Book Title: Stay With Me
Author: Ayobami Adebayo
Genre: Fiction (Realistic Fiction, Drama)
Pages: 272
Publisher: Canongate
Release date: 2017
Stay With Me is an intense read, full of drama and a catalytic end.
Yejide, the heroine, is an unassuming and easily infatuated character which makes her easy prey for her cunning husband, Akin.
Ayobami Adebayo created a compelling story, one that sucks you in, wrings you and leaves you feeling depleted.
At the beginning of Stay With Me, Yejide reflects on the last 15 years of her life, giving us a quick insight into what has happened before we even know it. During her flashback from 2008 to 1985, we get a sense of doom and despair.
Yejide is an unhappy woman, and that is sustained throughout the book. The only glimpse of happiness we get is when she was a student at the University of Ife.
However, it isn’t hard to understand Yejide’s unhappiness. She grew up in a polygamous family, unwanted and unloved. To top it off, her mother died during her birth, and her father is neglectful, for all his proclamations about loving her.
Yejide’s woeful existence doesn’t end there. Her lack of a true family leaves her with no self-worth, making her seek validation and love. Akin is the first person to show her a positive emotion, and she clings to him like a life raft.
Initially, Yejide seems like a strong woman with no weaknesses, but that’s just something she hides well. Her emotional deficiencies (naivete and need for external validation) lead her down a pigeonhole of being used by a selfish man who’s out to destroy the lives of everyone he encounters, so he can come out smelling like a rose.
Like Yejide, Akin grew up in a polygamous household with a neglectful father but that’s where the similarities stop. Akin has two siblings and a mother who would stop at nothing to help him succeed. Unlike Yejide’s student status when he met her, Akin is a self-assured working-class man who knows what he wants and goes after it.
Theirs would have been a perfect love story, a blending of yin and yang. But, something rains on their parade: childlessness.
After two years of matrimony bliss with no sign of a bundle of joy, all hell breaks loose. Society declares Yejide as barren, ignoring multiple medical reports that say otherwise. Akin’s mother, Moomi, will stop at nothing to ensure that her son has children who’d carry his heritage. Yejide succumbs to the request of her mother-in-law, visiting pastors and herbalists for “deliverance,” drinking all kinds of concoctions and enduring unexpected visitors until a visitor comes to break up all she holds dear.
Battling with the reality of Akin marrying another woman, Yejide takes matters into her own hands. Meanwhile, Akin is plotting his way out of his problems too.
Stay With Me explores themes of fertility, marriage, abiku, sickle cell disease, patriarchy, religion, femininity and everything else in between.
What struck me the most was how similar Yejide’s story is to Tia in The Girl with the Louding Voice (Abi Dare). It’s also comparable with Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Life of Baba Segi’s Wives, Micheal Afenfia’s The Mechanics of Yenagoa and some stories in Olukorede Yishau’s Vaults of Secrets and many more books. That tells us that society is encumbered with such problems but has damaged many lives by the hush-hush approach it has taken.
Ultimately, for me, there’s no angel in Stay With Me. Everyone takes a share of the blame. Of course, Yejide is to be pitied, and I felt bad for her, but she isn’t blameless. Especially because she avoided a confrontation even when she learned the truth. Yejide willingly enslaved herself, and that’s on her.
Also, discussing the defects of the other characters in the book will turn this review into a very long essay, and that’s not my intention.
Stay With Me is a book that I’d like to see in the curriculum of psychology classes. The characters and their responses to their situation are worth discussing extensively.
Meanwhile, I don’t have a favourite character in the book. I don’t like any of the characters They’re very manipulative, selfish or very naïve; that’s not a great recipe for a wholesome character, it leads to a complex.
Like most Nigerian books published in the 2000s but set in the 80s and 90s, Stay With Me addresses the military rule in Nigeria, and what life was like for everyone during those times.
Should you read this book? Oh yes! I recommend it a 💯. You’ll be enlightened about the problems a patriarchal society has created for all.
Folio Review 