The full lyric starts off with, 'Oh, you and all your vibrant youth / How could anything bad ever happen to you?' And it's just so reverent. I know I was listening to that album that the song 'Hunger' is on. I can't remember when exactly the title showed up. One of the few concrete external inspirations Emezi points to is the Florence + the Machine song ' Hunger.' You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty is a lyric taken directly from that song. 'I start writing it and then they decide what they are doing and I have to fatefully transcribe it.' Our conversation ended up being a meandering and fascinating one about themes, process, and, yes, a few moments of divine inspiration. 'When I'm writing books, I don't really get a choice about what the characters want to do,' Emezi says.

Frankly, this proved to be difficult because Emezi is an intuitive writer the work practically channels itself onto the page with little attention given to outside influence. Weeks before You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty was released, Emezi met with Thrillist over Zoom to talk about the novel's inspirations. But Emezi's prose traverses the emotional spectrum one page will be crushingly sad, the next will have you laughing out loud, and a few pages later will be devastatingly horny.

Feyi's world becomes confusing after they meet, forcing her to wrestle with the desires of others versus her own, the fear of moving on from her dead husband, and the realities of what she ultimately chooses. Only Nasir doesn't mention his dad is a reclusive celebrity chef named Alim Blake, who is also widowed. One rooftop party leads to a bar hangout that leads to a man, Nasir, inviting Feyi to stay at his family home on a Caribbean island. It follows Feyi Adekola, a young and hot visual artist living in Brooklyn with her also young and hot best friend Joy, through a summer as she heals from the trauma of her five-year widowhood via new relationships, spontaneous travel, Michelin star-worthy food, and art-making. Because mountaintop fucking: That's cinema, baby.Įmezi's first romance novel-after four works of bestselling fiction, a memoir, and a poetry collection, all published since 2018-is far more than just its steamy parts (which, it's worth mentioning, are written gorgeously, unafraid of the sex itself and its messy emotions). Jordan's production company scooped up the rights to make the book into a movie, with Emezi to executive produce, for Amazon. Luckily, 2018's National Book Award '5 Under 35' honoree Akwaeke Emezi's new summer romance must-read You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, which includes exactly such a scene, has followed this model perfectly: More than a year before it was published on May 27, Michael B. If two people have sex on a mountaintop at dawn in a novel, it should be greenlit for a movie adaptation immediately.

You make a fool of death