The madness of knowing that, but still sacrificing one’s agency. That tortuous tract of time when one’s internal weather is mainly dictated by the narcissistic, self-seeking actions of another person. But the story would have been the same, or broadly similar.

The sentences would have unfolded differently as a result, more formally structured and punctuated in keeping with the times. If I had been writing about this subject at the time when similar stuff was happening to me, the resulting text’s internal furniture would have been different: street maps instead of Google maps, telephone boxes instead of iPhones, newspaper articles instead of Insta. Because in one way or another, you will have been there. This is both alienating and strangely intimate, as if we too are engaged in spying on these people, as if we too are complicit with what is going on. Characters are ascribed a function within the text: ‘the man I want to be with,’ ‘the woman I am obsessed with’, ‘his wife’, ‘my boyfriend’.

If angry and uncomfortably honest makes you unlikable, I guess that’s just more of the shit we’re having to wade through.Īs in Anna Burns’s Booker-winning novel Milkman, with which Patel’s debut shares more than a strand of literary DNA, no one is named.

I have problems getting to grips with this designation. Readers and critics alike have described the unnamed narrator of Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan as an ‘unlikable character’, one of those Moshfeghian millennial bitches we love to hate.

Clay by david almond summary