CANR
WORK TITLE: Stay With Me
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/29/1988
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Nigerian
LAST VOLUME:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/books/review-ayobami-adebayo-stay-with-me.html?mcubz=0 * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/09/stay-with-me-by-ayobami-adebayo-review
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 29, 1988, in Lagos, Nigeria.
EDUCATION:Obafemi Awolowo University, B.A., 2008, M.A., 2013; University of East Anglia, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, short-story writer, and novelist. Saraba Magazine, editor, 2009—.
AWARDS:Writer in residence at schools and institutes, including Ledig House Omi, Hedgebrook, Sinthian Cultural Institute, Ox-Bow School of Art, Siena Art Institute, and Ebedi Hills; international bursary for creative writing, University of East Anglia.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Speaking for the Generations: An Anthology of Contemporary African Short Stories, edited by Dike Okoro, Africa World Press, 2010; and Gambit: Newer African Writing, edited by Emmanuel Iduma and Shaun Randol, The Mantel (New York, NY), 2014. Contributor to magazines, including Ilanot Review, Off the Coast: Maine’s International Journal of Poetry, East Jasmine Review, Farafina Magazine, Saraba Magazine, Kalahari Review, Elle UK, and Lawino Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Ayobami Adebayo is a Nigerian writer, novelist, short-story writer, and editor. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1988, and still makes her home in that country. Since 2009, she has been the editor of the magazine Saraba. Her own work has appeared in publications in the United States and in Nigeria and other African countries. She has been writer in residence at arts centers and institutes such as Ledig House Omi in New York, Sinthian Cultural Institute in Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuk, Michigan, and the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy. Adebayo earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in literature and English from Obafemi Awolowo University and an M.A. in creative writing (prose fiction) from the University of East Anglia.
In her first novel, Stay With Me, Adebayo presents readers with a “devastating debut about how the pressures of motherhood, masculinity and marriage slowly undo a relationship,” commented Natasha Onwuemezi in Bookseller. The story is set in Nigeria during the 1980s and 1990s, when the country was torn by civil war and a military coup. Akin and Yejide are a young married couple who seem comfortable going against many of Nigeria’s social customs, such as refusing to participate in a polygamous marriage. Though they are happy together, they can’t escape one of the largest of the country’s social norms for males: to produce a son. After four years, Yejide has yet to become pregnant, which leads them to believe that she is infertile. In response, Akin’s family conspires to bring in a second wife, which devastates Yejide. She slips into anger, guilt, and despair, then suffers a year-long psychosomatic pregnancy. Eventually, Yejide becomes pregnant—seduced by Akin’s brother Dotun, suggesting that the infertility problem may not have been hers but Akin’s. When her children are born, however, they are afflicted with the deadly disease Sickle Cell Anemia. Akin welcomes the child as his own, but events take another tragic turn with the death of his second wife. In this emotionally wrenching and tumultuous context, Adebayo explores the meaning of marriage, motherhood, and the human cost of intense relationships.
Adebayo, in a Vogue interview with Noor Brara, explained part of the idea Stay with Me. “I have always been very interested in the idea of loneliness and the presumption that romantic relationships are supposed to rid you of that,” she told Brara. Adebayo continued, stating, “I think a large part of being human centers on the state of being alone, and we try to mitigate that in so many ways. While I think sometimes we are successful, it’s not possible to escape loneliness one hundred percent of the time, and I wanted to look at how it was possible to have an intensely intimate relationship like Yejide and Akin’s, and still feel very much alone for their own reasons.”
Onwuemezi called Stay with Me a “rich, textured work which explores the fragility of married love against the background of a country rife with instability.” Adebayo’s “debut marks the emergence of a fine young writer,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews writer. A Publishers Weekly contributor had a similar reaction, stating, “Adebayo shows great promise in her debut novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Laura Chanoux, review of Stay with Me, p. 24.
Bookseller, November 25, 2016, Natasha Onwuemezi, “Ayobami Adebayo: A Scintillating Debut Novel, Inspired in Part by the Tutelage of Compatriot Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Looks at the Evolution of Nigeria across Three Decades,” review of Stay with Me, p. 22.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Stay with Me.
Library Journal, June 15, 2017, review of Stay with Me, p. 2a.
New African, Apr, 2017, review of Stay with Me, p. 65.
New York Times, July 14, 2017, Michiko Kakutani, “Portrait of a Nigerian Marriage in a Heartbreaking Debut Novel,” review of Stay with Me.
Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2017, review of Stay with Me, p. 38.
Vogue, August 9, 2017, Noor Brara, “Love Story: Stay with Me, the Debut Novel from Ayobami Adebayo, Explores New Horizons of Feminism and Relationships,” review of Stay with Me.
ONLINE
Ayobami Adebayo Website, http://www.ayobamiadebayo.com (September 18, 2017).
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com (July 24, 2017), review of Stay with Me.*
Ayobami Adebayo (born 29 January 1988) is a Nigerian writer.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Early life and education
2 Writing career
3 Bibliography
3.1 Books
3.2 Other writing
4 References
5 External links
Early life and education[edit]
Ayobami Adebayo was born in Lagos, Nigeria, shortly after, her family moved to Ilesa and then to Ile-Ife, where she spent most of her childhood in the University Staff Quarters of Obafemi Awolowo University.[2][3] She studied at Obafemi Awolowo University, earning BA and MA degrees in Literature in English, and in 2014 she went to study Creative Writing (MA Prose fiction) at the University of East Anglia, where she was awarded an International Bursary.[4][5] She has also studied with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Margaret Atwood.[6]
Writing career[edit]
In 2015, she was listed by the Financial Times as one of the bright stars of Nigerian literature.[7] Her debut novel, Stay With Me, was published in 2017 by Canongate Books to critical acclaim,[8][9][10] and was shortlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction;[4][11][12] prior to publication the work had been shortlisted in 2013 by the Kwani? Manuscript Project[13][14][15] – a prize for unpublished fiction, of which the Series Editor is Ellah Allfrey.[16]
Adebayo has been a writer in residence at Ledig House Omi, Hedgebrook, Sinthian Cultural Institute, Ox-Bow School of Art, Siena Art Institute, and Ebedi Hills.[17][18][19] She was shortlisted for the Miles Morland Scholarship in 2014 and 2015.[15][20][21][22]
Bibliography[edit]
Books[edit]
Stay With Me. Canongate Books, 2017 (ISBN 978-1782119463).[23]
Other writing[edit]
One of Adebayo's stories was highly commended in the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.[6] Her poems and stories have been published in several magazines and anthologies, including East Jasmine Review, Farafina Magazine, Saraba Magazine, Kalahari Review, Lawino Magazine, Speaking for the Generations: An Anthology of New African Writing, Off the Coast: Maine’s International Journal of Poetry, Ilanot Review and Gambit: Newer African Writing.[24] She has also written non-fiction pieces for Elle UK and the BBC.[25][26]
Love Story: “Stay With Me,” the Debut Novel From Ayobami Adebayo, Explores New Horizons of Feminism and Relationships
AUGUST 9, 2017 1:00 PM
by NOOR BRARA
Ayobami Adebayo photographed for Vogue in New York in June 2017.
The author Ayobami Adebayo photographed in New York in June 2017.
Photographed by Aaron Berger
At 3:00 p.m. on May 31, Ayobami Adebayo landed in Atlanta to begin the first leg of her U.S. book tour for Stay With Me, her highly anticipated debut novel, to be published by Knopf on August 22. Just off a 12-hour plane ride from Nigeria, she was surprised when the immigration officer at the gate greeted her pleasantly with, “E kaaro!” or “Good morning!” in her native Yoruba. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, everyone here is so friendly! How did she know how to say that?’” Adebayo notes, revealing a small smile that soon breaks into a full grin. “And then I turned on my phone.” Earlier that day, President Trump had released his “covfefe” tweet. “That’s all people were texting me about,” she says. The juxtaposition of the immigration officer’s greeting and this very unwelcoming president’s Twitter blunder, in his own “English,” was perfection. “I guess anything really can happen in America.”
While Adebayo didn’t write her book in response to current events—in fact, it was first published in 2013, by a small Nigerian press—it holds special significance today. Set against the backdrop of Nigeria in the 1980s and ’90s, when the country acquired and quickly lost the promise of democratic leadership to a military coup and a civil war, we meet Akin and Yejide, a couple whose relationship is deeply loving and seemingly one of equals. As with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s characters in the seminal 2013 novel Americanah, the handsome, more gentle young man falls instantly for the independent, strong-hearted young woman, with their vows reflecting their modern and nontraditional choice to have a monogamous marriage (while polygamy isn’t legally recognized by Nigerian law, it is widely culturally accepted).
The initial similarities depart there, however, as after a few unsuccessful years of trying for a baby, Yejide is pronounced infertile by Akin’s family, who dutifully intervene by procuring him a second wife—a younger woman who is described as beautiful and “pale yellow, like the inside of an unripe mango.” Overcome by grief when Akin is unable to tell his family no, Yejide falls into despair, vowing to do whatever it takes to prove them wrong and become pregnant. What proceeds is a decades-long, emotionally ricocheting account of what it means to lose not only multiple children to a fatal disease, but also one’s self-worth and sanity, and how those experiences differ for women and men in a deeply traditional community.
Though the book has already received considerable attention for its nuanced feminist perspective, Adebayo was concerned, first and foremost, with writing something that rang true. “I’d lost a couple of friends to sickle cell anemia when I was a child and remember running into the mother of one of them at a ceremony during my last year of university,” she recalls. “I think I must have been absorbed by my phone, but all of a sudden I looked up and saw her staring at me with so much pain. One of the tragedies about this disease is that it’s so touch and go, and every time you think you’ve gotten through it, the worst can happen. I became sort of obsessed by how awful that is. I had written an earlier version about a couple breaking up, but it only dawned on me later to add the layer of what happens when you have a sick child in the equation, and the toll that takes on you, as a mother and in a marriage.”
Having grown up between Lagos and Ikeja, a Nigerian university town, Adebayo remembers little about her upbringing that wasn’t tied, in some way, to her love of reading. “TV didn’t start until 4 p.m. in cities outside of Lagos when I was growing up,” she shares. “For a long time, until I was about 16 or so, I thought everyone read the way we did. When someone got a new novel in my class, there was a list of people who wanted to take it home and read it. Instead of doing as they did, I would borrow the book during the day and finish before school ended. I don’t think I really learned anything other than what I was reading in books. That’s ironic, too, because I got an award for perfect attendance every year.”
Ayobami Adebayo photographed for Vogue in New York in June 2017.
Ayobami Adebayo photographed in New York in June 2017.
Photographed by Aaron Berger
Such dedication to the written word shows in Adebayo’s bold narrative sensibility, from the way she informs the dimensionality of her characters to her mastery of plot—while the book, at times, moves full speed ahead, taking unexpected turns, no event seems convoluted or set up for the sole purpose of shock value. Much like that of her literary idols—Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and Adichie, whose workshop Adebayo attended while in college—the compelling nature of her writing is based in her apparent understanding of the human capacity to be both heroic and deeply flawed. Within this context, she explores love and marriage and the belief that both can cure one’s inner turmoil. “I have always been very interested in the idea of loneliness and the presumption that romantic relationships are supposed to rid you of that,” she says. “I think a large part of being human centers on the state of being alone, and we try to mitigate that in so many ways. While I think sometimes we are successful, it’s not possible to escape loneliness 100 percent of the time, and I wanted to look at how it was possible to have an intensely intimate relationship like Yejide and Akin’s, and still feel very much alone for their own reasons.”
For Adebayo, that answer was found within the premise of the quandary. “I think the flip side of the morbid nature of that fact is that it’s okay to feel alone—simply that. If there’s one thing readers might take away from this story is that it’s okay to make peace with the state of being on your own, and to use that as a point of departure in relationships,” she says. “I think for women in particular, it’s kind of like you’re expected to get married, have a child, and then you get to be a person. But you don’t need someone else—be it a spouse or child—to complete or validate your existence. Being human is enough, and should be enough, and I hope that we all come to a point where we can accept that.”
It is with this sense of sincerity that Stay With Me feels like a genre unto itself—a story that illustrates the necessity of hope and equality, but one that doesn’t water down the challenges of realizing them or seek to put either of its subjects—Yejide or Akin—on a pedestal. Adebayo’s characters are all, rather, live wires, and the rooms they inhabit are abuzz with the fullness of their personalities: whether in the salon where Yejide works, surrounded by the women of her community, many of them allied with their husbands’ traditions, or in the hallways of the hospitals where her aspirations and hopes for the futures of her children are laid to rest. Yet between the lines of these vivid, often painful scenes courses Adebayo’s unrelenting truth serum, which not only highlights the shortcomings of individuals and the societies they represent, but underscores the tenacity of human resilience. After all is said and done, and after the layers of varnish we use to protect ourselves have been stripped away, what is left of hope? Can we look beyond the messiness of our own shortcomings to start again, and believe in something bigger? As Akin asks, “What is left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?”
For Yejide, at least, Adebayo’s answer feels abundant, as the final scenes provide her with a sense of new beginnings that shine, as Yejide puts it, like “a benediction, a promise of wonders to come.” Of the fate of her two characters, Adebayo smiles when asked how the story really ends between them, past the book’s cliffhanger close. “It’s intentionally left open-ended. I don’t want to be disloyal to them by saying this, but in certain ways I do think their love is quite possible,” she admits. “I’ve come to feel that maybe your weaknesses have to complement those of a partner, the same way your strengths do. When I see couples out and about, I sometimes imagine they’re Akin and Yejide going about their day. For me, their stories live on, and regardless of what happens between them, I think I’ll always see them together everywhere I go.”
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, and one was highly commended in the 2009 Commonwealth short story competition. She holds BA and MA degrees in Literature in English from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife and has worked as an editor for Saraba magazine since 2009. She also has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she was awarded an international bursary for creative writing. Ayobami has received fellowships and residencies from Ledig House, Sinthian Cultural Centre, Hedgebrook, Ox-bow School of Arts, Ebedi Hills and Siena Art Institute. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria.
Stay with Me
Laura Chanoux
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Stay with Me.
By Ayobami Adebayo.
Aug. 2017. 288p. Knopf, $25.95 (9780451494603).
When Yejide and Akin fall in love, they decide not to have a polygamous relationship. This surprises their Nigerian families, especially when, four years into their marriage, Yeiide still hasn't become pregnant. Although everyone recognizes how hard Yejide is trying to conceive, the family secretly brings in a second wife. Yejide is furious, and desperate to save her marriage. Adebayo's debut novel expands beyond the second wife's arrival to explore the darkest moments of life and marriage. The story alternates between the late 1980s and a funeral in 2008, setting Akin and Yejide's marriage against a period of political instability in Nigeria. Telling the story from both Akin's and Yejide's perspectives, Adebayo describes parenthood and love with heartbreaking prose. She deftly reveals secrets and the decisions that set life-altering events in motion. The story's fast pace brings surprising twists to Akin, Yejide, and their families' lives while delving into their history, as a couple and as individuals. Readers of Stay with Me will eagerly await Adebayo's next book.--Laura Chanoux
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chanoux, Laura. "Stay with Me." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499862709&it=r&asid=afaee928598be90bec8af4ba7edfd58c. Accessed 4 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862709
Adebayo, Ayobami: STAY WITH ME
(June 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Adebayo, Ayobami STAY WITH ME Knopf (Adult Fiction) $25.95 8, 1 ISBN: 978-0-451-49460-3
A couple struggles with fertility--and fidelity--as Nigeria falls apart around them.Yejide is furious when her husband, Akin, brings Funmi, a second wife, home to their house in Ilesa. Pressured by his mother, and by the constraints of Nigerian masculinity, to conceive a son, Akin seeks a solution to their marriage's childlessness--even if it means hurting Yejide in the process. In alternating chapters, Yejide and Akin tell a desperate story of hope and deceit, grief and forgiveness. "I simply had to get pregnant, as soon as possible, and before Funmi did," explains Yejide. "It was the only way I could be sure I would stay in Akin's life." Yejide's path to motherhood is marked by operatic tragedy, with the requisite affair and multiple deaths. Although Adebayo wields misfortune to shed light on the pressures of marriage, melodrama, at times, crowds out sympathy for the human-sized grief of her characters. Still, in the moments when Yejide confronts the fear and uncertainty of raising children with sickle cell anemia, Adebayo's writing shines. Set against a backdrop of student protests, a presidential assassination, and a military coup, Adebayo's novel captures how the turmoil of Nigerian life in the 1980s and '90s seeps into the most personal of decisions--to fight for, and protect, one's family. Adebayo's debut marks the emergence of a fine young writer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Adebayo, Ayobami: STAY WITH ME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495427844&it=r&asid=25a3245137fdd01ed125954f563a14df. Accessed 4 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427844
Stay with Me: A novel
Ayobami Adebayo
142.11 (June 15, 2017): p2a.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
In the spirit of Chris Cleave's Little Bee and Emma Donoghue's Room, this unforgettable novel set in Nigeria gives voice to both husband and wife as they tell the story of their marriage--and the forces that threaten to tear it apart.
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978-0-451-19460-3 | $25.95/$34.95C | 40.000
Knopf | HC | August
* 978-0-451-49461-0 | * AD: 978-1-5247-8183-5
LITERARY FICTION
Social: @AyobamiAdebayo
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Adebayo, Ayobami. "Stay with Me: A novel." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 2a. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495668136&it=r&asid=c92319ba35e30aafec508d9c54567b25. Accessed 4 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495668136
Stay with Me
264.24 (June 12, 2017): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Stay with Me
Ayobami Adebayo. Knopf, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-451-49460-3
A debayo explores the toll the intense pressure to have children exacts on one Nigerian couple across two decades. Akin's large family disrupts his and Yejide's happy but childless marriage by forcing him into a polygamous marriage without his wife's knowledge. This betrayal and a last-ditch visit to a holy man convince Yejide that she is pregnant and she begins a year-long psychosomatic pregnancy. Just when she finally accepts that there will be no child, Akin's brother Dotun seduces and impregnates her. The child is eagerly welcomed as Akin's own, especially by his imposing mother. The happiness ends abruptly with the seemingly accidental death of Akin's second wife. As subsequent traumas multiply between the couple, Adebayo slowly reveals their unspoken shame by having both narrate chapters covering the same events. Yejide's strong ache to be a mother and her frustration with traditional Yoruba culture make her a complex character. Adebayo shows great promise in her debut novel. Her methodical exposure of her characters' secrets forces the reader into continual reevaluations and culminates in a tender, satisfying conclusion. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stay with Me." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495720642&it=r&asid=8a6549c05ccafab30a7545409acb0fd4. Accessed 4 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720642
Stay With Me
.571 (Apr. 2017): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 IC Publications Ltd.
http://www.africasia.com/icpubs
STAY WITH ME
BY: AYOBAMI ADEBAYO
14.99 [pounds sterling] CAN0N6ATE
ISBN: 978-1-78211-959-3
Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a child. It is all her husband wants, all her mother-in-law wants, and she has tried everything--arduous pilgrimages, medical consultations, dances with prophets, appeals to God. But when her in-laws insist upon a new wife, it is too much for Yejide to bear. It will lead to jealousy, betrayal and despair.
Stay with Me has been longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction.
Ayobami Adebayo's stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, and one was highly commended in the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.
She holds BA and MA degrees in Literature in English from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife. She also has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she was awarded an international bursary for creative writing. Ayobami has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Ledig House, Hedgebrook, Threads, Ebedi Hills and Ox-Bow. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria.
Set against the social and political turbulence of 1980s Nigeria, Stay With Me sings with the voices, colours, joys and fears of its surroundings. Adebayo weaves a devastating story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the wretchedness of grief and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood. It is a tale about our desperate attempts to save ourselves and those we love from heartbreak.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stay With Me." New African, Apr. 2017, p. 65. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492465361&it=r&asid=7311f24ea0ce2dcb5be2a229c7211119. Accessed 4 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492465361
Ayobami Adebayo: a scintillating debut novel, inspired in part by the tutelage of compatriot author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, looks at the evolution of Nigeria across three decades
Natasha Onwuemezi
.5736 (Nov. 25, 2016): p22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Bookseller Media Group (Bookseller Media Ltd.)
http://www.thebookseller.com
Nigerian author Ayobami Adebayo's first novel Stay with Me is a culmination of years of writing experience--including numerous workshops and two Masters degrees--and mentorships from behemoths of literature Margaret Atwood and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
In 2007, Adebayo was accepted onto a 10-day workshop with Adichie, which proved to be a formative experience for the young writer. "It was at that point, aged 19, that I was making a decision that [writing] was what I wanted to spend my life doing and [the workshop] was good to experience," she says.
More recently, Adebayo worked with Atwood while studying Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and recalls being "so impressed with her", especially with the fact that Atwood has "read absolutely everything". Adebayo says: "That might be one of the most important things I took away from that class. I've always loved to read, but it just showed me that people who work at that level are really voracious readers. I didn't know how that was possible."
Atwood worked with Adebayo on the first chapter of what became Stay with Me, a devastating debut about how the pressures of motherhood, masculinity and marriage slowly undo a relationship. The multiple threads that run through the novel--the intricacies of Yoruba culture, the turbulence of Nigerian politics and the painful realities of sickle cell disease--make for a rich, textured work which explores the fragility of married love against the background of a country rife with instability.
SPANNING DECADES
Oscillating between 1985 and 2008, the novel follows Yejide and Akin, a couple who meet while the former is at university--and quickly marry. They are slowly pulled apart by the pressure of childlessness and then, when they finally manage to conceive, by the secrets they keep from each other and the grief that amasses because of them.
The novel started out as a short story Adebayo was working on while at university in Nigeria in 2007. She says: "I had written this scene where a couple were breaking up, and they had a child who was in hospital. I had completed the story but I just wasn't satisfied. I felt that there was something about it that I didn't understand. There was something the characters were saying that I couldn't hear. So I remember going over it again and again, [and finally I had a] sort of eureka moment, when I sort of knew, 'Oh my god, this is what they're actually talking about.' Then I went back and finished the story"
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Adebayo's realisation was that the crux of the story would concern what Yejide and Akin were not saying to each other, and how all the secrets they keep from each other drive them further apart. "[The story] came from the fact that they were having this dialogue but they were not really speaking to each other," Adebayo says.
"That everything they were saying or wanted to say was left unsaid; to understand each other they would have to listen to what was not being said. I think the whole book came from that, the idea that two people spend hours talking and never quite say anything that matters because they're both afraid."
Discussing the relationship dynamics of the couple and the fears that drive them, Adebayo says: "The tragedy of Akin and Yejide's marriage lies in their inability--Akin's in particular--to accept their flaws. Yejide is afraid that Akin is going to leave her, [and] Akin is afraid that the pressures [of the relationship will force] Yejide to start asking him questions that he can't answer at his own pace. For him, there is a major disconnect between who he is expected to be, what he thinks he should be, and his lived reality. He never quite accepts the facts of his life and perhaps because of this he is never vulnerable enough with Yejide."
SPANNING DECADES
When Yejide eventually gives birth, her children are diagnosed with sickle cell disease, a serious blood disorder that affects around 20%-30% of the Nigerian population. Adebayo herself is very close to the disease, and describes being "both consciously and subconsciously preoccupied with the topic", adding:" At [the time I was writing the book], a couple of friends, both in their early twenties, who lived with the disease died as a result of its complications. I spent a lot of time thinking about them, about some of the conversations we'd had. I also knew by then that although I wasn't a sufferer, I did carry the sickle cell gene and if I chose to have children with another carrier, we could have children who had the disease.
"This was obviously something that would have a lot of impact on my decisions going forward. So I began to look into the disease and read everything I could about it. A lot of what I read didn't make it into the novel actually, but I found it remarkable that though this is something that affects millions of people--directly and indirectly--I didn't come across many non-scientific texts that explored the subject."
STRUCTURAL CHALLENGES
Figuring out the structure of the era-hopping novel was the "most challenging thing", Adebayo says, but the decision to set the novel in the 1980s was an easy one. "The '80s are a time I've always found interesting: I was born in 1988 and it was a time in which so many things were happening in Nigeria. There was so much change: I had always been interested in it but I didn't see it in fiction as much as I would've liked to. So I wanted to write about what it would have been like to live in this time that I believe really shaped the way Nigeria is today."
Nigeria of 1985 is marred by coups and political turbulence which subtly permeates the daily lives of the characters, but there are also times when the effects of this political instability are much more overt. There is a passage in the novel when Akin urgently needs to get their child to hospital but there's been an outbreak of gunfire outside the hotel. He has to hold the baby up in the air to convince the soldiers to let him leave. Adebayo says: "What I really wanted to look at were those points where there would be an intersection between the political and personal and how important that can be in the course of anybody's life. People who aren't even necessarily, or directly involved in politics ... everything that's happening at the centre impacts on the course of their own lives."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
METADATA
Publication 02.03.17
Formats HB (14.99 [pounds sterling]), TPB (12.99 [pounds sterling]), EB (11.99 [pounds sterling])
ISBN 9781782119463/9586/9593
Rights Italian, Swedish, US lights to Knopf
Editor Jo Dingley
Agent Clare Alexander
EXTRACT
As a child, it was expected that I would call my stepmothers Moomi, even my father encouraged me to, but I refused. I stuck to calling them Mama. My mother had become an obsession for me, a religion, and the very thought of referring to another woman as Mother seemed sacrilegious, a betrayal of the woman who had given up her life for me to live.
One year, the Anglican Church my family attended celebrated mothering Sunday with a special service. After the vicar delivered his sermon, he summoned everyone who was below eighteen to the front of the church because he wanted us to honour mothers with a song. I must have been twelve at the time but I didn't get up until an usher poked me in the back. We sang a song that everyone already knew, an expansion of a popular saying. I managed the first line, iya ni wura, iya ni wura iyebiye ti a ko le f'owo ra, before biting my tongue to choke back tears. The words, mother is gold, mother is treasured gold that cannot be bought with money, resonated with me more than any homily I'd ever heard. I knew by then that my mother could not be replaced with money, by a stepmother, or anyone else and I was sure I would never call any woman Moomi.
QUICK CV
1988
Born in Lagos
2004-2008
BA in English Literature from Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife-Ife, Nigeria
2007
Attended a writing workshop led by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2011-2013
MA in English Literature from Obafemi Awolowo; then a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia
2009-present
Fiction editor of Saraba Magazine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Onwuemezi, Natasha. "Ayobami Adebayo: a scintillating debut novel, inspired in part by the tutelage of compatriot author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, looks at the evolution of Nigeria across three decades." The Bookseller, 25 Nov. 2016, p. 22+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472005095&it=r&asid=4651837b330accc06424ccf8e1609048. Accessed 4 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472005095
Portrait of a Nigerian Marriage in a
Heartbreaking Debut Novel
Books of The Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI JULY 24, 2017
The two narrators of Ayobami Adebayo’s stunning debut novel — a Nigerian woman
named Yejide and her husband, Akin — remember the stories they heard when they
were children, and they hope to pass on these stories to their own sons and
daughters. They are folk tales featuring talking animals and magic potions, but while
they often come with an old-fashioned moral (“He who has children owns the
world”), Yejide devises her own versions, adding new bits and pieces as she goes
along, turning them into allegories that speak to her own life and that of her country.
Like those fables, Adebayo’s “Stay With Me” — a beautifully produced book with
a Matisse-inspired jacket that felicitously captures the spirit of the author’s writing
— has a remarkable emotional resonance and depth of field. It is, at once, a gothic
parable about pride and betrayal; a thoroughly contemporary — and deeply moving
— portrait of a marriage; and a novel, in the lineage of great works by Chinua Achebe
and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, that explores the pull in Nigeria between tradition
and modernity, old definitions of masculinity and femininity, and newer imperatives
of self-definition and identity.
Beginning in the 1980s, a period of political tumult in Nigeria, and moving on
public events — be they elections, protests or coups — take place while people are
getting on with their daily lives, eating or opening a window, fighting with a spouse
or taking care of a sick child; how dreams, ideals and romantic relationships can be
shaped by distant but momentous developments on the national stage.
Adebayo — who was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and who studied with Adichie and
Margaret Atwood — has two master’s degrees in creative writing, and “Stay With
Me” is deeply informed by a knowledge of contemporary and classic literature.
But while readers may pick up on this novel’s many allusions and borrowings (for
instance, its nods to Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” and Lauren Groff’s “Fates and
Furies,” in creating a stereoscopic portrait of a marriage), “Stay With Me” feels
entirely fresh, thanks to its author’s ability to map tangled familial relationships with
nuance and precision, and her intimate understanding of her characters’ yearnings,
fears and self-delusions.
“Stay With Me” pivots around a series of secrets Akin has kept from his wife —
and the terrible, unspooling consequences those secrets will have on their marriage,
and on the life of Akin’s importunate brother Dotun. The novel’s one flaw is that it’s
hard for the reader to believe that Yejide, however naïve she might be, would not
have immediately grasped the first of Akin’s lies, but Adebayo’s orchestration of the
emotional chain reaction set off by those deceptions is so assured that this stumbling
block is soon forgotten.
Akin tells us that he loved Yejide from the moment he met her, but four years of
childless marriage blunted his belief that “love could do anything”: “If the burden is
too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and
sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that
doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.”
When they married, both Yejide and Akin said no to polygamy, but as years pass
without a child, their relatives insist that Akin take a second wife, Funmi. Yejide is
told to accept Funmi as a “younger sister,” a “friend,” a “daughter.” Akin’s mother
cruelly says: “Women manufacture children and if you can’t you are just a man.
Nobody should call you a woman.” She goes on: “We are not asking you to stand up
from your place in his life, we are just saying you should shift so that someone else
can sit down.”
Yejide, whose own mother died in childbirth, becomes desperate to have a baby.
She gets hospital tests, and the names of doctors, pastors and herbalists. In one sad,
comic sequence, she treks up the “Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles” to visit a
healer named Prophet Josiah, who has her dance with a white goat she’s dragged to
the summit as his chanting followers swarm her. She soon believes she’s pregnant,
despite doctors’ insistence that there is no baby.
These events are recounted with a mix of sympathy, humor and suspense, but as
the novel progresses, it shifts into a more minor key, as Yejide does become
pregnant, only to face the prospect of sickle cell disease in her children. Instead of
bringing the couple closer together, this fear accelerates the fissures in their
marriage, as Yejide realizes that Akin has withheld painful truths from her from the
start — that she had refused to see “things standing in plain view.” It’s a realization
that forces her to question traditional attitudes toward women in Nigeria —
including the primacy of motherhood and deference toward their husbands — and to
try to sort out her own expectations from those she’s inherited from her family and
society.
Adebayo, who is 29, is an exceptional storyteller. She writes not just with
extraordinary grace but with genuine wisdom about love and loss and the possibility
of redemption. She has written a powerfully magnetic and heartbreaking book.
Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani
Stay With Me
By Ayobami Adebayo
260 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.
A version of this review appears in print on July 25, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Disquieting Secrets of a Happy Marriage.