Debutiful

Téa Mutonji‘s My Person opens on an ordinary evening that will not stay ordinary: Tania and Margot, best friends of over twenty years, are getting ready to host their monthly dinner party when Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore. It is a small sentence that detonates a life. What follows is not a plot in the traditional sense but a slow unraveling — a “rigorous revision of history,” as the novel puts it — in which two women, one lack and the other white, who have loved each other since girlhood are forced to ask what, exactly, they have been to one another all this time.

Set against the frame of a tense, cross-race and class, will-they-won’t-they breakup power dynamics, My Person follows Tania’s meditative, often wry narration as she tries to live loudly on the outskirts of Margot’s world, even as Margot’s old betrayals come into sharper focus. But Mutonji refuses to let anyone play villain or victim. Margot means well — doesn’t she? They had felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania simply been blind to the patterns all along? The book keeps that ambiguity alive until its final pages, less interested in assigning blame than in understanding how two people build a shared history — and how brutal it is to dismantle one.

Threaded through the friendship story is an unflinching look at race, class, and privilege, and the quiet, corrosive weight of what is owed between people who love each other unevenly. In the interview that follows, Mutonji speaks about naming the book, writing without villains, and why a friendship breakup felt like the truest container for everything she wanted to explore.