Tomi Adeyemi Says Goodbye to Orïsha

Ayush June 27, 2024

Tomi Adeyemi is standing between two worlds. When Children of Anguish and Anarchy came out this week, she closed a chapter that began seven years ago, when her she sold her debut Children of Blood and Bone in one of the largest ever YA deals. In the time since, she’s hit the bestseller list, become a publishing legend and a Time 100 honoree, appeared at Paris Fashion Week, written a screenplay, and turned 30. And, perhaps most importantly, she’s brought a Nigerian-American perspective, one that reflected her family, to popular literature.

The Children of Blood and Bone series introduced readers to Zélie, a young girl fighting to defeat an evil regime and restore magic to Orïsha, her devastated community. In the weeks before the release of Anguish and Anarchy, Adeyemi has been thinking about just how much she held in while writing the books. “I didn’t realize this until I turned in the third book, but I’ve been carrying the stress of this trilogy for the seven years it took to create it,” she says over lunch in Manhattan. “I do have a very joyous side, and I won’t say that that joy wasn’t there, but I didn’t realize how heavy the stress was until it died.”

When she thinks about what this moment means, Adeyemi is struck by images of all the different places she wrote in. They all looked, and felt, much the same. “I remember where I was writing before Children of Blood and Bone got a book deal. I remember the writing for Children of Virtue and Vengeance. If there was a time-lapse of all of it, you’re just going to see me in a dark room because I kind of have a vampire writing aesthetic. But it’s just me alone,” she says. Her days now are filled with very different things. “There’s just celebration and there’s community and I’m connecting with my fans on TikTok. I can answer the DMs again and we’re excited about tour and then there’s so much happening with the Children of Blood and Bone movie. The creation was a very solitary trial, which took a community to get me through, but at the end of it, [I] had to put every word on that page.”

Caroline Fiss

Makeup by Michel Maquillage.

The release marks a new stage for Adeyemi—she’ll still write, but maybe not YA. She’ll still embrace her fans, but maybe people won’t know exactly what she’s working on at all times. “You know when your iPhone storage is always running out, so you have to delete a bunch of old videos? There’s so much that has left my brain. I look at these three books and it’s actually, literally an out-of-body experience. There’s just so much freedom in my spirit and freedom in my mind,” she says.

Children of Virtue and Vengeance, the trilogy’s second entry, was released in 2019 and for devoted fans, the five-year wait for the next book was a long one. “I did very much feel like I didn’t want to leave my fans waiting. Shout-out my fans, because they’re really sweet and they’re like, ‘We actually care about you as a person,’” says Adeyemi, who begins to get teary-eyed. “They’ve been very much like, ‘We’re patient. Where is it though?’ So, to be able to say, ‘It’s here, it’s here. It’s finally here.’ There’s a group of people who have been on this journey with me for seven years, and then there’s this whole new group of people who just discovered the first book, just read the second book, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t wait for two months [for the third],’ so it’s like I have two swells.”

She’s just finished the first draft of her fourth book. It’s an adult book, set in reality, but has a darkness that even she herself can be taken aback by. “She scares me. This protagonist, the things that she does. Mind you, I understand all of them and I’m like, I think I’m capable of anything my protagonists are capable of,” she says. “My books are very intense, but I think something about this one feels so much more intense because they’re not living in a fantasy world where it’s par for the course to pull out your staff and crack a guard in the head. There’s something about it being like, there are these rules, there are these laws, and this is your mind and this is what you’re doing.”

Creating a world with new characters has given Adeyemi a new degree of flexibility and a bit more space to explore her ideas. “From the reader perspective, no one knows anything about it, I’m not on deadline for it, so it’s like I still have my own safe little inner world where I’m working out the adventure,” she says.

The creation was a very solitary trial, which took a community to get me through, but at the end of it, [I] had to put every word on that page.”

When she finishes her second draft, the book will go to her agent first, then right to her dad, who has always been her first reader. “With the first book I tried to get published, it took me four and a half years, but got rejected. Someone asked me, ‘How did you convince your Nigerian parents [to let you do this]?’ she recalls. “My dad read that [first] book. He told me, ‘Honey, it’s good. I would tell you if it wasn’t because I don’t want you to do this.”

That book was never published (though perhaps it still might be one day) but it taught Adeyemi that there’s so much more than writing that goes into publishing a book. “It taught me everything about writing, about revising, editing, publishing, how to get a literary agent, how to write a query letter. Even though it felt like a failure at the time, as it got 63 rejections from literary agents, looking back, I’m like that was my training wheels,” she says.

Adeyemi started writing when she was 5. She was raised in Hinsdale, Illinois, as part of a tight-knit family with Nigerian parents. “I’d written so many stories [before Children of Blood and Bone], but I’d never written a story that was based in not only something real, but something that I had a genuine connection to,” she says. “When they’re like, ‘Would you call yourself an American writer or would you call yourself a Nigeria?’ I was like, ‘Nigerian-American, because they’re specific.’ Yes, we can see some Octavia Butler and some Toni Morrison here. But the Nigerian-American mix is so specific.” Her characters and settings take so much from the Yoruba beliefs and traditions that her parents were raised with, at that the same time that the battles in Orïsha mirror police brutality, racism, and incarceration. Adeyemi is honoring her parents at the same time that she’s putting forth a notion of what a fairer American could look like.

a woman posing wearing a brown jacket and jeans

Caroline Fiss

Makeup by Michel Maquillage.

Right now, Adeyemi is heavily involved in the long-awaited Children of Blood and Bone film, which she believes will allow even more people to connect with the story. Late last year it was announced that Gina Prince-Bythewood, of The Woman King and Love & Basketball, would be directing. “She’s the calmest force of nature I’ve ever witnessed and collaborating with her has been so much fun. I remember I was describing it to someone, I was like, ‘It feels like the yin and yang symbol coming together,’” Adeyemi says. She has the encyclopedic knowledge of the world of her books, while Prince-Bythewood has the ability to see Orïsha in a whole new way. “What Gina does so well is tell these deep, complex stories of women who look like us front and center, with incredible action set pieces, incredible cinematography. It feels divine. It feels bigger than [just] making this project. We’re really in sync.”

Adeyemi is bursting with excitement and joy and energy today, but she is most of the time. She loves writing but has a list of other passions, as well. Modeling is one—she recently attended a camp led by Coco Rocha. She loves living in New York City, which she says “feels like an aquarium, when you’re one of the fish flowing. Like Finding Nemo, without the bad part.” She’s single and has been going on dates. She loves napping and Central Park. “It’s funny because I do a lot, but my day still feels mostly like those things. I’m talking to my sister. I’m talking to my friends, going on this date, canceling this date, telling this person I don’t think there’s anything there,” she says.

In her 20s, Adeyemi achieved things that most people could only do over the course of a whole career. Now that she’s on the other side of the trilogy, though, she wants things to look a little bit different. She has other priorities now. “Fitness is really important to me, that’s one of my sanctuaries. Church is really important to me. Dancing in the kitchen while cooking my eggs,” she says. “The priority used to be the book and the deadline. Now, the priority in a day is like, what do you need to do to take care of yourself?”

These are the things that make the excitement of what Adeyemi will achieve more potent now than ever. She’s moved through a process of defining who she is as a person and who she is as the creator of Orïsha. “All I have with me is me and what I’m doing that day or how I’m feeling. [There was a] disentangling because to be a writer, to spend so much time in that inner world alone, almost 20 years, to feel like that was my value on earth,” she says. It was. But she was born for a lot of other things, too. “I couldn’t tell you that two or three years ago. I’d be like, it’s all my career. Now, I’m like, no. I take immense joy and pride and I work very hard and I am very disciplined and I try and execute my absolute best. But I’m also really happy and proud of myself, just the human I am.”

These changes have helped Adeyemi see just how glorious what she’s doing is. “I’m in a place where intellectually I’m coming to terms with how insular, and beautiful, and introverted, and inner world the artistic and creation process is, and then how a million ripples in an ocean, the actual putting art into the world process is.”