Peace Adzo Medie Quotes

I’ve been impacted by many books, but one that has profoundly impacted me as a writer is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. After reading it as a teenager, I began to think seriously about how I could use words to create images and to effectively show the reader what I was thinking. Before then, my focus had been on producing fiction to entertain myself.

In the social sciences, we know. . . that our identities matter for our research: They matter for what we research, how we conduct our research, and how we write our findings. In the same way, I think our identities matter for the stories we tell and how we tell them.

Respect is important and something that is very much needed in society, but has been constructed by some to mean submission and self-denial, especially in regard to young women.

I have to fight for what I want, for what's mine.

How can I be a good wife with no husband by my side?

So my books never end up being the books that I planned. His Only Wife was a very different story when I started writing it. I was returning to Ghana and His Only Wife started off with a main character who in some ways shared some similarities with my own life - someone living in the US and coming back to Ghana after graduate school. I'm sure you can see that Afi in His Only Wife is not that person, so that shows you how much my writing changes once I begin writing.

I’m very interested in presenting the truth of people who are not centered in mainstream narratives. But I’m also fascinated by how we construct our version of truth, by how two people can have the same experience and not only describe it differently but also believe that their version is the only truth. The novel I’m currently working on excavates this phenomenon.

You need connections, you need to have a certain kind of training, you need an agent, and if you send your work to an agent, it ends up in a slush pile. It was all too much. So I never sent out a book manuscript - my plan was that I would look into publishing my books when I retired from academia. I just figured that I would keep writing, then when I was 65 or 70, I would try to get published. That was the plan.

I use fiction to teach in my social science courses and I am always keen to explore the issues that I work on in my research.

If there was one thing I agreed with my mother on, it was that one could never be sure about a person’s intentions, no matter how kind that person seemed.

I knew that even though we were surrounded by a large family, we had nobody.

Tell the story you want to tell. It's a very simple message but it's really affected my writing in a positive way. I hadn't read any book on Ghana like His Only Wife so I couldn't look at anyone's trajectory of success and say ‘this person wrote a book like this so if I write it, I will have a similar response’. I just knew that this was the story I wanted to tell. You have to believe in the story and trust the book will find its readers and readers will find the book.

Marriage shouldn’t be a never-ending competition where you spend your life fighting to be seen and chosen.

A person who talks so freely about her own life will talk just as freely about yours.

Not everyone who smiles with you wishes you well.