How many selves do we house? Thousands, thought Virginia Woolf. Are they one and the same? Not according to the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, whose alter egos – writers just like him – came with their own distinct names, biographies, mindsets and hot takes on the world. Born of him yet operating independently, he called them “heteronyms”. Are our selves on the same team? You wish, Helen Oyeyemi might say, holding up her new novel, which features a protagonist split seven ways, one self for each day of the week, and no two ever in full agreement.
Oyeyemi made her debut in 2005 with The Icarus Girl, the story of eight-year-old Jessamy, troubled and imaginative daughter of a Nigerian mother and British father, whose mysterious playmate, a girl named TillyTilly, is possibly her own destructive alter ego. A New New Me may at first glance seem like a thematic cousin; tonally, however, it belongs with Oyeyemi’s more recent works: playful, self-aware tales that revel in the hijinks of storytelling.
