Imbolo Mbue on EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY
Poured Over
In this episode of Poured Over, host Brenda Allison sits down with acclaimed author Imbolo Mbue to discuss her latest novel, Every Story is
Key takeaways
- Mbue reveals that the novel's dual timeline was an organic discovery during writing, necessary to fully flesh out Yoma (the deceased wife) and explain Victoria's motivations for seeking atonement.
- The protagonist Wolo is deeply conflicted between traditional Cameroonian family obligations and modern American individualism, a tension mirrored by his brother Dikaki who was born in the U.S.
Main topics
- Plot structure and narrative perspective
- Grief and the search for truth
Notable quotes
"Grief is a journey... It's not something that you just end one day. Maybe some people, their grief just ends. But for me, like, no matter how long it was, I still grieve for some people."
Conclusion
Listeners gain a nuanced understanding of Mbue's literary approach to
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:02) This is Poured Over, a show about stories presented by the booksellers of Barnes & Noble. Speaker 2 (0:11) Hello, I'm Brenda Allison, co-host of Poured Over and a bookseller at Barnes & Noble. Today, I am very excited to be in conversation with Mbolo Mbwe. Mbolo's debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, was a Penn Faulkner Award winner and an Oprah Book Club selection. We are here to discuss her most recent novel, Every Story is a Love Story. It's in stores now, and it is, yes, a love story, but it's also a story of forgiveness, regret. family, obligation, and grief. Mbolo, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank Speaker 3 (0:39) you for having me, Brenda. Yeah, Speaker 2 (0:41) we're going to try and have a spoiler-free conversation today. So let's get underway. As I said, every story is a love story. It is indeed a love story, but it's also so much more. Can you give us a synopsis of the novel? Speaker 3 (0:53) Yes, so it is basically the aftermath of a car accident, a fatal car accident. A young woman goes for a run one day. She's pregnant and she is accidentally killed by another young woman. Speaker 1 (1:09) And the Speaker 3 (1:09) novel begins three years later when the accidental killer sends a letter to the husband of this woman. person that she killed asking to meet because she really is in need of forgiveness and she hopes that her husband forgiving her will sort of give her some kind of relief that she's been hoping for because as you can imagine killing somebody accidentally is a very very difficult thing to live with so she's looking for some sort of relief and so Speaker 3 (1:41) The widower, the husband of the late woman, has to decide whether to meet her and eventually decides to meet her. And that sets the stage for what happens. Speaker 2 (1:51) Yeah, you mentioned the novel opens. The woman who was driving the car that day, her name is Victoria. The novel opens with Victoria's letter to Woloh, who is the widow. Why did you decide, how did you decide to open the novel with the letter? Speaker 3 (2:08) Well, I think that the letter basically sort of introduces the reader to what happened three years ago. And the novel is pretty much about, you know, it's two sides of forgiveness, right? It's Victoria is seeking forgiveness and Wolo is trying to decide whether or not he should forgive. And I think that, at least when the story starts, Wolo is... You know, it's been three years after his wife was killed. So he's, you know, he's still in pain, but it's not as much pain as he was three years ago. So he has to sort of go back to all of that. And Victoria also has to deal with, do it, you know, the process of asking for forgiveness. So I thought that the letter would sort of introduce both of those characters and also, you know, Wolo, I mean, Yoma, who is the young lady who was killed, who is very, very central to the story. Right. And so the letter sort of introduces all three of them. Speaker 2 (3:02) Right. And Victoria is seeking forgiveness from Willow, but also she's looking to forgive herself. Right. You know, you kind of said like. If you were a person who caused an accident like this, obviously there is the grief of the people who were affected, who were the victims. But also if this happened and you caused it, that would obviously be a thing to carry with you. And so Victoria is also looking for forgiveness for herself, right? That's right. Speaker 3 (3:31) That's right. Speaker 2 (3:32) Yeah. Speaker 3 (3:32) Yeah. Because I think that's also a very hard thing to do, to forgive yourself. Right. And she said it right in the beginning. She said, this was an accident. I know it was an accident, you know. But that doesn't make it any easier because I did kill people. Right. I have to deal with that. So throughout the novel, she's also wrestling with forgiving, you know, getting forgiveness from Muloa and also forgiving herself. And we see they both, you know, you know, go through this sort of separate journey, but they are somewhat one journey because they both having to deal with like, you know, how to forgive something like that. Speaker 2 (4:05) Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you kind of, the structure of the novel, it opens with the letter. And then it kind of alternates between the present day, it starts three years after the accident, and the past, Willow Enyoma's courtship and marriage. Did you always know you would write it in that way? Speaker 3 (4:25) No, no, I did not. Oh, say more. Yeah, when I started, it was very much about telling Victoria's story. Oh. Yeah, that was what interested me in the story. I wanted to talk about, you know, this person would do this thing that they're living with this pain and guilt and regret, and they're on this journey to find forgiveness. So my biggest concern was writing about Victoria. But then when I started writing, I realized that I couldn't really tell a complete story without Yoma, who lost her life, being at the center. And I started off doing a bit of flashbacks, you know, like flashbacks. because I moved to Wolo's point of view and then I had all these flashbacks and I realized this is not going to work. There was just too much about her. And the way what... What Victoria wanted to do as an atonement, you know, you needed to understand Yoma, who Yoma was, and why Victoria, from what she knew about Yoma, why she wanted to do what she thought she needed to do. So that is how I came up with a structure where, you know, we are going back and forth between the past and the present. So it's basically like, it's two different stories. It's Yoma and Victoria, I mean, Wolo and Victoria and Wolo and Yoma. One is the story of him and his late wife, and the Speaker 2 (5:44) other Speaker 3 (5:44) is the story of him and the person who killed his late wife. So I decided that that structure would allow me to tell sort of the most complete story about these three people. And of course there's other characters because Wolof's family is very involved in Speaker 2 (5:57) his Speaker 3 (5:57) life. Speaker 2 (5:58) Oh, they are very involved indeed. I want to talk about Yoma as a character. You know her fate. from the beginning, but she is a very real and vibrant character in the book. She's very, because you get those flashbacks, she is very three-dimensional. She's not just, you know, often in fiction and in life, when someone passes, we kind of elevate them. But Yoma is flawed and funny and bright. How did you approach her character? Speaker 3 (6:33) Yeah, well, it's funny because Yoma was a character I met in a very different manuscript. I was working on something. Oh, interesting. And Yoma was a character in the manuscript. And then when I put that manuscript aside, because I said, this is not going to happen, I took her from that manuscript. And so I sort of like, you know, when I first met her, I was like, oh, I want to write more about this character. So I took her from this other manuscript. And I knew again that she died, right? By the way, it's like, okay, she died. I think because of the structure, it allowed me to not focus on her death. Because even when you get to the end of her story with Wolo, she's still alive. So it's almost as if in that storyline, we are stuck in this. I think her storyline is from 2004 to 2009. We are stuck in that bubble where she's alive. She's vibrant. She's really annoying in so many ways. You know, in my dispersing. So I think that that allowed me to just look at her, not focus like, oh, she's about to die. Because in her storyline, she really does not die. Speaker 2 (7:34) Right. And she doesn't know her fate. So neither does Willow at the time, right? That's right. Yeah, yeah, she, we learn that Yoma is an author. There's even a line in the book where Wolo asks if Yoma's book could be in Barnes & Noble. So I did note that. She's also a mathematician. She sees the world as orderly. And she's a real foil to Wolo in a lot of ways. Can you talk about that relationship? Speaker 3 (8:07) Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting because they are from, you know, the same town, right? They are from... In Cameroon? Yeah, they're from my hometown, right? Low-hanging fruit, right? They are from my town. Yoma goes to Rodgers, and I went to Rodgers, even though, like, I just, I do not find much in common with her besides the obvious, you know, democracy stuff. But she is... So I think that, like, you know, like, Yoma is... you know, in many ways very Cameroonian, but at the same time she's also like sort of like a bit more westernized than than than Uolo. Like Uolo is, you know, leaning more towards the traditional, whereas Uyoma, you know, she wants to be a mathematician and a novelist, you know, she's already... it wasn't common for for girls like her growing up to be readers. Like growing up I did not see many people who read books and she was a big reader. And I think that like, you know, because probably because she was a reader she was she had a very very... you know, more, I guess, sophisticated opinions on certain things that Wolo doesn't share. And it also comes across in her writing. But it was important to me that I, that I kept her real again, like show her all the things that we do that we know she does. We don't agree with her, right. It's not a thing that she does. We agree with her, but it was important that I show her like