CE Riley’s forceful debut novel begins with a wife filing for divorce, afraid for her physical safety. Her voice, mediated by her lawyers, then all but disappears, except for a few short extracts from her personal diaries and emails. It falls to her partner, J, to tell the story of the couple’s relationship and breakup. J does so in intense, repetitive prose that lurches between declarations of love, ferocious invective and counter-accusations. “I am not emotionally abusive and controlling,” J states. “I see clearly now that you have been.”
The text refers to J as “they”, and J’s lived relationship with gender is strikingly withdrawn from the narrative. J’s wife, by contrast, is described early on as looking like “an Egyptian princess”. She is both gendered and defined almost exclusively in relation to others, as “wife”, “sis” (by her sister), or “you” (by J and lawyers). Implicitly, Is This Love? asks its readers to reflect on the role gender plays in how we judge the two parties in a bitter and unwieldy dispute.
