A few weeks ago I finished this excellent novel called Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo. I got a gift card to a Black-owned bookstore and was searching through the online catalog, looking for what books I could buy. I came across a memoir by the late congressman John Lewis and this book. I was looking for something new to read, and I didn’t know the plot of Stay with Me so I went with it. I was also looking for something fictional to read. Some friends of mine saw the book when it arrived and told me they loved the book and how deeply it moved them. Within a few pages I was hooked. It got recognized as a New York Times Notable Book and was rated one of the best books of the year, and I can see why, because the author’s writing is absolutely spellbinding. I have read a few works by Nigerian authors: Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (The Thing Around Your Neck, Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Dear Ijeawele), and all the books they wrote were really good. Ayobami Adebayo’s book Stay with Me was published back in 2017, and frankly I don’t know why I waited so long to read it, because it is an amazing novel that left my heart pounding until the last page.
It’s about this young woman named Yejide who finds out that her husband is cheating on her with another woman named Funmi in order to bear children. Yejide has a hard time bearing children, so her husband Akin tries to conceive with another woman, partly to please his parents, who dislike Yejide because she doesn’t have any children. Yejide does everything she can to get pregnant, and she finally goes to some people who put her through a ritual to make her pregnant. She notices all the signs of pregnancy over time; her stomach gets larger, she experiences morning sickness, she feels kicking in her stomach. But what she is experiencing is actually a thing called pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy. Akin warns her that she isn’t really pregnant, but Yejide, who has been stigmatized by her community for far too long for not being able to conceive, can finally have something to hold onto, so she keeps saying she is pregnant. Then Funmi dies and Akin’s world falls apart. Yejide finally gets pregnant, but when she does she deals with a trauma that keeps on happening over and over again each time she has a child.
I’m not a mother myself, but reading about Yejide’s struggle showed me that the path to motherhood is definitely not an easy one, especially if you lose your children and have to deal with the grief and trauma that comes with it. I guess that’s why I read fiction, though, because even if I’ve never gone through what someone has gone through, I get to know what their lived experiences are like, and so I’m having to put myself in this person’s shoes. Of course, at the end of the day, I don’t have to carry the trauma and grief that Yejide did for many years, but reading about what she went through gave me a deeper appreciation for women and mothers because they have to go through a lot, and taught me a lot about cultural attitudes around children and marriage and how these attitudes can have a deep impact on people who either don’t want kids or are having a hard time conceiving kids.
Stay with Me. Ayobami Adebayo. 272 pp. Published July 10, 2018
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