Natasha Onwuemezi

I first met Ayobami Adebayo six years ago to interview her about her debut Stay With Me; it was the first interview she’d done for the book. Many things have changed since, for one, Adebayo has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize for her latest novel A Spell of Good Things. For another, we’ve both lived through a global pandemic, which has seen us replace the fancy restaurant and expense account of our last interview with a video call that might have been hiding the fact that we were both wearing pyjama bottoms.

Back then, not only was the word pandemic not in our vernacular, neither was Zoom, something that has made this international call possible. Except, it’s not quite as international as I was expecting. Logging on, I assumed Adebayo would be dialling in from sunny, vibrant, colourful Lagos, but instead, the grey backdrop tells me all I need to know: she’s currently experiencing the best summer the UK has to offer. I ask if she’s looking forward to going back to her home city. “Very much so, given the turn in the weather,” she says, with a laugh. “I mean, a couple of days ago I was thinking of bringing out a duvet, it was that cold. It went down to like nine degrees at one point. Like what is this?”

Adebayo is warm and understated and cuts a very cool figure against the dismal background, bringing the summery vibes to the UK with delightful ombre locs framed by a casual bandana. Headphones and a T-shirt – both oversized – complete the look. She tells me that she’s been in the UK since February, when A Spell of Good Things was published. She has gotten married and had a baby in the six years since I saw her last and the family has settled in Norwich for a few months so she can promote her new book. This new domestic situation means that publicising her latest novel is a very different experience to touring her debut. “My mind’s been in three different places,” she says. “[My son’s] a little older now than he was in February, so I can sort of leave him for more extended periods of time, and it’s fine. And I’m also fine, because I feel like there was a window where he was actually fine being left alone, but I wasn’t!”

Adebayo is no stranger to Norwich – she studied for an MA at the University of East Anglia in 2014. It was there she met and worked with Margaret Atwood on the first chapter of what became Stay with Me, a devastating début about how the pressures of motherhood, masculinity and marriage slowly undo a relationship. In contrast with Stay With Me’s intimate focus, A Spell of Good Things is an expansive state-of-the-nation novel about modern Nigeria that is told through the lens of two families – one wealthy, one down on their luck. Adebayo says her latest book is “trying to capture what it’s like for people to live on opposite ends of the financial spectrum in the same city and what the implications are for both families”. While the economic disparity Adebayo explores can be found in cities and towns across the globe, there is a distinct dichotomy that exists in Lagos, Nigeria, where Adebayo is from. She explains, “I had an experience where I was in a part of my city – the city that I’d spent most of my life in at that point – and was quite shocked at how impoverished that particular neighbourhood was. And I just couldn’t get that idea out of my mind from that point – the idea that people can live in the same space and their financial and economic realities can be so different, and that they can be so invisible to one another in a particular kind of way.”

I ask Adebayo if her writing style has evolved since her debut – and only realise how ridiculous the question is as I read back on our first interview together to write this piece. “I really hope it has!” she returns with a laugh. “I think it has. I think A Spell of Good Things is a very different book from Stay With Me. Stay With Me is very pacey; it’s insular by necessity because it’s a book about two people looking at each other. In fact, it’s set up as a conversation right from the beginning. They’re sort of talking to each other. That’s why they’re telling the story. This one is very different. I think it’s more expansive.”

When working on her debut, Adebayo says she felt like she needed to be “much closer to what I imagined the voice of the characters to be”, but with her latest novel, which is told in close third person and follows a polyphonic cast of characters, Adebayo “had more room for my own voice to come through – or at least, I allowed my own voice to come through in a way that I was very strict about not doing with Stay With Me”. Told from nine different perspectives, Adebayo found figuring out the structure of A Spell of Good Things challenging. “I worked really hard to make sure that it’s as seamless as it can possibly be [with all the perspectives]. With both books, I’d write them, particularly for like the first two drafts and then realise, ‘oh, this is all wrong’, and then sort of pull everything out, I put it back together again. So with this one, it was sort of similar that I’d written almost all the way through with some of the characters, then at least one of the characters that was at the centre in the initial draft became a minor character, so I had to go back and sort of rewrite almost everything.”

“I like to sit with the structure because I think that for me, often the form is as important as the storytelling,” Adebayo continues. “I feel like there needs to be a synergy between the form and the story for me to be satisfied. And until I find that I’m going to keep trying all kinds of iterations until I feel that the form of this thing is saying something about the story.”

So, how does she finesse the structure? Is she one of those writers with post-it notes pinned to a corkboard like a crime scene investigator? “I don’t do post-it notes at all,” she says with another laugh. “I aspire to be someone who does that. I’m someone who’s very ‘to-do’ listy. I make lists about every little thing. I do make lists when I’m writing, but everything just goes to nothing. It just never works out the way I’ve planned it. So I think I’ve just accepted that this is the part of my life or my mind that I can’t always control. So it is terrifying. But it’s also exciting, because many times I go in thinking I’m writing this, and then I get halfway when I realise it’s totally something different.”

Another thing that is seemingly out of her control is plotting. Adebayo says she doesn’t plot ahead, instead leaving ideas to ruminate until she has a full understanding of the character at the heart of the story – and this rumination can take years.“Right now, I have all kinds of ideas: I’d like to write about this, I’d like to write about that. But I’m not going to start on them until I have somebody that I feel anchors the story,” she says. “So with Stay With Me it was [one of the protagonists] Yejide. I had the idea for Stay With Me in 2008. It wasn’t published until 2017. I remember exactly where I was when I first had the idea, but I thought, ‘no, I’m not ready to write this yet’. So I started writing when Yejide came to me when I had a clearer sense of who this person was, what their backstory was, and why they were in this situation. And then I felt that I could write the book. With [A Spell of Good Things], it was Eniola [a boy from the poor family]. Eniola was the heart of it for me, the young boy.”

Adebayo started writing what would become A Spell of Good Things in 2013, when her debut was still in progress. She went back to it in June of 2018, after she had finished the press tour for Stay With Me. Adebayo was adamant that she would finish A Spell of Good Things in 2020; she had a fellowship at UEA that was supposed to last four months, and she was planning on dedicating time to the novel, but then… Covid. “My mind was just, I couldn’t think about anything. I became a bit obsessed with [the pandemic] very early on. Part of it was because by that time, things were really spiralling in Italy and I felt like it was going to start happening in the UK. And I needed to get back to Nigeria if everything was going to close down. So I was just watching the numbers every single day and thinking to myself, ‘do I need to leave?’ And I was getting married!”

Understandably, Adebayo says she found it “very, very difficult” to write at this time. Her mum and sister both work in the health sector and were on the frontlines and the chilling dystopian novel Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (which is set after a global pandemic has wiped out most of the world’s population) was on the forefront of her mind. “It was very disturbing. I had to leave the UK, I had to leave the Fellowship. I just had the sense that countries were going to shut their borders and at some point there wouldn’t be flights anymore.” Adebayo left the UK on the day the lockdown was announced and arrived in Lagos a day or two before Nigeria also went into lockdown. “I just made it in time,” she says. “And by then in Nigeria If you were coming from Europe, you had to self-isolate for a while. It was so strange. It was very, very hard to work. So I had a few months of not really being able to create anything because I was just as stressed out.”

A balm in this stressful time was Adebayo’s relationship with her now-husband, fellow writer Emmanuel Iduma, who she married during the pandemic. “We were able to achieve that very rare Nigerian thing, which was a wedding in which we knew everybody that was attending – that being impossible under different circumstances,” she says, laughing. “About a year later, we had the traditional wedding, because that was when we had to reach a compromise with our parents.”

While Adebayo says she and her husband have collaborated on writing projects before, she’s amused at the prospect of them writing together. “We don’t write together because we’re very different in the way we work. For instance, he’s very much more regimented with his work than I am,” she says. “So yeah, we don’t write in the same room. In fact, we write on different floors of the house! But we talk a lot about what we’re doing, we bounce ideas off each other, we recommend books to each other. We’ve been doing that for well over a decade.” Adebayo adds that the support from her husband was invaluable during the pandemic when she was struggling with writing the book. She describes him mocking up a cover for the work in progress, framing it and giving it to her as a gift. “And so over my desk in Lagos, that’s the thing I look at, when I, when I sit at that desk. He was really important to me when I was trying to finish it, because I really was at the point where I thought, ‘I’m not sure I can do this, I’m not sure I can finish this. Maybe I’m trying to do too much with this book’. So I’m really grateful for that support.”

It’s a good thing that she did finish the lauded novel, because after we speak, it’s revealed that A Spell of Good Things has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Adebayo’s debut was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize and won the 9mobile Prize for Literature and the Prix Les Afriques. She describes the Women’s Prize longlist coming out a day or two after the publication of Stay With Me. “It was the proof copy that was featured in the initial announcement video”, she tells me, laughing. “So it was this thing where my publicist had messaged me and I went to look at the video and was like, “where’s the book?” I thought to myself, “was she trying to message someone else?” The proof copy was really small.” Size of the book aside, Adebayo says that the prize “definitely had an unbelievable impact on the book’s trajectory”. She adds, “it brought in way more readers than I think it might have had otherwise.” Here’s hoping the Booker nomination does the same for her latest spellbinding work.

Life questions

First memory

I think my first memory is of my father, of him coming back home; he used to travel quite a bit. I remember him standing on the other side of this door that had a glass pane. He’s just arrived back home from a trip. And I’m looking at him, and I’m just waiting for him to pick me up.

First writing

I think it was a poem. I had a notebook when I was about nine that I used to write poetry in. It was a yellow notebook. I would write poetry after school, or sometimes during class I would just scribble. I think for some reason it might have been about a cat. I think my mum still has it somewhere.

A book I loved as a child

The Go-between by LP Hartley. I need to read it again. It made such an impression on me.

Someone I’d like to thank

My mum. She really really supported me. Even when my school suggested I should pursue other things, study medicine, study law. She literally at least twice had to come to school to tell my teachers “yeah, it’s fine, that’s what she wants to do. Let her go ahead with it”.

Advice to my younger self

Chill. Just chill, just relax, take it easy. Enjoy being young. I was one of those people who was like an adult child; I was very serious. I am grateful for it, but I think that’s what I would say to myself. Just enjoy every season. Don’t be too anxious about getting to the next phase that you don’t enjoy where you are. Enjoy being a student. Enjoy being unpublished. Really enjoy that.

‘How to Write a Book: The Adebayo Method’

You start writing when an idea meets a character. You usually have multiple ideas that you’re interested in at any point in time. But at some point, a character emerges in your mind who is so compelling to you that you have to tell their story. That’s when you commit to a novel.

You seldom plan. The first phase of writing for you is getting to know the character. So sometimes, you write a whole day in the life of the character, which often never makes it into the book, right from when they wake up to when they go to sleep. And that gives you a sense of them, of who they are, what their routines are, what their anxieties are, what their secret desires are.

After you do that, you discover the directions the story can go in, and it keeps unfolding. From there, you edit a lot. You spend a lot of time going over things. You write your first drafts without worrying about anything because you know that you’re definitely coming back to fix things. You know the goal with a first draft is to get to the end.

Then with the subsequent rounds, you go very slowly. The closer you are to what you feel might be the finish line, the slower you go, so when you go back over it the second time, you’re looking at character again, when you go over the third time, you’re looking at the story. And when you go over the fourth time, you’re looking at the sentences. And that’s when you’re very, very slow. And you really enjoy that phase of things because so many things are already settled and you can now just polish things to a shine.

You used to be distracted by your phone, but you’ve kind of solved that for yourself by having two phones now: one with all your distracting apps, and one that just gets calls and texts. And that’s the phone you have with you all the time. The other one,you switch off in the morning and you switch back on maybe around 5pm. You cheat all the time. But you think it definitely helps. Sometimes you put in a different room in the house, so you have to get up and do a walk of shame to get it.

You have a writing schedule because otherwise the novel would never get done. For the first draft, you work with a word count. So you say you’re going to write 1000 words or 2000 words a day. And you just do that every day until it’s done. When you’re editing, it depends on what stage of the edits you’re in, sometimes you do a chapter, sometimes you do a page, and sometimes you go by word counts. Later on in the process it’s easier to say to yourself, “I’m going to work on this for about five hours today”, but with the first draft, you write the number of words. If it takes one hour, if it takes five hours, the goal is to hit the word count.