These opening chapters establish Irina’s identity as a performance of cultivated taste, rooting her misanthropic worldview in the theme of Class Anxiety Shaping One’s Aspirations. Her internal monologue reveals a sharp awareness of socioeconomic signifiers, which she uses to assert superiority and distance herself from her working-class Newcastle origins. This is immediately evident in her contempt for her mother, whose preferences she dismisses as “common” (20), and her hostile labeling of an affluent southerner at the bar as a “Home Counties transplant. A coloniser” (3). This class-based resentment, informed by the UK’s North-South divide, fuels her interactions. When her mother criticizes her during lunch, Irina’s agitation leads to self-harm, which she does in order to maintain the performance of a calm façade. This act reveals a psychological pattern where internal distress, often triggered by challenges to her curated identity, is managed through physical pain. Conversely, her tastes in fetish art, challenging films, and “beta” males are weapons deployed to maintain a fragile sense of dominance in a class system she simultaneously resents and aspires to master.

The narrative immediately connects Irina’s artistic practice to Gendered Power Imbalances in Objectification and Abuse. Her photography is a process of consumption, a method of possessing her subjects by reducing them to aesthetic objects. This predatory impulse is articulated when she scouts Eddie at Tesco, fantasizing about him as “a new flower no one else has noticed” that she can preserve and keep “all mine” (34). The archival review in Chapter 2 reinforces this dynamic by tracing her artistic origins to the cruel “calling card” project, where she used photography to mock her peers under the guise of transgressive art. This pattern recurs in the present day. The opening scene with Daniel’s mother shows how instinctively Irina tries to absolve herself of any accountability, putting blame on Daniel for deceiving her when she stood to gain from his exploitation by potentially benefitting from the sale of his photographs to Mr. B. Later on, at Will’s party, Irina maliciously displays private, sexualized photos of him to his friend Henson, weaponizing the images to assert her power. The camera functions as an instrument of humiliation and control. By framing her art as a practice of aggressive consumption, the novel aligns with a contemporary movement in transgressive fiction that sees women co-opting the traditionally male predatory gaze to examine power imbalances in abuse.

The structural inclusion of an interlude from Flo’s blog introduces a narrative counterpoint, immediately destabilizing Irina’s authority as a narrator. While Irina’s first-person perspective offers a performance of confidence and control, Flo’s blog post provides an external, skeptical perspective. Flo’s armchair diagnosis that Irina has Borderline Personality Disorder, coupled with the responses from her blog readers and from Michael, who distrust Irina, gives the reader a critical lens through which to view the subsequent events. This structural choice is immediately significant, as Irina’s account of being assaulted by Will follows her ketamine-induced dissociative episode. The reader is primed to question the veracity of Irina’s memories, creating a central tension between her subjective experience of trauma and the objective uncertainty of the events. This narrative fracture ensures that her stories and claims are understood as sites of constant ambiguity.

Irina’s review of her archive connects her artistic development to a history of reframing personal trauma into a performance of power. When recalling her exploitative relationship with her teacher, Lesley, Irina insists she enjoyed the encounters and frames the public discovery as the actual source of trauma. She rejects the identity of a victim, stating she disliked being seen as a “raped child” (43), and instead reclaims the experience as one of consensual exploration. This psychological move, which transforms the survival of abuse into an assertion of agency, is a recurring pattern that directly informs her art. When a tutor suggests she has “penis envy” (44), Irina responds with the aggressive XXXTreme Penis Envy project, turning a psychological slight into a defiant artistic statement. The archive reveals that her entire creative identity is built on this mechanism: metabolizing experiences of vulnerability or criticism into displays of transgressive control.