I’ll close with the best kind of story, the kind that tangibly changes something in your life. I love Oyeyemi’s magical realism for all sorts of reasons but this story stays with me because it brought me my favorite holiday: St. Jordi Day. The story is not actually about the holiday but the simple description of a lover telling their new partner about this real holiday where Catalonians exchange books and roses on April 23rd inspired me to suggest it to my then-new girlfriend. A decade later, we’re still married and we’ve got a decade’s worth of surprising books to show for the ongoing exchange. What could be better than that?
First published in Granta, 2014. Collected in What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Riverhead Books, 2016. Read it online here
A Personal Anthology 