#maame

I realized partway through the book how similar the author bio’s was to the life of the protagonist and I wondered if this is more memoir than fiction. If true, I’m not sure why this wasn’t just written as a memoir and billed as a memoir? I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was clearly memoir because I would’ve been putting the story and its events into the context of a young person writing their first book and exploring their own point-of-view rather than expecting literary affection, where the author provides insights and commentary on urgent and/or timeless themes through literary structures and devices. That being said, the strongest creative nonfiction (in my opinion, or at least what I have most enjoyed) also reveals broader, applicable thinking through the experiences of the narrator. Some of the experiences that Maddie goes through include moving away from home for the first time and the pressure put on her from parents that don’t want her to move out, having her first boyfriend, realizing said boyfriend is two-timing her, getting let go from her job, and finding a new and better-fit job. These problems (common for someone in their early to mid-twenties) were often dealt with in exactly the way I would’ve predicted rather than in a way that surprised me or added nuanced through layered thinking. For example, her first break up was tied to the unequal treatment Maddie realized that Ben was giving the two women he was simultaneously dating. Maddie quickly pieced together that Ben wanted to be “public” with Sophie because of her race. He introduced her to his family, invited her to parties, and took her out around London, while Maddie was relegated to meals at home. This tension provided an opening to talk about interracial relationships and how family and social perception repeatedly devalues young women of color; instead, this topic was moved on from quickly and undermined by the book’s idealistic ending. 

The ending felt simply like “wish-fulfillment” because Maddie found “the perfect man” right after all of this emotional turmoil. A man of her same race and intellectual stature (an artist, with similar interests, no less!) drops into her lap. Miraculously, Maddie also seems to have a better relationship with her mother—even though nothing would change in that relationship based its history—once she meets her mother’s standard of “having a boyfriend.” Her mother still pesters her about getting married, but now this banter has a cute and fun tone because she has hot, perfect boyfriend Sam who seems obsessed with her. I found this quick ending very unrealistic, and even if it is possible (it does happen, occasionally, that someone finds their perfect match when all the chips are down in their life), given that this book is fiction, it seemed like a wasted chance to do something other than resolve problems with the wave of a magic wand. Very little is made of the fact that Sam was previously dating Maddie’s housemate Jo, even though the two girls have had a tumultuous friendship. I got more out of the dynamic with housemates Jo and Cam than most other dynamics in the book. These dynamics were not easily solved. Three very different girls became friends quickly, but the cracks begin to show and no one seems wholly in the right or wrong. Jo was insensitive about Maddie’s father’s death and did not jump to support her in the wake of this. But Maddie also made choices to court these girls’ friendship early on, and, in the wake of dramatically accusing Jo of being the reason she wasn’t at her father’s side when he died, simply withdraw. 

Next thing we know, Maddie is dating Jo’s perfect ex and they never talk about this really. The inability of these girls to lean into difficult conversations did, I suppose, feel very “we’re only 25!” I’m not sure if I’m being too hard on them (and I wouldn’t, were they real people!), but, as characters in a book, they ended up being bland and not particularly complex. Similarly, Maddie’s friends Nia and Shu are perfect friends, self-sacrificing and deeply understanding. Maddie behaves as if she’s all alone in the world and then has two friends who know her private self and her full life experiences. I was baffled by this.