Helen Oyeyemi’s Novel of Cognitive Dissonance
Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we’re twitchy with regret and self-loathing, advertisers blare, “New Year, new you,” urging us to jettison our failures and start fresh. In fiction, self-reinvention is a perennial theme, often shadowed by the suspicion that it can’t be done. Lately, novelists have put a political spin on the idea, counterposing hopeful acts of individual self-fashioning to the immovable weight of circumstance. Halle Butler’s “The New Me” (2019), a millennial office satire, finds its temp heroine, Millie, trying to life-hack her way out of loneliness and professional drift—buy a plant, whiten her teeth, make friends, think positive. The trouble, Butler suggests, is that Millie can’t begin anew until the world does. It’s a vision steeped in the gloom Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”: fiction that strains to imagine another world, only to collapse back into the one we know. The deck is stacked; Millie is doomed.
Now comes “A New New Me” (Riverhead), Helen Oyeyemi’s ninth novel, its title a knowing wink at Millie’s futile self-optimization. Our protagonist, Kinga, forty and single, grinds away at a corporate job. We meet her on a Monday: “up at six,” “crunching on instant coffee granules and repeating Snoop Dogg’s daily affirmations.” By week’s end, she’s exhausted, subsisting on delivery apps and barely able to move herself from bed to bath. But Oyeyemi, unlike her fatalist predecessors, conjures alternate realities. She swaps the dead-eyed liturgy of capitalist drudgery for something stranger—magic. Kinga suffers from a peculiar affliction: there are seven of her. Each takes charge of a day of the week, leaving voice memos and diary entries for the others; their texts and transcripts form the book.
Kinga-A is the striver, mainlining Snoop Dogg with her morning coffee. Kinga-B works at the same company, a bank, but with less zeal; Kinga-C, whose job is as vague as it is improbable, impersonates antique dealers and window washers. On “maintenance” Thursday, Kinga-D glides through appointments set by her predecessors. Fridays and Saturdays are given over to pleasure and partying, the boundaries between Kingas softening as the week winds down. Sabbath Kinga is an enigma—each Sunday she claims to stay in bed and catch up on TV, though the fitness tracker on the Kingas’ shared phone intimates clandestine trips to who knows where.
Helen Oyeyemi, the British Nigerian novelist who published her début at twenty, is an original—a writer whose style is equal parts mischievous, moony, and tart. Her books occupy the borderlands of realism and fable, where the plausible brushes up against the impossible, and the laws of narrative logic are bent just enough to let in the surreal. If the self-help cant of the title seems to glitch or stutter, the book’s contents shimmer with the same strangeness. Everyday routines are dusted with improbability: a typical meal is “pale-amber-tinted broths and avocados sliced in half and covered in wildflowers.” Even the day job is askew—Kingas A and B work in the bank’s matchmaking department, engineering meetups for personal-finance-focussed singles. Oyeyemi’s prose is propelled by a subtle animism; her sentences sometimes seem to contain the whole book in miniature. At one point, a Kinga notices trees “full of tattered buds that had leapt for the light too early; I tried not to look, but they were everywhere, bright half lives crawling along the shadowy branches.”
Each of the Kingas sports her defining trait like a gemstone embedded in her forehead—uptight, cynical, intuitive, and so on—and it’s easy to fall for the almost fairy-tale logic of their distinctions. But the Kingas are unreliable narrators; are their characterizations to be trusted? The voices can blur; sometimes, there’s the faint sense of an uninvited presence among them. At one point, Kinga-F pauses over a line she’s written: “Is this really how I think about the things I see?” she wonders. “It feels borrowed. But I can’t think who would’ve lent it to me.”
Much of the novel’s initial pleasure comes from its intramural politics. The Kingas squabble, kibbitz, and conspire, their volatile intimacy echoing the female frenemyships found in Oyeyemi’s earlier work, especially “Parasol Against the Axe” (2024), about three women reconnecting at a bachelorette party. Kinga begins in a kind of psychological solidarity: romantically alone but squadded up inside her head. There’s loneliness in the diary entries, but never a whiff of real despair. The plot engine revs, gently, when a dark-haired man appears tied up in her pantry. He’s Jarda, possibly someone’s secret boyfriend, possibly the scion of a crime family. He joins a supporting cast who float through the narrative, speaking episodically about betrayal, first love, ambition. The Kingas themselves trade fragments of family lore and piece together partial memories. Some anecdotes spiral forward—a ransom scheme emerges, bit by bit—but others contradict or undercut one another, while still more seem to exist purely as motifs. One gets the sense that to grasp why any story appears where it does would be to understand the book completely.
Across her nine novels, Oyeyemi has shown a restless fascination with proliferation, complexity, indeterminacy, and paradox. Her framing devices keep sprouting new limbs. In “Gingerbread” (2019), one of her metaphors for art is a sweet loaf that’s ruinous and sulfuric and tastes of revenge. A woman who eats it declares her life “destroyed forever”—then thanks the baker.
Oyeyemi’s novels are less punishing than that loaf, but just as likely to scramble the senses. Genres and registers collide: her prose offers, in a single page, poetic candor, sly wit, dad jokes, and contemporary therapyspeak. The call sheet for a scene might include the moon goddess Selene, Ariana Grande, and Hedy Lamarr. At once overstuffed and evasive, Oyeyemi’s fiction is full of texts that shift shape for each reader, proposing that fiction is inherently confounding. “What I write is made up, but it’s also very, very made up,” she once said. “It’s not trying to reconcile its contradictions.”
The Kingas in “A New New Me” seem engineered to multiply and sharpen contradictions. Friday’s Kinga tells us that a man’s features are “very, very ordinary, and his eyes are alight with a cheerful ‘let’s fix it’ rationality”; for Saturday’s Kinga, the same man has a “face full of restless crests and curlicues,” as if “summoned out of a shower of sparks in order to contradict all orthodoxies.” Oyeyemi’s point, perhaps, is that every perspective is hopelessly partial. In these epistemologically treacherous conditions, the Kingas model how to proceed with curiosity and humility: “Maybe you see gentleness where I see joylessness,” one Kinga muses, debating their shared therapist. Yet Oyeyemi sometimes seems to go further, endorsing a relativism so deep that even provisional consensus is out of reach.
Oyeyemi is drawn to complication as an end in itself. She’s compared stories to viruses—always mutating, always spawning new forms—in a vision that echoes William S. Burroughs’s idea of the Word as “an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.” Her books, with their Borgesian labyrinths and witchy symmetries, sometimes flirt with nonsense. Meanings proliferate, then blur. A perfumer claims that “fragrance has the power to delineate”; another passage insists his scents are so immersive they “prevent you from making . . . distinctions.” Which is it? Or do Oyeyemi’s words inevitably breed their own opposites, spinning fictions in which nothing is reliably true or false?
Yet in “A New New Me,” the virus has achieved self-awareness. There’s always been a flighty, avoidant streak in Oyeyemi’s fiction, as if she forever wants to be telling a different story than the one she’s begun.This novel is, in a way, about that very impulse: the lure of complexity as a means of escape. About halfway through the book, Oyeyemi delivers the septet’s origin story. OG Kinga, as her variants call her, grew up sidelined and overlooked: her father went to prison when she was twelve, her brother floated through life on charm, and she was an outcast at school and made to feel inferior at home. At twenty-nine, OG Kinga attends her high-school reunion, primed to rub her beauty and success in her former classmates’ faces. Perplexingly, they remember her fondly, as a friend. The gap between her self-image and their perception leaves her so rattled that she relinquishes control. “Guys,” she says to her inner chorus, “would you mind just being me? What have I been doing it for?”
Many of the book’s stories are later questioned or contradicted by other narrators. But, uncharacteristically, the provenance of this scene goes unchallenged. OG Kinga thought she was one thing; her classmates saw her as something else. The pain shatters her, and she splinters into an array of alters. The moment is oddly moving, in part because it seems to reach back and challenge Oyeyemi’s usual strategy. Here the great proliferator tries, fleetingly, to fix the point of departure for all her novel’s swirling forms. But, as OG Kinga retreats into the clamor of her seven selves, her one-woman circus looks less like a performance than like a defense—a way to make herself too many to pin down, and too many to wound.
Oyeyemi’s characters are often fleeing from stories—sometimes literally, as when Jarda’s mother bolts for Czechia after a friend foists a manuscript on her, or when a journalist in “Parasol Against the Axe” skips out to Prague after a letter from a disgruntled reader. But to run from stories is also to run from yourself, a pattern clearer nowhere than in “A New New Me,” a book whose title radiates neurotic self-multiplication. Selves propagate in Oyeyemi’s fiction: as dolls, doppelgängers, a changeling with double pupils. Identities, like words, replicate virally. And, as the OG Kinga scene suggests, this proliferation isn’t always creative—it can flow from a kind of death drive. What’s at stake isn’t the familiar “death of the author” but a subtler vanishing act: you’re spun through so many stories that you never get to exist at all.
If Butler’s “The New Me” lampooned the self-improvement industry, Oyeyemi’s “A New New Me” pushes the logic of perpetual upgrades to the point that self-help is indistinguishable from self-erasure. It’s bloatware masquerading as betterment. Yet Oyeyemi doesn’t mourn the loss of unity or push for resolution. Is Kinga better off as one or seven? The book is agnostic. Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi’s simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world. ♦
