New Beginnings: PW Talks with Imbolo Mbue

In the novelist’s Every Story Is a Love Story, a Cameroonian American widower debates whether to meet the woman who accidentally killed his wife.

What made you want to write about love, loss, and the need for atonement?

When I was a teenager, I was involved in a physical fight that left a young man wounded and scarred for life. At the time, I didn’t think much about it. Decades later, during the pandemic, I was overcome with guilt about my role in the incident. I didn’t start writing the novel then, but over time, I used a character from a failed manuscript to begin this story.

That was Victoria, the white motorist who runs over Wolo’s wife, Yoma?

When I started Every Story Is a Love Story, Victoria was the main character. It began with her quest for forgiveness.

What has drawn you to write about Cameroonian immigrants in America?

The immigrant experience didn’t cross my mind in the early stages of writing this novel, but the Cameroonian characters are shaped by their culture. The way they approached the tragedy of Yoma’s death, including the suspicions they held about Victoria, are a consequence of being immigrants from Cameroon, so I had to touch on that in order to present them in their full complexity. Yoma and two other women characters are composites of Cameroonian women I know. The irony is that in real life, I struggle with women like them, as I don’t quite have the capacity to deal with their strong personalities, but spending time with them on the page was pure delight.

The book’s ensemble cast beautifully advances the narrative. How did you keep track of each character’s role?

I actually wrote each story line separately. I wrote the story in the present [Victoria’s] from beginning to end and then wrote the story in the past [Yoma’s] from beginning to end. So, in a way, I feel like I wrote two separate stories.

What would you like readers to take away from the novel about the nature of forgiveness?

I did not appreciate what a complex thing forgiveness is until I started writing this novel. My main struggle during the writing was to present questions that I hadn’t quite thought about before. How does one go about forgiving? Who is worthy of forgiveness? What is lost or gained by forgiving? Writing the novel gave me a whole new level of compassion for those who struggle or refuse to forgive. And of course, I’ve developed a greater awe for those who can forgive.