A New New Me — Dinaburg Writes

by Helen Oyeyemi

Here’s a thought that haunts me: I believe I am great at picking out picture books for my kids at the library. Whenever they’re busy with coloring pages or blocks or whatnot, I think my hit rate for bangers is really high. But–and this is a banal thought that could only seem introspective coming from a man in his middle age–are they the most interesting, or just the most interesting to me? Cue the wavy fingers of faux insight.

The kids are little, so they seek comfort and familiarity in this big wide confusing world: out of a stack of eleven or so books, one or two achieve top honors, are read and reread until they are returned. Do I nudge? Do I shift the pile, or suggest which to grab once they’ve all arrived at home? Of course. Does it work? No, never. Have we checked out Sunflower Sisters twice somehow in 2025, and read it as our first book selection nearly every night? Yes. Have Where’s Joon? and Where’s Halmoni? started to teach me Korean? No. But I’ve certainly carried them home a lot.

Full lines of text are integrated into their shared lexicon: the first week when dinner was peppered with, “I sip my lemonade in the moonlight” made me think I was having some sort of mental break: as far as my wife and I can figure, it’s a misremembered line from So Tortoise Dug, a book we had read a handful of times and then returned months prior. The two-year-old saw a tortoise at the zoo yesterday and said, “It’s like mouse’s friend from that book.” The five-year-old likes to drink from her water bottle in the dark, as it is more like moonlight.

I don’t even remember reading it that much. Sincerely, I did not realize that book was part of the canon.

Wholesale incorporation of linguistic fragments is, well, how we cohere into a persona. The thousand-thousand books these kids will inhabit over their first decade shape them into who they will be in ways I will never fully know. Every single library selection is like the stroke of hammer on chisel, only you don’t know the sculpture, nor even the substrate. Just keep swinging, I suppose, because any form is better than “unshaped slab”.

A New New Me is So Tortoise Dug, for me: it carved itself joyfully into my heart. I have been aware of Helen Oyeyemi for years, having borrowed but never started Boy, Snow, Bird at least once. Sometimes I conceptually conflated her with Ruth Ozeki, though now that I’ve actually read books by them both I doubt that will happen again. Having no other context, I don’t know where or how to place A New New Me into her larger body of work, but it was enough that I will go back and find something else to read, soon.

The writing is sprightly. Things that seemed like absurdist fun looped back into something else with the vigor of a stand-up’s callback; the overall plot was weird enough to be, and stay, interesting. The whole book was satisfying in it’s pacing. I was really thrilled reading this. There is no need to be coy about the plot, as I never regretted starting this book already knowing that our narrator, Kinga, has different personalities for each day of the week:

Thanks to the omnipotence of People You May Know suggestions, my work gets interrupted by people who’ve met you–it’s always you they’re trying to contact, Kinga-F, never any of the others. This video was from a member of a stag party that accosted you on the street, lifted you up in the air, and ran down to the riverbank singing a drinking song…It looks as if they’ve caught you on your way back from the corner shop. You’re not dressed from a party. you’ve got a coat thrown on over your pajamas, but that doesn’t stop you from accepting the invitation.

All the Kingas talk to each other, some writing serious journals, other dictating missives through voice-transcription software. All of them are fun and strange, different in voice as they are in goal. I sometimes recommend people go blind into a book, but I don’t think there is anything to be spoiled here: the journey is far better than any single revelation. I do have a recommendation, though: if I could read New New again, I would start it on a Monday, and read one chapter each day (each chapter is one day, thus one Kinga). There is no return to prior Kingas, so you’re left sorting out context and reliability as you get deeper into this septa-fractured perspective:

He helped me into my coat, left arm, right arm, the warmth of his touch passing from my shoulder to my wrist, where he tugged the sleeves so they covered the cuffs of my jumper. I liked what I was seeing, too, this big man dressing a doll with the tender solemnity that separates doll stylists from measly dilettantes.

This separates [any noun] stylists from measly dilettantes is such a delightful and usable phrase. Even keeping that particulars–“stylist” was applicable in the original context–decouples it from reality so that I love it even more. My kids sure aren’t drinking lemonade every time they claim to sip it, nor is there much moonlight at 5:30pm, but that phrase is part of their lexicon now.

I would have liked, here in my review, to attribute the dilettante line to the correct Kinga, but A New New Me was on hold by someone else so it has long since been returned to the library. It is probably Kinga-C—tonally, it could only be Kinga-Casimira—but I will have to wait a whole library hold cycle to confirm.

Just use the internet rather than waiting for a physical book, you say? All the world’s information at my fingertips, you say?

But three weeks of real-time later, which has been compressed down to scrolling past a single image for you, my hunch was confirmed. Kinga-C, of course. This type of dedication is what separates research stylists from measly dilettantes.

Go on and read this book. It’s a trip, and I loved it, and it made me want to read more of the author. I don’t know what higher praise there can be.