Q&A with Theresa Okokon: She wrote a memoir for her future self

Editor’s Note: An excerpt of this interview appeared in Cognoscenti’s weekly Sunday newsletter of ideas and opinions. To become a subscriber, sign up here.
Having the opportunity to work with writers of all backgrounds and experiences is one of my very favorite things about working at Cog. Just this week, I got to work with Anita Diamant on the second installment of “The Firehose” and chat with Julie Wittes Schlack about her lifelong obsession with the Guinness World Records.
There’s almost nothing more exciting for us than seeing our writers go on to do creative work that, even in some small way, builds on the essays we’ve published. I think of Leah Hager Cohen’s book, “I Don’t Know.” Or of John Vercher, a long-time Cog author whose latest novel “Devil Is Fine” was just long-listed for the Pen Faulkner Award.
And so it is with Theresa Okokon, who wrote her first piece for us, a stirring essay reflecting on what it means to be Black in America, in May 2020. Theresa is a storyteller (ask her how she came to be a professional storyteller and she’ll tell you a tale about roller derby, a YMCA production of the “Vagina Monologues” and massmouth, which used to be a Boston-based storytelling community), who’s been creating art since she was a little kid. Her first book, “Who I Always Was,” a memoir in essays, was published earlier this month and I jumped at the chance to talk with her about it.
I read the book in two sittings — late one night and early the following morning — which is basically unheard of for me. (I am in a life stage of perpetual exhaustion; I climb into bed and fall asleep immediately.) Theresa’s book is about belonging and loss and growing up. Reading it was like having a conversation with her: funny, thoughtful, unexpected, bracingly honest.
You can read an excerpt from the book here and our Q&A with Theresa below. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cloe Axelson: In your memoir, the author is a character. I’m wondering, how is Theresa the character different from Theresa the writer?
Theresa Okokon: My mentor and memoir instructor, Alysia Abbott, taught me to think about it like this: You have the “I” character, who is the Theresa on the page, who the plot is happening to. And then you have the narrator, and that’s the Theresa who’s writing about the “I” character. The narrator is also making meaning of what’s happening in the plot.
Oftentimes our “I” characters are just dummies. They’re kind of like a kid with their nose up against a TV screen, which prevents them from being able to see the bigger picture.
The difference between Theresa the narrator and Theresa the “I” character is perspective, and distance and time. It’s a lot easier to look back on my past selves and have compassion for them now, than it was for me to have compassion for myself at the time.
I don’t think I had a whole lot of compassion or grace for myself as a middle schooler. I was just doing what all other middle schoolers are trying to figure out: How do I fit in?
What was different about my experience is that there was this layer of race. I was a Black kid in an almost entirely white environment. But the desire to fit in was the same, and that desire to fit in held through for many years of my life.
CA: The central mystery in your book is the tragic death of your dad. He’s a young guy, 42, when he heads to Nigeria to celebrate his mom’s life, and then he just never comes back. You were 9 years old at the time. There’s good reason to suspect foul play, perhaps among your father’s own family. When you started writing this book, were you sleuthing to try to figure out once and for all what happened to your dad?
TO: When I decided to write about my dad’s death, I knew I was going to talk to my mom, her brother and my cousin. I was going to get them all to tell me the truth, and then was going to write it. That was the plan.
But then all three of them told me different things – like it was all the same thing, kind of, but not all the same thing. And what I started to realize was that there just wasn’t a truth with a capital “T.”
There wasn’t one truth that could be said. Part of that is because different people believe different stories about what might have happened. Part of it is because there wasn’t a lot of clear communication when my dad was dying, so where exactly it happened and who exactly was there when it happened was never clearly communicated.
And part of it is because my dad’s death happened while he was back home in Nigeria and the way that death would be interpreted in my dad’s community in Nigeria is just culturally very different than the way death is interpreted in the [United] States. And so, for me to say definitively, “this is what happened” is inherently canceling out one culture or another.
CA: How did you deal with that? I think it’s accurate to say that you may never know what happened to your dad for sure.
TO: I didn’t like it. I’m very much a person who, for the longest time, didn’t even read fiction because I’m like, why? I don’t want to read things that aren’t true. I think this is probably rooted in there having always been so many different versions of truth about my dad.
After my dad’s death I became a person who was maybe overly attached to the concept of truth. I was overly attached to feeling like I was being lied to. I always wanted to know, are you telling me the truth? Are you telling me a lie? It was one or the other.
In writing this book and figuring out how to tell these stories, I had to let go of that. I think I always knew that that’s not how it works, but the writing made it become very obvious that that’s just not how any of this works.
CA: How do memory and imagination play off each other in your work?
TO: So many of the stories in the book are ones of family lore. They’re the stories that get told over and over again. Something I realized while writing was that many of these stories are told so often that they feel like memory. They feel the same way that that memory feels. I have the same imagery and pictures of them in my head as I do for things that I can actually remember.
In the book, Theresa the narrator is often realizing that something is not an actual memory. I had to do some grappling with how to make sense of that. What does it mean when I don’t actually remember something? How do I tell a story that has those kinds of holes? Because I don’t think you have to remember everything. I think you’re allowed to be a human who sometimes has a gap – and part of the story you’re telling is what’s in that gap.
CA: Who did you write this book for? Your family? Yourself? Your dad?
TO: On one of the first days of my memoir writing class, where the first draft of this book was written, we were given this activity for memoirists to answer this very question: Who are you writing for? And: Who are you writing to?
I was never good at doing that activity. I think I did it a million times and probably had a different answer every time — just trying to find a way to be eloquent, without really answering the question.
I think I wrote the book for my future self. I want my future self to be able to look at it and say, “Yes, that’s how I felt at the time; that’s what I believed at the time. That was the truth at the time.” I think that’s one of the biggest goals I could have for it.
In the meantime, I hope other people read it. Maybe they’ll see a plot that’s different from their own lives, but still find a reflection of their life in it: because they’ve also struggled with the question, “Where do I belong?”
Follow Cognoscenti on Facebook and Instagram. And sign up for our weekly newsletter.