WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 49Author Profile
of Limbe, Cameroon, Mbue was
always different. “I was a bookish
kid, and in the place I’m from, people
don’t really read books,” she says. She
came to America at 17 to attend
Rutgers University; How Beautiful
We We r e’s Thula comes to the United
States at the same age for her studies.
“I also grew up in Africa in a time
when people were trying to fight
back,” Mbue says. “There were a lot
of revolutionaries in my childhood,
not in my country but all over Africa.
So even as a child, I always had this
love and admiration for dissidents
and revolutionaries and protestors.”
Though Mbue shares some attri-
butes with her heroine, their lives
took very different tracks.
While Thula becomes a
revolutionary, Mbue earned
her bachelor’s in business administra-
tion and, later, her master’s from Columbia University’s Teachers
College. In 2009, after she’d been laid off from her job in
market research, she noticed black drivers waiting at the Time
Warner Center in Columbus Circle for white executives. That
moment sparked Behold the Dreamers.
The novel’s central character, a Cameroonian immigrant
living in Harlem who gets a job chauffeuring a Lehman Brothers
executive, sold for a rumored seven figures in 2014—the same
year Mbue became an American citizen. But before the book
sold, she says she faced “years of rejection.” She adds, “It was
more like a roller coaster than like smooth sailing, you know?”
Mbue is a private person—so private that when her agent was
sending out Behold the Dreamers to publishers, they would google
her name, “and there was nothing, because I just didn’t even
exist on the internet,” she says, laughing. “Then I got a book
deal, and then my name appeared on the internet, and then my
picture appeared on the internet, which was actually funny,
because there was no picture of me on the internet before.”
Mbue says she cares deeply about maintaining space to do
what is true to her, supporting the solace of “a cocoon” in which
to think and create without getting caught up in what other
people want. “You have to know yourself.” So she’s not on social
media. A friend manages her Facebook page. She prefers not to
talk about her kids or her husband (who reads all of her press
“but knows not to say a word to me”). She doesn’t even enjoy
talking much about herself, outside of her writing.
But there is one personal anecdote Mbue loves to tell. A few
years after moving to America, she visited a library in Falls
Church, Va., where she encountered Toni Morrison’s Song of
Solomon, an Oprah Book Club pick. It inspired her to start
writing, though at the time she kept her work a secret from her
friends and family, considering it just a
hobby. Then in 2017, when Mbue’s first
novel, Behold the Dreamers, was selected for
Oprah’s Book Club, Mbue received a call
from Winfrey herself. “I said, ‘You won’t
believe it, but you, your Book Club, is
what affected me and got me to start
writing, actually.’ Oprah responded, ‘Oh
my God, why haven’t I heard this story
before?’ ”
How Beautiful We Were, which Mbue
describes as an incredibly difficult book
to write—“a love song to anybody with
the strength to overthrow a system”—has
been nearly two decades in the making.
“I’ve had people say, ‘Oh, you write such
timely books,’ ” she says. “I’m like, ‘What
do you mean, timely? I’ve been writing
something that was on my mind in 2002!’
Nobody was talking about the oil
industry when I was writing this
book. I was thinking about a story
that mattered to me.”
Mbue returned to the novel in 2016, after Behold the Dreamers.
“I knew that I had to write the story that had been haunting
me,” she says. “And then after Mr. Trump won the election,
there was all this hysteria, and I just was like, ‘You guys just
continue your noise and hysteria. I’m just going to work on my
story.’ It was a wonderful, wonderful sense of solace, having
this story.”
How Beautiful We Were went through “a gazillion drafts,” says
Mbue, who poured herself into the task, spurred by an innate
curiosity and a sense of herself as an observer informed by two
very different worlds. “I’ve seen such a range of what it means
to be a woman, and what it means to stand up, and what it
means to have a voice. I think America really shaped my mind,
and Cameroon shaped my character.”
Mbue didn’t hesitate to ask the hard questions, to dive into
those stories behind the story: What is it like to be a freedom
fighter, or a revolutionary, or a dissident? What are the sacrifices
you make? And what sacrifices do your family make? And what
price do you pay?
When asked if she’s nervous about preparing to publish a
book in the midst of a pandemic, she shakes her head. “I just
don’t want to make anything worse. We want it to be over as
soon as possible, so we all have to do our part. And hopefully it
is over soon.” Then she adds, “I am very much at peace, because
it was a story I had to tell, and I told it, and my part is mostly
done.” ■Jen Doll is the author of the YA novel Unclaimed Baggage (FSG) and
the memoir Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial
Wedding Guest (Riverhead).