playing to an audience with a mixture of truth and lies in order to project a very particular image. Her mother, meanwhile, seems a harried figure, one who made a mistake in ever marrying Lee Grant and now just waits to be questioned so she can justify that failure with light remarks like “that’s just what people did”, dancing around truths she can’t name and retreating when the line of questioning doesn’t go in directions she approves of.
“In the supermarket, I remember, I used to try to hang back, behind him, or else I’d get suddenly quite absorbed by a display; anything to drift out of a culpable proximity to his witness vaunting.”
What Riley manages to tap into is that sense of people who are incapable of communicating properly because they never listen. They’ve siloed themselves off in some world where they’ve got all the answers and they know all of the questions that are worth asking too. Someone like that is impossible to deal with, and when a family is built on that foundation it’s broken from the start. Bridge’s mother and father are both victims of their own self-absorption, completely at odds with the world at all times. And yet Bridget doesn’t seem to realise she suffers from the exact same problem, at least where family is concerned. They all speak in platitudes and bland phrases, mockings and placations. And yet there’s nothing one-dimensional about Riley’s writing; My Phantoms is built on the things not said, the inability to voice certain things, the complete lack of trust or bond between an entire family, the tragedy of terminal miscommunication.
“And she didn’t even mean provoking, did she? She meant an omission, not an action. She meant: you mustn’t fail to anticipate something he could possibly decide to be affronted by. Which rather left one with nowhere to go. Michelle and I had never been cheeky or disruptive. We’d been mild and quiet from the start when he was around, and it made no difference. Anything could set him off, or not set him off. All depending on how he wanted to feel; on what kind of satisfaction he wanted to extract. Not provoking him could provoke him. It often did provoke him.”
An acute observer of human behaviour, Riley’s penetrating insights drive My Phantoms, making for a compelling, uncomfortable and very human tale, as comic as it is tragic. Whilst it doesn’t compel throughout, it’s an intriguing little volume and an interesting taste of an author I’d like to return to.
7.5/10
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