I didn’t draw any inspiration from actual female serial killers, not real ones or ones from literature. Out of every character in the novel, she’s the one having the best time. She just does what she wants to do when she wants to do it. She has no sympathy for her victims, no remorse, no sense of consequence. She’s not this broken female who’s acting from a place of hurt. Sometimes, she just does it because she can. That’s something I love about Ayoola - I don’t think her actions are always from a place of pain or revenge or self protection. What really fascinated me about the black widow spider was that the males are not prey until the females are hungry, and if they’re not hungry, the males get away. I also wrote a fantasy that had a tribe of black widows. They agree to may the best woman win, but they each keep sabotaging the other’s dates, and every time, it becomes more dangerous, until the guy actually dies in a fire. After that, I wrote a short comedy about two sisters who go on a series of dates with the same guy. And eventually, they are both after the same man. Her best friend, the unattractive one, was the only one who knew this. The first would marry rich men, and then she would, at some point, poison them and gain all their wealth. It was about two friends, one attractive, the other unattractive. Years earlier, I wrote a poem about black widows. I’ve been playing with the idea ever since. The first time I came across this idea of the black widow spider, I thought it was hilarious: the fact that the female will mate with the male, and if she happens to be hungry afterwards and the guy is still hanging around, she’ll eat him. My inspiration for Ayoola was the black widow spider. Here, Braithwaite walks us through how she conceptualized her serial killer. That’s where the comedy happened.” Midway through the story, Ayoola returns home from a trip to Dubai with one of her lovers, a new diamond comb tucked into her dreadlocks. “I just wanted to tell a really good story, so I needed to keep it light. “Dark stuff comes naturally to me, but I didn’t want to bog people down in messages or morals,” Braithwaite explained in a recent call from Lagos. As the story moves swiftly toward its dark conclusion, Korede, the narrator, begins to suspect that the younger, more beautiful Ayoola, is killing just because she feels like it. But it’s a sly, slim read that resists easy political narratives. The novel has been hailed as “an ideal book for the present moment” because of its portrayal of unlikable women joining forces to take down abusive men. In Oyinkan Braithwaite’s noirish, critically acclaimed debut, My Sister, the Serial Killer, one sister kills men, and the other cleans up the blood and hauls away the bodies.
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