A New New Me: A Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

Riverhead Books. 2025. 224 pages.

Whereas much of Helen Oyeyemi’s past fiction has engaged with fairy tales, A New New Me takes on another genre: the mystery novel. Oyeyemi brings her characteristic absurdist style to a highly formalized plot structure: Kinga, a Polish woman living in Prague, has a distinct personality for each day of the week (Kingas A through G), and they keep a journal in which each self documents life for the future Kingas, who will have no memory of the past six days. The novel remixes familiar tropes—the stranger with a secret, the split personality warring against itself, the isolation of contemporary life—with chatty wit.

The novel begins on a Monday, when Kinga A discovers a man zip-tied in a chair in her pantry closet. She has no idea who he is. And he is not forthcoming with details about himself, aside from a name: Jarda. Which of the Kingas, she wonders in her voice-to-text account for her sisters B–G, could have let him in? Are they being betrayed?

Oyeyemi is as virtuosic here as ever, laying out the seven Kingas’ narrations of their days with just enough mortar to hold the structure together. Their apartment, their phone, their bank account, the contents of their fridge, and, of course, their journal provide physical and digital connections that keep them tethered to each other. But their experiences of life—especially as they relate to the same few individuals—could hardly be more different. Jarda, his mother, the Kingas’ own mother, and Kinga-A’s and Kinga-B’s coworkers at the matchmaking agency hold such different significances in the minds of these different Kingas that they, at times, seem to operate as entirely different people. On one day, Jarda is an all-consuming puzzle, while on another, he is almost too superfluous to the events at hand to even register in the journal entry.

But across these narratives, the observational humor about different types of millennial white ladies is hilariously spot-on: there’s the cynical entitled one who listens to a playlist called “101 versions of Mac the Knife” during dinner, the basic boss lady who begins each week singing along to Snoop Dog’s “Affirmation Song,” and the self-care one who, when she isn’t handling all the medical appointments, spends all day soaking in a magnesium bath and drinking wine.

It’s a propulsive, enjoyable fiction that leaves readers hungering not just for the next clue to what plot might be afoot but, perhaps even more, for what surprises of habit await in the next Kinga’s perspective. As in other Oyeyemi novels, there are hints of serious themes: an organized crime ring stages home invasions in different neighborhoods across Prague to manipulate property values. Questions of national identity and language and belonging burble up. But, as I found to be the case with Gingerbread, which invited then resisted being read as a Brexit novel, references to serious themes cannot be boiled down or summed up into a neat takeaway. The result is an unsettlingly slippery yet delightful romp through a series of perspectives in which readers will never quite find their footing.

For those willing to buy in, A New New Me offers a challenging and fun exploration of memory and agency in modern life.

Nicole Schrag
Tampa, Florida