I picked this up becuase I loved Gwendoline Riley‘s My Phantoms, and because my hit rate with NYRB titles is so high that it feels fairly low risk. While this didn’t quite cause the introspection and assessment of my own relationships that My Phantoms did, it was still a stressful and satisfying read.

The book is narrated by Neve, as she dissects her terrifying relationship with her husband Edwyn. He’s frankly a monster, and every moment she spends with him is ugly. He’s abusive, needy, manipulative and a simply terrible human. At the beginning of the novel we get a glimpse of their relationship:

When we cuddle in bed at night, he says, ‘I love you so much!’ or ‘You’re such a lovely little person!’ There are pet names, too. I’m ‘little smelly puss’ before a bath, and ‘little cleany puss’ in my towel on the landing after one; in my dungarees I’m ‘you little Herbert!’ and when I first wake up and breathe on him I’m his ‘little compost heap’ or ‘little cabbage’. Edwyn kisses me repeatingly, and with great emphasis, in the morning.

There have been other names, of course.

‘Just so you know,’ he told me last year, ‘I have no plans to spend my life with a shrew. Just so you know that. A fishwife shrew with a face like a fucking arsehole that’s had…green acid shoved up it.

Just yikes. The story zooms out and Neve takes us through much of her childhood and other relationships in her life: her abusive father, her flighty and frustrating mother, her strained frienships and more. There’s an intermittent, long-distance pseudo relationship with an American musician that’s particularly teeth-grinding.

At the centre of it all is Neve’s frustrating inaction. She’s incapable of saying the thing that needs to be said, or removing herself from an unhealthy situation.

This, I think, is Riley wondering why we hurt people we love, or why we allow people we love to continue to hurt us.

Riley is so good at writing the claustrophobia and tension of the abusive relationship. It’s sometimes hard to read. Neve’s unwillingness to stand up to Edwyn is unbearably (deliberately) frustrating. There are so many moments in this book where true and honest things go unsaid for very relatable reasons. Infuriating, but mostly because it’s true.

What surprised me about this book is how Neve’s relationship with her mother (and father, to a lesser extent) was echoed by the protagonist in My Phantoms. It’s a few days after finishing First Love that I’m writing this, and I’m already getting the two stories confused. That’s not a bad thing, at all. Revisiting familiar ground can be illuminating and fruitful (ie. Consent), but it made me wonder about the author’s relationship with her own mother.

At any rate: First Love ss a rewarding and effective read, but if you’re new to Riley, start with My Phantoms.

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