Allow Me to Introduce Myself

April 15, 2024
Millions of people around the world knew Aṅụrị before she knew herself, thanks to stepmother Ophelia's popular lifestyle blog. Now in her mid-twenties, Aṅụrị has struggled with her identity and self-worth, and she sees the pattern of exploitation starting to repeat with her half-sister, Noelle. Disappointed that their father, Nkem, seems to allow Ophelia to do whatever she chooses, Aṅụrị files a lawsuit demanding the removal of her image from Ophelia's web site--a major request since Ophelia built her personal brand around being the perfectly polished, white stepmother of a sweet, compliant Black stepdaughter. Alongside her chosen family--best friends Simi and Loki, her therapist, Ammah, and her attorney, Gloria--Aṅụrị endeavors to rebuild her life on her own terms, seizing the control that she never had. Nwabineli (Someday, Maybe, 2022) explores the long-range effects of social-media overexposure through Aṅụrị's journey of self-discovery and healing. This timely, gripping novel establishes Nwabineli as a writer with the emotional insight to tackle heavy topics in a skilled and thoughtful manner and will provoke lively discussions for book clubs.

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April 15, 2024
Scarred by a childhood and adolescence spent as the face of her stepmother's social media empire, a London woman tries to protect her little sister from the same fate. Aṅụrị Chinasa is not okay. While she runs two thriving businesses and, at 25, has enough money to afford a two-bedroom apartment in London, she struggles with alcoholism, likes to verbally abuse consenting men online, and is semi-estranged from her father, Nkem, and her stepmother, Ophelia. Enabled by Nkem, Ophelia, a famous blogger, made a name for herself on the back of her experiences raising Aṅụrị, sharing photos, videos, and anecdotes that won her millions of fans and lucrative sponsorships. For Aṅụrị, the material benefits of such fame and fortune couldn't outweigh the social and emotional drawbacks--constant scrutiny, a lack of anonymity, even a kidnapping attempt--but Nkem and Ophelia didn't see it that way. When Aṅụrị cut ties with the business at age 18, she was soon replaced by Nkem and Ophelia's new baby, Noelle. Five years after Noelle's birth, Aṅụrị, still suffering the ill effects of hypervisibility, sues Ophelia in an attempt to force her stepmother to expunge her social media accounts and commercial ventures of anything Aṅụrị-related. Roughly around the same time, the relentlessly momagered Noelle begins to exhibit worrisome behavior. Concerned for her sister's welfare, Aṅụrị undertakes a new crusade against the backdrop of the ongoing lawsuit: to liberate Noelle from stardom. For all the righteousness of Aṅụrị's cause, Nwabineli's cleareyed narrator resists the temptation to wholly vilify Nkem and Ophelia; brief chapters told from their perspectives, coupled with the narrator's occasional injections of background information, offer insight into why they made the mistakes they did. In many ways, this novel recalls Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000). Both novels foreground immigrants and immigrant struggles, including racism and xenophobia (Nkem and an infant Aṅụrị emigrated to England from Nigeria after Aṅụrị's mother died; Ophelia's contrasting whiteness is a subtle point of tension); both novels have the same sweeping third-person-omniscient point of view, peppered with wry observations about life and humanity. Though it isn't a modern classic like White Teeth, this novel tells a moving, thought-provoking story that interrogates the toxic and parasocial dynamics associated with influencing. A parable for the social media age that critiques without resorting to alarmism or preachiness.

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