what is not yours is not yours by helen oyeyemi

When puppets and ghosts interact with human beings, we are more than willing to suspend disbelief. Her latest book is even more compelling.Ī master of her craft, Oyeyemi’s prose is lively, humorous, creative, and disciplined at every turn, mixing magical realism and the real world in a way that truly surprises the reader. Her critically acclaimed fourth book, Boy, Snow, Bird, is one of the most interesting retellings of Snow White out there and is often taught in English classrooms where global perspectives are explored. Oyeyemi has made a name for herself since her first book, The Icarus Girl, was published while she was an undergraduate at Oxford. Helen Oyeyemi’s collection of short stories, What is Not Yours is Not Yours, explores the longing we all have for the things and people that are not ours despite our best (and worst) efforts.

No matter how much you want it, you can’t have it, if it isn’t yours. It's just a question of different categories of reality, I guess, and not giving one greater precedence than the other.It’s true. I'm so in my head that I feel like everything that's happened to me has happened in a book. I think the things I go through in my own life are the books I read. And I was never interested in the bit where they became amazing, and everyone was like, 'you're so amazing.' It was the falling and getting up, and the falling and getting up, and what changed between each fall and each rise. And I was also very interested in stories about process, so, like, I don't even particularly like horses that much, but stories about girls learning to ride horses, or ballet stories. I was reading lots of orphan girl stories, so Anne of Green Gables.

I did, and I was so uninterested in them.

On whether she read fairy tales as a child Not because of some supernatural force, but because why not? Oyeyemi's fiction is exactly the kind of place where a house might just disappear. Because I'm me, I believed that that had happened.' 'I was walking up and down the street, and then the next street, thinking that my house had gone. Like the day she returned from the library to find her front door had been painted a completely different color. 'It was as if the keys were saying, 'Don't talk about us.' It was as if they didn't like it.' 'All of these things happened to me with keys,' she says. While she was writing, she tells NPR's Steve Inskeep, she felt as if keys were haunting her. In fact, she's written an entire book about them, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours - nine short stories (she says she could have written 900) about the power of keys. Writer Helen Oyeyemi has been thinking a lot about keys. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Author Helen Oyeyemi

What is not yours is not yours by helen oyeyemi