An Unusual Grief is Omotoso’s third novel and, typical of her rich imagination, she provides a cast of deeply complicated women flung together by the suicide of the protagonist’s daughter. The story follows the journey of a mother who posthumously attempts to excavate the details of her daughter’s life through unconventional strategies, including moving into her apartment and impersonating her on a dating site. As the story flows, blockages and confrontations force the characters to learn new strategies to manoeuvre through life. The book also delves into the possibilities of sexual exploration, desire, as well as the meaning of friendship for older women. As we sit down to talk, Omotoso unweaves this delicate tale and shares her thoughts on the complications of grief. 

Thinking about how Toni Morrison speaks about the birth of Beloved and how she saw her emerging from the water while sitting at her writing desk, I would like to ask, where was this book born?

“I will struggle to answer that question elegantly. It never feels neat and tidy but I will name the instances. I lost my mother when I was 23 to cancer and that is something you never get over. I carry that with me and I wanted to write about death, loss and mother-daughter relationships. I did not want to write it biographically and deliberately wanted to invert it onto its head. What if I had died and my mother had grieved? I wanted to write from a place of distance and fiction. Another place it came from was motherhood in general. I am captivated by motherhood and mythologies around motherhood so I wanted to explore how society polices mothers. I also wanted to explore the rules around the bodies of mothers and what they can or cannot do with these bodies.”

As much as the book follows the trajectory of grief, what felt particularly striking is that this is an intergenerational story of mental illness. The different generations acknowledged that they were struggling with mental health but this occurred in silos and never in an interconnected manner. Can you tell us more about the silences and the gaps in this family that perpetuated this African taboo about speaking about mental illness?

“So much of the book is about the silences and the gaps. Pop psychology and social media instruct us that we have to talk about these issues and be vulnerable. Yet, so much has us by the throat and we cannot speak. We are stuck with the same thing and all three members of the family could have learnt so much from each other if they had the facility to do so. I wanted to illustrate the damage of the myth of what is considered “African” or “UnAfrican.” We hang ourselves on that myth. This is a portrait of what that looks like at the scale of the family and the impact of that kind of silence. This is of course done with compassion and the word “wrong” is too blunt a tool to use to allocate to the characters. It is nuanced and delicate and therefore I looked at the historical silences and gaps that the parents had inherited from their parents.”

You steered away from the stereotypical narrative of “Africans” being ignorant and dismissing mental illness as a “white disease” due to lack of education. You have created characters who are academics and still grapple with the ideas of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. It highlights the role of shame and its capacity to overrule knowledge. With these contestations in mind, how did you choose “kink” as a strategy for healing?

“I followed the thread and saw where it took me. The thought of kink did not occur until three or four years into the book. However, I thought about Mojisola and how wound up she would be in her grief. So part of the healing would have been the journey of unwinding. I wanted to respectfully handle a lifestyle that is so often villainised and used as a prop, and I uncovered that the practice of kink can be healing.”

You made Mojisola an incredibly bizarre human being and the book highlighted that there is nothing normal about grief and there is no normal preset to follow during the process. Why was it important for Mojisola to find herself in grief?

“It was important to have a tragic equation in the story. The cliché by line of losing her child to find herself. Although, cliché as it might be, there is a kernel of truth in this. Her daughter’s death was what it took to wake up. She was the living dead, sleeping throughout her life, closing down desires and not following her dreams. It is the loss of her child that strikes her right between her eyes and she is compelled to go through this journey thinking she is searching for the answers to her daughter’s death when really, she is searching for herself. This is now a mission that she has been given for the rest of her life because she spent the last 60 years not looking.”