emily’s Reviews > Dream Count > Status Update

“I wrote: ‘the real benefit of travel is that you encounter the comforting ordinariness of everyone else.”

I always imagined my choice of husband would be like my travel-writing, unusual, but not so much as to alienate my parents. Somebody foreign, with poetry in his soul. Not a successful Igbo engineer who still polished his shoes with kiwi polish that everybody’s father in Nigeria had used. Where did he even buy the tin?”

“If I said he beat me, or he’s not actually divorced, or he is seeing another woman, Aunty Jane would understand. Real meaty reasons, with sympathy poured on me, and opprobrium on him. But she would never understand the truth, that I broke up with Chuka because I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.”

“My father was a shrewd and cautious man, but because there was a part of him that dreamed, he knew how to let others dream.”

“Yet New York City often featured in my imagined lives, maybe because it is the city that is supposed to feature in imagined lives. Paris featured too, another city I do not care for. Paris wears its badge of specialness too heavily, and therefore gracelessly;”