Dear FabFitFun,
I’ve been reading romance since I was a preteen, and it has been an absolute pleasure to write one myself! With this story, I wanted to explore what searching for joy could look like after a terrible and life-altering loss. I wanted to write about how messy romantic relationships can be, and what it takes to choose love when the costs are high and the odds are against you. Most importantly, I wanted readers to see themselves in Feyi’s doubt for hope and her subsequent strength in allowing herself to accept the love and happiness she never thought she’d achieve again.
In You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, Feyi is slowly healing herself through her art and with some help from her best friend, Joy, who attempts to ease Feyi back into the dating scene. Though Feyi isn’t ready to throw herself into anything serious, she finds comfort in dating the perfect guy who whisks her away to his family’s house on a tropical island. To Feyi’s surprise, she falls for the one person in the house who is most definitely off limits—his father, Alim Blake, a Michelin star celebrity chef.
I loved the idea of a romance between two artists because much of who they are is communicated in their work, adding another layer to their relationship in the process. Feyi and Alim’s relationship is complicated in every sense of the word, but what’s most heartbreaking is that both deprive themselves of the joys that life offers to honor their grief. Their transition to the people they become at the end of the novel through the exploration of their feelings for each other is essential to the message of this book—It is never too late to find happiness in others and if not, in yourself.
Like any romance novel, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty has sexy romps, full-blown love affairs, and heated reactions to the sheer messiness of it all, but what I love most in this novel is that inherent messiness, the roads that are harder to take but ultimately pay off in a tremendous outcome, the choices we make in pursuit of the all-encompassing love we hope for ourselves and for those we cherish. I hope you enjoy the novel as much as I did writing it. I can’t wait for these characters to offer the hope we all need to take that leap into happiness.
–Akwaeke Emezi
P.S. US readers can get your copy of You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty here, Canadian readers may find it here, and UK readers may purchase here.
