Who I Always Was: A Memoir

Essayist Okokon debuts with a tender exploration of how her Midwestern childhood and the death of her father have shaped her. In nostalgia-tinted essays, Okokon discusses growing up as one of the only Black children in lily-white River Falls, Wis., struggling to sustain romantic connections in her 20s, and staying in touch with her Nigerian roots. At the center of the collection is the death of Okokon’s father, who went to visit his home village in Nigeria in the early 1990s and died there during a possible flare-up of his seizure disorder—though the specifics remain murky. While the narrative is rooted in loss, Okokon avoids excessive gloom by charting her personal growth: she writes of how she learned, in adulthood, to celebrate her mother’s unwavering support after her father’s death, and draws on the Ghanaian concept of “sankofa” (meaning “go back and fetch it”) to reckon with her past. “I am responsible for living the life I want to live, and for living it on and with purpose,” Okokon writes, and it lands not as a cliché but as a hard-won insight. Readers will savor this stirring self-portrait. Agent: Brettne Bloom, Book Group. (Feb.)