A New New Me, Helen Oyeyemi, 2025 | ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
quick summary: There’s a different Kinga for every day of the week, to say nothing of the OG Kinga, radio silent since handing over the reins. There is also a man imprisoned in Kinga’s closet. Seven chapters, seven POVs and a very high re-read value.
quick opinion: This is the type of fiction that has disproportionately low star ratings because people felt they “didn’t understand it” or “weren’t smart enough to get it.” I think that does those readers, the novel, and literary fiction on the whole a disservice. Since when did a book have to make sense for it to be a literary masterpiece? Have you ever read Faulkner?
quick review: I love this quirky book and how Oyeyemi decided to handle dissociative identity disorder as a plot. There is no prescription, or shame, or external force driving change - best exemplified by Kinga-D’s note (p. 99) that they will only tolerate a psychiatrist who accepts all seven splinters of this person as they are, instead of the heralded “integration” of Kingas A-G.
quick analysis: A New New Me feels like a face on the same prism as Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi and The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. du Bois. A New New Me reflects a lighter turn than Freshwater (also an exquisite novel), but tie them together at just the right angle with the right beam of light and they refract a multidimensional picture of the Black experience of self and identity, especially through a post-continental interpretation of double consciousness. I don’t know if this is anything beyond a passing thought, but I can’t escape the association.
quick footnote: I would like to see this turned into a one-woman play à la Sarah Snook’s turn in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Credit me when it hits the West End.
quick interpretation: Diego Velasquez, The Toilet of Venus ('The Rokeby Venus'), 1647-51.
