The Baby Is Mine by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Nigerian-British writer Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut novel – My Sister The Serial Killer – was a critical and commercial success upon its release a few years ago and this micro follow up (part of a project called Quick Reads that is mentioned nowhere in this British edition other than in the Acknowledgements section) is an excellent pandemic novella about parenthood, responsibility, self-awareness and growing up…

Bambi is a playboy hoe type who has a sweet lockdown deal in a great flat with a woman who is exactly his type, however his indiscrete and roving WhatsApp chirpsing gets the better of him, and she throws him out…

Bambi’s previous housemate has already filled his old room, none of his other regular lovers are looking for a live-in situation mid-COVID, his sister is stuck out of town and she won’t let him go and stay unchaperoned at hers, so he heads to the only place he can: the house of his recently dead uncle, figuring that the old guy’s much younger widow has likely gone to grieve and do lockdown with her own family and is unlikely to have updated the guy’s notoriously lax home security…

Bambi heads over, lets himself in and is getting ready to whiiiile away the time needed for the clubs and the bars (and the dancefloors and their very appealing dancers) to reopen in this empty house, when he turns a corridor and finds not just his widowed aunt, but also his uncle’s sexy mistress and one (1) baby, who both women claim is theirs by Bambi’s formerly horny uncle.

Drama – light, near-comedic drama – ensues, with potential secrets to be revealed about slutty Bambi’s previous meeting with his dead uncle’s sexy mistress (did they really just say “hello” that night in the club???), revelations about whose baby it is and whether one of the women is lying or genuinely delusional…

So, in a brief (too brief!) 100 pages with basically size 12 double spaced font (so it’s more like 40 pages of a normal book), Bambi grows to take responsibility of the warring household, and grows to feel compassion and affection for anyone and anything other than his hefty libido.

It’s short, yes, and it’s not too serious and it’s not too weighty, but it’s far from slight.

It’s a slice of a family’s life, a slice of a person’s life, a nice little picaresque coming-of-age piece about growing up.

I liked it a lot!

If you have 30-45 minutes and access to this, it’s definitely worth your time!

–///–

Are the protagonists of coming-of-age narratives getting older? I mean, I get it, I don’t think it should stop… I’m also a millennial (and we’re not the youngest legal adults any more) and in many ways I don’t feel like I’ve come into my own in any meaningful way yet…

As those material markers of adulthood become less accessible due to increasing global inequality and the intentionally strangled housing market everywhere there’s regular work, then how we measure or label “maturity” has to change too, no?

I dunno…

I feel like I still have plenty of growing up to do. I hope I do. And I don’t think that used to be something that people in their mid-thirties felt, they certainly weren’t “meant to” feel it? Maybe I’m not “meant to” feel it either?

I don’t fucking know.

But yes.

From the ashes of the mid life crisis novel rises the 30ish coming-of-age novel.

We still find caesurae and liminal moments in fiction, but they no longer stick with just the numerically young.

Or do they?

I don’t fucking know anything.

I don’t know

I don’t know

I don’t know

But I do know that The Baby Is Mine was excellent!

Yes.