Our main girl, Irina, is this manipulative psychopath of a woman who takes erotic and explicit photographs (fetish art) of young men for a living. She captures dialogue and regional accents as if she bottled it up from the air and pinned it to the page where, still fresh and alive, it squirms in discomfort as much as the reader.

I mean, compared to We Play Ourselves, Self-Portrait with Boy, and Generation Loss (all of whom happen to focus on queer young women who are not portrayed as exclusively interested in men and in replicating tired dom/sub dynamics) Boy Parts just doesn’t go much into depth when it comes to Irina and her changing relationship to her photography. Explores the darkest corners of artistic practice, sexuality and violence with bold wit and fearlessness. firstly, i saw that it's been compared to american psycho a lot and i do get it - particularly in the second half when the narrative gets increasingly more violent and dissociative - but honestly i don't think that's the most pertinent comparison when ottessa moshfegh's my year of rest and relaxation is like, right there with its Same Hat tone/style/characterisation and equally horrible-but-oh-god-mood protagonist. Celebrate Northern literary talent, pick up this book, and let the kaleidoscopic vortex sweep you away. If there was one critique I'd have on it, though, I'd just say that I wasn't a huge fan of the writing.The main character is distinctly unappealing, which can sometimes work, but not here, as there is no sense of why she became so morally vacuous in the first place.

She poses them in photographs in ways that subvert the male gaze-heavy fetish photographs that show women in peril or pain. For Joyce, Irina is “somebody doing absolutely everything they can to be taken seriously”; her frustrations in this respect are relatable, even as her behaviour becomes increasingly unhinged. She recently wrote on Twitter: “a good thing about me is that you can enjoy my book without finding out that i went to oxbridge and my parents are both famous journalists like 6 months later and feeling somewhat betrayed. As mentioned earlier, the recent years have been a litany of men in positions of power in the art world being exposed for using this power to assault and silence women, though we also know this has occurred throughout time with big names such as Picasso or Edward Hopper abusing their muses, and Andy Warhol has often been criticized for exploiting those around him. Effortlessly swaying from darkly disturbing to riotously funny, Eliza Clark’s clever and fearless novel about a photographer hunting for average-looking men for explicit shots is a perceptive window into sexual taboos and gender roles in the twenty-first century.and to ‘merely’ think the other two as to say them out loud in front of someone who is not white, and who she had identified as ‘sensitive’, and risk that he would see her for who she truly was.

Now it’s been turned into a stage play, adapted by Gillian Greer and starring Aimée Kelly as the wildly unreliable narrator. The dedication in Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts sets the tone for the tale that follows: “For my mother and father.Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle.

However, says Greer, Clark also shows how easily her work gets swallowed by “the machine of capitalism and the patriarchy of the art world”.And a few months ago I was enthralled and disturbed by Titane directed by Julia Ducournau (who actually gets a mention in boy parts).