Like many of the narrators in her books, the British writer Gwendoline Riley is a vegan. She was raised by a working-class single mother and grew up mainly in the northwest of England. She is obsessed with the musician Morrissey.
Her last two novels, “First Love” and “My Phantoms,” are quick sketches of abuse and misery in domestic settings. They are told with precision and an ear for dialogue. Because of that, it is tempting to try to piece together details of Ms. Riley’s life from her writing.
“I bet,” Ms. Riley said. “I’ll just say: Resist.”
It was a spring afternoon, and Ms. Riley, a slender 47-year-old woman with her hair pulled into a knot at the nape of her neck, was walking briskly along Cheyne Walk by the River Thames. We had agreed to meet at the bronze statue of Sir Thomas More, whom, Ms. Riley reminded me, King Henry VIII had taken “downriver and chopped his head off.”
She began her career in her native England as a bit of a wunderkind, publishing her first book at 22 and following it up with seven more. A couple had been published over a decade ago in the United States, but it wasn’t until 2022 — when New York Review Books Classics published “My Phantoms,” about a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and “First Love,” a taut story of a crumbling marriage — that she found a new, enthusiastic American audience, mostly composed of stylish, literary-minded women who may have imagined her as a shrewd but sympathetic friend with whom they could gab about their love lives over a dry martini (or two).
Yet the novels contain themes not totally befitting of cocktail conversation.
“The book is depressing as hell, but impossible to turn away from,” the blogger and novelist Emily Gould wrote of “My Phantoms” in The Cut in 2024.
In an email, the author Sheila Heti explained Ms. Riley’s appeal this way: “Her vision is very uncompromising, and her view of the world is very bleak, very un-American: not pleasing and hopeful and warmhearted — but she’s not fashionably ironic or jaded, either, and the books don’t seem contemporary, somehow.”
The language of Ms. Riley’s sharply observant, emotionally guarded female narrators “is not the language of right now,” Ms. Heti added, “and all of this is exciting. She tells the truth in her own way, and many writers don’t tell the truth, and if they do, they don’t tell it in their own way.”
With her new novel, “The Palm House,” Ms. Riley wanted to step outside the domestic sphere. The novel traces the internecine drama of a highbrow magazine of ideas whose new editor in chief wants it to be “a sort of London version of The New Yorker.” It’s told from the perspective of a writer named Laura, whose closest work friend is an older man, Edmund, the deputy editor who has resigned in opposition to the new regime.
Their tender encounters are interspersed with scenes from Laura’s youth, involving Laura’s distant relationship with her mother.
Ms. Riley was partly inspired, she told me, by Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1979 Booker Prize-winning novel “Offshore,” a drama in miniature set among a cluster of houseboats. “I wanted a little collection of people working somewhere,” she said, “doing something that’s a little bit under siege. Or Nazi bombardment. Or a bad editor.”
Ms. Riley was once married to the English poet Alan Jenkins, who was the deputy editor of The Times Literary Supplement until 2020. They divorced in 2023. Like Laura, she lives in Ravenscourt Park. She wakes up, has coffee and writes. “I can’t think of a way to make that other than it is,” she said. “Yeah, I do those things.”
Ms. Riley mumbles. Extracting personal details from her requires persistence. “I’m not telling you,” she said when asked if she had ever undergone psychoanalysis. Asked about the term “auto-fiction,” and if it applied to her deeply realistic writing, she said: “That phrase is kind of old-fashioned, now, is it?”
Much of “The Palm House” is set on the South Bank of the Thames, which we had now reached in our walk, and where the fictional magazine offices are based.
We approached the famous Globe Theater. Ms. Riley is part of a film club. Had she seen “Hamnet”? “I cannot imagine anything more ignominious than watching ‘Hamnet,’” Ms. Riley said.
“The Palm House” opens with Laura and Edmund eating salt and vinegar “crisps” at the Anchor, a pub near the Globe. From the street, Ms. Riley pointed to the room where she imagined her two main characters sitting. “Except I didn’t have that large television,” she said, referring to a screen mounted to the wall.
Writing for Ms. Riley is both straightforward and a little bit mysterious. “Animal instinct, honestly,” she said. “I found out the other day that beavers can’t stand the sound of running water. Beaverism. It’s what I am. I just do my thing and then do it again.” She tinkers until, she said, “something will sound right and then it will still sound right the next morning.”
She was always drawn toward books. “It’s what there was to do,” she said. In “Opposed Positions,” her 2012 book about a young female writer adrift, the narrator’s mother remembers her daughter triumphantly reading a book at age 2. As a child, Ms. Riley was always writing, or scribbling in the margins. “I’ll still find old books that I had things to say about 30, 40 years ago,” she said. She loved the Brontës, Thomas Hardy — “the obvious ones.”
Twice, she stopped herself mid-thought when talking about herself and asked me not to include what she had just said. “I just lie,” she said. “It’s amazing how easy it is to just lie and come out with something that’s facile.”
We were now near Southwark Bridge, and we were discussing what I found to be the most disturbing scene of the new novel, placed there by Ms. Riley with a disarming sangfroid. It involved a flashback, showing her narrator, Laura, visiting the home of an older — much older — famous stand-up comedian who invites her to London. He does a line of cocaine, takes her to his bedroom. Ms. Riley writes: “Then I was to get undressed. In my confusion, I managed to leave my tights and shoes on, which he found irritating. I must have looked ridiculous.”
As we strode through the crowds of tourists and passers-by, I asked her about it.
“I think I was showing how — similar to this editor arriving out of nowhere and just spoiling everything — no one speaks to her,” Ms. Riley said. “Her mother talks past her or announces things, no one speaks to her. She’s got no one, no affection. She sees someone on the television who she thinks would understand them, right? So it’s terrific bad luck that he’s a very wicked person.”
Ms. Riley paused. “It’s an old-fashioned phrase, but I wanted to show that she’s in a ‘man’s world’ all the way through the book. These kinds of things happen to most women at some point, if not as teenagers, then as adults. Or to someone they know.”
At the end of our walk, we reached a cheerful vegan restaurant for dinner. Ms. Riley fidgeted as I asked more questions. Book titles? A shocked expression crosses her face. Of course she comes up with them herself. Does she write to music? “No. Total silence. Total silence. Except for the eight lanes of traffic outside my flat.” She became flustered after more questions: “I don’t know what to say. Sounds good. Sounds good. I don’t know what to say.”
I reached to switch off the recorder on my phone.
Her face visibly relaxed. “Please turn it off,” she said. “Don’t do me dirty.”
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