#bomjuly

A brief session today.

Another quick session today. I slept late and then the power was out and I didn’t have light to read by, so I went back to bed. I woke up when it came on.

This section was good. The first being about how Ifemelu was settling in with her new babysitting job and slowly improving things. She still will not talk to her boyfriend from home, Obinze. She ignores his emails and phone calls and he wrote a letter, and she won’t read it. She doesn’t know how to move forward because she knows she will have to tell him about what happened with that man and she can’t do it yet. She is healing from that moment, but I think it still lingers with her. 

Then another part was about her finding her voice again. She had been using an American accent so people wouldn’t judge her or think her simple and after a telemarketer told her she sounded American after she told him she was Nigerian; she stopped. She reclaimed that part of herself. Next she meets a man named Blaine on the train. The book starts with her dating and leaving a man named Blaine because she is moving back to Nigeria, so again it is interesting to see these parts play out that I know is part of her life. They had a fantastic time on the train and exchanged numbers, but he did not call back. But the reader knows something happens because she ends up with him.

I read chapters 14 and 15 tonight and it was heavy. 

Chapter 14 focused on Ifemelu starting school and having struggles fitting in or understanding the culture around her and a hard time getting a job. She finds a group, the ASA, filled with other students from countries in Africa and that helps her to feel not so isolated there and also a little of American customs is explained to her by people who have had to come to terms with it. She also finds a renewed love of reading and a safe space in the library that made me so happy for her. This chapter wasn’t overly heavy, just the feelings of not being able to succeed or find a place were hard and it feeds into the next chapter.

I did it!!! I loved the book and I hate that I took so long to read it because it was great. 

The book had me in tears! Happy tears. It was the part about Obama’s first presidential run and subsequent win. They were just so hopeful and happy about the possibility of him becoming president. They were afraid too that he would be felled by a scandal or killed. 

Ifemelu and Curt broke up because she cheated on him. 

This eventually led to her blog and her being successful, wildly successful on her own. And then back to Blaine, who she is now dating. 

I don’t know if it is the success from her blog or that Blaine is black, but she finally told her parents about who she was dating. I assume she dated Curt for a few years, but she never officially moved in with him. She moved in with Blaine after a year.

I would love a better exploration of why she felt that way with Blaine, but not with Curt. It devastated her when Curt ended things. She realized she made a mistake in cheating and told him, and he couldn’t forgive it. She tried for weeks, constantly going to his apartment and calling him, but he wouldn’t talk to her. 

It feels like Curt was one of those relationships where she didn’t realize how great it was until it was gone. Or until she had made that awful mistake of cheating. Like she had to test her love for him.  

I appreciate each of her relationships for what they do for her. Being with Curt seemed to heal her from the trauma and pain that resulted from her allowing that tennis coach to touch her when she was so desperate for money. He provided her safety to heal and become lighter. And even the breakup seemed to make her wake up out of this unhappy life she had within the happiness of being with him. She resigned from the job she didn’t like and after encouragement from a friend started her blog.

I didn’t feel much like reading today. I got in 20 minutes with Stuart Little and read a chapter from this to get my 30 minutes in for the day.

This chapter spent more time in the salon than a lot of other chapters have. Ifemelu, in the present, is having doubts about returning to Nigeria. She wishes she hadn’t sold her condo and that she would have taken the offer to sell her blog, but be a paid writer. And not breaking up with Blaine just because she was leaving. It seems the doubts came from many of the women in the salon discussing how awful Nigeria was and how they would never let a Nigerian in their family. 

The last bit of the chapter is about her first relationship with a white man named Curt. He is Kimberly’s cousin; I think. It makes me wonder how she gets into the relationship with Blaine. It seems this relationship for the time being just makes her happy. Curt is optimistic, and she has fun with him, even though it mentions that there came a point when she wanted to crush that happiness. I think the next chapter explores this relationship some more. 

I read for an hour tonight. If I hadn’t started reading so late, I probably would have continued, but I have other things I need to do.

So, I began Part Two this time and most of it is spent in the past, mostly in Ifemelu’s past. It opens up with Ifemelu still at the hairdresser getting her braids done and then I guess we slip back into her memories or what have you. First up is her thinking over her mother and her dalliance’s with different religions and what it ended up doing to her. Her father’s job loss and how it changed him as well. Next is Obinze and Ifemelu’s meeting and it is so sweet. It is everything I think a person would want in meeting their first love and I just loved the whole thing. After that it goes over to her memories of her Aunty Uju, who ended up living a life of luxury because she was a mistress to The General and how that all played out. 

As a reader, we know that Aunty Uju lives in America and has a different life than when she was with The General. So it is all interesting. Seeing how Ifemelu and Obinze play out because Obinze is married with a kid in Nigeria and Ifemelu is finishing up her education in America and getting ready to go back to Nigeria.