Instead of English, she studied art, first in Newcastle then in London. No good at drawing – or so she felt – and “too shy” (unlike the narrator of Boy Parts) to ask people to pose for photos, she found that what she most enjoyed was writing a dissertation on how Michel Foucault’s ideas of surveillance play out in the online era. By day, she sold posh undies at Agent Provocateur, having previously worked in bars. Returning home on graduation meant pulling pints again (“there’s not a lot of luxury retail where I’m from”), but this time she wasn’t able to blag a drink on shift – a perk she’d enjoyed in London – and the bouncers were useless: “I’d be dead sober, there’d be a man sexually harassing me and my manager would be like, ‘Well, he’s a paying customer.’” The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our

Eliza Clark: I suppose I was just generally interested in it. Originally, I wanted to write Penance as this fake true crime thing, because there was this case I was particularly interested in. Then as I started reading more high-quality true crime, as well as listening to more slightly dubious podcasts that were engaged with a lot of the muddier areas around true crime, my relationship with the genre shifted a lot. I wanted to do something more critical. BP: One thing I really loved about Penance was how much of early 2010s Tumblr you put in there. All the creepypasta stuff and references to Slenderman. I feel that was such a huge part of the adolescence of our generation. Andrew Hankinson An untrue true crime story: Penance, by Eliza Clark, reviewed A teasing piece of crime fiction weaves together real and invented murders in a satire on the true crime genre and its devoteesFor fans of meandering plot, un-engaging and let’s face it, cringeworthy abbreviations (mainly online jargon like ((another word CONSTANTLY used here -I know I sound like a GCSE English teacher, but COME ON)) “fml” “tbh” “irl” “w/e”) as a form of “dialogue” and references to social media trends (which reading in 2023, some have already dated), this book was a HOT MESS -and not the good kind. BP: Oh my god, I was laughing so much at that because, I don’t know, the idea of donkey strangling is just so funny. Please keep in mind, that this book is entirely fictional, however, I found myself researching things that are completely made up because the narrative just felt so real. The window into true crime podcasts and tumblr felt really authentic and broke up the prose nicely, really enjoyed those sections.

Her debut, Boy Parts, was not even my favourite book of 2020, but one of my all-time favourite books.EC: For me, the most considered and interesting sort of true crime reporting has been in longform books that spend a lot of time with the victim and the broader sociopolitical context of the murder, which is something that a book gives you space to do, rather than just an hour of documentary, where you’ve got to get people to go on to the next episode, or an hour-long podcast where you really need to get your mattress advert in. The three years Penance took to write were, she says, akin to pulling teeth, unlike the pleasure she got from Boy Parts, a mischievous satire narrated by a predatory photographer whose images of her male victims are hailed at a hip London gallery as edgy roleplay. “People who’ve read it maybe think I’ll be more of a wind-up merchant when they meet me, but I’ve got more of a primary school teacher energy than an enfant terrible vibe,” Clark says.

at this point i've read several things that deal with or depict parts of internet culture that i was in and most of the time i find it really cringe. things like chat logs, tags, memes, are hard to take seriously out of context and you DID have to be there or it doesn't really work lmao. clark has made it work extraordinarily well? because she was obviously In It, because it's hard to fabricate the PRECISE phrasing and punctuation of internet language as well as she does, and because she's just a mature writer. it takes a level of maturity to depict the immaturity of young people without making it feel overly nostalgic or voyeuristic. insanely specific and recognizable and terrible. cannot stress enough. at several points. nauseating Written when she was 24, in eight months of weekends off from a day job at Newcastle’s Apple store, Boy Parts has so far sold 60,000 copies, she says: strong numbers for any literary debut, especially one from a tiny independent house such as north London’s Influx Press, which said yes to Clark’s cold pitch after she was snubbed by 12 agents. The book went more or less unreviewed – coming out in the plague summer of 2020 didn’t help – yet steadily amassed word-of-mouth buzz. About a year and a half after publication, Clark began to notice an extra digit on her royalty cheques. “It was TikTok. I don’t use it, so I had no idea. One of my friends said, it’s everywhere, there are videos about it that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views.”The setting of Penance (a Northern seaside town in decline), the crux of the plot (what is the truth about a notorious murder that took place seven years ago?), and the format (a mixed-media approach incorporating lots of interviews) all make it feel like a long-lost cousin of the Six Stories series, though here the medium is a true-crime book written by a shifty journalist – think Joseph Knox’s True Crime Story – rather than a podcast. The crime at its centre is the gruesome death of a teenager after she was set on fire by three classmates. Like an ever-growing number of modern novels about murder, it’s concerned with the mechanics of true crime and how ‘true’ it ever really is, though I don’t think Clark’s concern lies as much with the ‘ethics of true crime’ as it does with the messiness of ‘the truth’ and how we come to decide what we believe. What is truth, really, when there is no single tidy, complete version of a story? Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. speaking of maturity this book gets into so many things at once that I'm really not sure how she keeps any of it straight. it's about the ethics of true crime, the overall meanness and greed with which it's consumed, how much of it is not really about the truth at all. it's about small towns in decline. it feels trite to say it's About Girlhood but it is, every time she zooms in closer on the lives of these kids and the specific ways and times that they were all violent and all vulnerable, no excuse given or needed, it's just like that. layered over all of that we're thinking about our narrator the whole time and how he's even able to recount events in this much detail. how indeed. If people read Penance and really enjoy discussion of the true crime phenomenon or industry, what would you recommend them to read or watch if they want to understand more?