In conversation

The most anticipated book of 2023 is finally here. Six years after her acclaimed debut Stay With Me, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ is back with a new novel about two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, and romantic obsession. We sat down with Ayọ̀bámi to discuss the story behind her latest novel, her journey so far, and where it all started.

Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.

(No spoilers, we promise.)

NA: I feel like a lot of us could say we’ve always been readers, but I’m interested in the moment where you started to think, “Well, actually, I can do this myself.” Do you have a writer origin story? Where would you say it all started?

AA: I mean, I started writing relatively consistently when I was about nine, and I can remember nine, because I was in my first year of secondary school. Instead of paying attention in class, I would just write poetry or stories. That was all I did, really. Throughout most of secondary school, I was either just reading another novel under my desk while they were teaching, or I was writing. What helped was that I still managed to do quite well in school, so I didn't get into too much trouble. But I think part of it was also that I was a very quiet child. There were always times where, after an argument, I would sit and think about what I should have said. There's this expression in Yoruba that refers to someone who isn’t quick-witted. When someone isn’t quick on their feet, the expression suggests that the person has to go home to collect the answer. It's usually used when someone insults you and you don’t have a quick comeback; that was usually my experience. The day after an argument I would always think I should have said this or I should have said that. I think I just found it easier to articulate my thoughts on paper than say them out loud. So that's probably the true origin story - I found myself writing a lot of the things I was thinking.

NA: I love the idea of articulating yourself better on paper; I think many people can relate to that. I also think there’s something quite revolutionary about the transition from writing for yourself in a notebook, to actively pursuing a career in writing - particularly within the context of being Nigerian. I read that your mother was a doctor, and your sister is also a doctor - in your early 20s you had a job in an engineering institute - these all sound like very “Nigerian” careers to me, but your obsession with writing was still there. Did you feel like you needed permission to fully commit to it, and if so, who gave you that permission?

AA: It was my mum, every step of the way. So in Nigeria, when you get to the third year of secondary school, you write this national exam, and they use the results to sort you into classes. You were put into one of three divisions: science class, social sciences, or arts and humanities. I think it's a very flawed system and I don't know if it’s still practiced now, but what would often happen was that the parents of the students who had been sorted into either social sciences or arts and humanities would come to school and ask for their child to be transferred to the science class, because the science class was reserved for students who had performed best in the exam. I remember being sorted into the science class, and I immediately went to the staff room with one of my friends who had also been sorted into the science class. We asked if we could be sorted into the humanities class instead. Of course, all the teachers were like “What? What are you talking about? You have the opportunity to become doctors and engineers. What’s your business with humanities?” Then they eventually asked us what we wanted to study in university and my friend said law, and they said “Ohhh, Okay. Fine.” And then they asked me, and at that time I was thinking about studying drama because I’d read quite a number of Wole Soyinka’s plays, and of course I wanted to be like him. I remember saying this to them and I remember very clearly that one of the teachers said “Oh, so you want to go and be dancing in the university?”

In the end they refused to sort me into humanities and I had to call my mother to school because they were sure that no parent in their right mind would allow their daughter to swap science for humanities. So I called my mum and she came to school to talk to the teachers on my behalf. When they explained the situation, my mum said “It’s fine. If she wants to study drama, let her be in humanities.”

When I got to my final year of secondary school, I wrote my JAMB exam and received a really good score, so again the question of studying law at university came up. My mother worked at the university, and by then I had decided to study literature, so at least two, if not three, people came to my house to talk to my mother. They wanted to know why she was allowing me to waste my life. In fact, one of them was a professor in the faculty of law who saw me after the orientation and assured me that I could still change my mind and transfer to law.

My mum was really the one who gave me permission to write. So when Stay With Me did as well as it did, and some of her friends would read about it and call her up, I was just happy for her. This woman had been vindicated. When any good thing happens I just think thank God because now it definitely doesn’t seem like she allowed me to “waste my life.” She was the one who gave me that permission and I’m forever grateful to her.

NA: Ugh. I love that so much. So then where do you think her appreciation of the arts came from?

AA: My mother is an avid reader. My mother reads. I remember one time she had a novel that was like 600 pages. She started it in the evening, I went to bed, and by the morning she had finished it. She reads a lot and she reads very fast. She has a very curious mind. So I think that really influenced her attitude and response to the idea that I wanted to become a writer. It was something she already appreciated and valued as a person.

NA: OK I’m officially obsessed with her, but let’s bring the conversation back to you. I guess your early interest in writing explains your decision to really study the craft. I know you eventually moved to the UK to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA), but I also read that you’ve taken courses with everyone from Margaret Atwood to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Why did you feel the need to spend so much time studying the craft, and is there a piece of advice that you remember receiving that has gone on to influence your work?

AA: I mean, I loved writing, but I think I quickly realised that loving it wasn’t enough. There are writers who can write really good first drafts, they can go from sentence to sentence and every sentence is clean. I'm not one of those writers - yet. I want to get there someday, but for now I have to rewrite because my stories don't come out of me fully formed. I needed to learn how to perfect it, and get what I had on the page as close as possible to what I was imagining. It’s that thing where you have a really great idea and, after writing it down, you read it back to yourself and you think, what is this? That happens to me a lot. So my interest in craft came from this feeling. I knew I needed help. I knew I needed to understand structure, and many other things. But when I focused on the craft and started learning more about writing, I could see myself getting better as a writer, and I could finally learn to trust my process.

There’s one piece of advice that sticks out for me. I remember the very first writing workshop I went for was the one organised by Chimamanda Adichie in Lagos. This must have been in 2007, because it was the very first one, and it was such a good time for me because I was either 18 or 19 at the time, and I was young enough for it to have a real impact on me. Chimamanda delivered the workshop with the late Binyavanga Wainaina, and I remember something he said. I'm paraphrasing, but he sort of said, “The Judeo-Christian tradition says it took God seven days to make the world, so why do you think it's going to take you one day to create this world? Why do you think it's only going to take one attempt?” And he’s right because that's part of what you're trying to do as a writer - you're trying to create a world that is as compelling, if not more compelling than the one that your readers are living in. And it's going to take time, and you need to give yourself that time. I think that's the piece of advice that I remember often. I refer back to it when I need to remind myself to have patience with the process.

NA: And then you obviously took that brilliant advice and went on to write the debut of all debuts! Stay With Me shook the world. It was celebrated in literary circles, but what I truly loved about Stay With Me is that it went far beyond literary circles and permeated everyday conversations amongst people who wouldn’t even think of themselves as readers. That’s the part I loved the most. But whilst a hugely successful debut is a blessing, it must also feel like a curse when you start to prepare for your next book. I know I would have been riddled with fear and anxiety - so my question to you is, how did you approach this new book? How did you start writing it and how do you feel now that it’s out in the world?

AA: Ok so I'm going to come at this from two angles. I totally get what you mean, but with Stay With Me, I never thought that book would get published. Someday I'm going to actually look at all the rejection letters I got for it - I’m going to sit down, go through my emails and tally up the number. I got so many rejections that I had to remind myself that many writers don't publish their first book, and an author’s debut is not necessarily the first book they write. When I came to that conclusion, I felt like I needed to start working on something else. So when I arrived at UEA to do my MA, I was workshopping A Spell of Good Things and this must have been in 2013 or 2014. So by the time Stay With Me came out, I was already committed to this other book. And to be honest, I think that’s the only salvation I had. With the kind of attention that Stay With Me got, I don't think I would have been able to start anything for a while. I think there would have been that crippling sense of can I ever do anything better than this?

It's important to be able to write in a room without anybody in there. But when you publish a book, you have a lot of people with you in that room and you have a lot of voices telling you what’s good about your work and what’s not good about it. So it’s important to be able to leave all the voices outside so you can be alone with the work. It’s difficult but it’s necessary because I feel like if I hadn't started working on this book, I might have been trying to write another version of Stay With Me.

You really need to give yourself that freedom as a writer to write the story you want to write, to do it as well as possible, and trust that some readers will like it. The people who loved Stay With Me might not necessarily like this one, and you have to be able to live with that. This is where my work is going now, and I hope that there's enough in it that travels.

So I think that's what helped me. I had written enough of A Spell of Good Things and I was already committed to a different type of book.

NA: Ok so, continuing on from the idea of starting something new, when you sit down to work on a new novel, do you start with a character and build a world around them? Or do you have a vision of the world and then you find characters to slot into the narrative?

AA: I always begin with the character. I don't feel like I have a story until I have a character. So I could have an idea sort of floating in the background for years, but I know I have a book when there's a compelling character that I'm interested in. With this book, it was Eniola, from the beginning to the end, it was always him. So to answer your question, the ideas can be there, but I just let them sit and percolate until somebody comes to me. All my stories begin when a character comes to me and I want to know more about them.

NA: Beautiful answer. Makes perfect sense. Now, moving on, one thing I love about storytelling, but specifically books, is that two people can read the same story and walk away with two different conclusions about what the book is about. So, as the author, I would love for you to tell me what A Spell of Good Things is about.

AA: For me, it's a book about seeing. Sometimes the characters come alive and the book takes on a life of its own, which is really great. For instance, for me, Stay With Me is a conversation - it’s two people talking to each other and trying to make a case. As the book unfolds, each one of them is making a case to the other about why the marriage is not working. But A Spell of Good Things for me is a book about what is visible and what remains invisible, even when it's in close proximity. It’s also about who has the privilege and the liberty of not seeing the other person. It's about what people see of each other, even within a family. Even when things are right there before their eyes, what can they see? What can they recognise? What do the parents see? What do the children see? Does anyone really see each other? That's what it's really about for me. As we toggle between these families and these characters, I am interested in who sees what and what remains invisible.

The way it ends is also important. Nothing really happens in the last chapter, and nothing is supposed to happen. It’s just this moment of two people in the same space, and it’s about who is able to see the other person.

NA: That’s so poetic - it's already making me think about the story in a completely different way. And the idea of ‘who sees who’ kind of brings me on to the next question, which is around the thread between this book and your last. On the surface, A Spell of Good Things feels like a very different book from Stay With Me, but the common denominator is your exploration of the political versus the personal, the public versus the private, and the way politics affects the lives of ordinary people. This completely aligns with what you're saying about seeing and not seeing. Sure, you can see that a person is running for office, but there is a lot that you don't see behind the scenes. So I’m wondering whether you have a particular fascination with politics. Do you think an aspect of politics will be present in all of your novels, or was it just a coincidence that it happened to play a role in both novels so far?

AA: No, I don't think it’s a coincidence. With this book, I feel like I succeeded in a particular way, and I could realise my ambitions in a way that was not possible with Stay With Me. For instance, in the initial draft of Stay With Me, Akin goes off and joins a political party. I wanted to use this as a way to talk about politics, but I knew it wasn’t working. I had to be honest with myself, I had to cut those parts out and find a way to lightly thread the politics into the story. So yes, I am very interested in Nigerian politics. I think about Nigeria almost obsessively, and I think it's something that will always show up in my fiction.

For me, part of why I write is about the opportunity to explore things that I don't understand. I'm always trying to process things through my characters, in the hope that I may come away with some form of clarity. So, in as much as Nigerian politics continues to perplex me, I think it will continue to show up in my fiction.

NA: When I read this book, I found myself drawn to Eniola’s father and I found his character really compelling. In a recent article, I read that the situation he found himself in was inspired by what you had witnessed when a new state government decided that humanities subjects weren’t important. In your words “a generation of teachers in the public school system were retrenched overnight” and that’s the situation this character finds himself in as the story begins. You’ve spoken about how you use your stories to help you understand the world around you, but to what extent are your novels also a way of responding to the world around you?

AA: Well, I mentioned earlier that I was a very quiet child. I wasn't the child who would walk into a room and talk. But what I did do from a very early age was sit down and listen to people. I would just sit down and observe. If people were visiting, I would sometimes sit at the dining table and just listen to the conversations the adults were having. I think that that has really informed my work, in that I’m inspired by the lives of others and by moments that I encounter. My mind has the capacity to take something and sit with it for six months, and then six months later there’s an idea for a story. I don't think that I write so much about my own personal life, but I do use things from my environment quite a lot.

NA: And when you have the ideas for these stories and characters, how do you then decide whether you’ve achieved what you originally set out to do? When is it time to stop writing?

AA: It’s really hard for me because I’m one of those writers who clings to their work. I hold on to it for as long as possible before showing it to anybody. But I usually get to a point with editing where I start editing my way back. So it’s like I get to the seventh draft and I remove a chapter, and then the next day I find myself trying to put the same chapter back in. That’s when I know I have nothing else to give to the story. I know to stop when it feels like I’m going backwards.

NA: Solid answer, and really practical advice for anyone who’s interested in writing stories of their own one day. So, on that note of advice, I read an interview where you were asked to share some advice for aspiring authors and you shared three. You said:

1. Read, read and read some more.

2. Write even when you don’t feel inspired.

3. Be prepared for rejection.

Is there anything else you would like to add to this list?

AA: No, I think that’s it. I have nothing else to add.

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ was born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her debut novel, Stay With Me, won the 9mobile Prize for Literature, was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Wellcome Book Prize and the Kwani? Manuscript Prize. It has been translated into twenty languages and the French translation was awarded the Prix Les Afriques. Longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, Stay With Me was a New York Times, Guardian, Chicago Tribune and NPR Best Book of the Year. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s second novel, A Spell of Good Things is published by Canongate (UK) and is out now.