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.
Asale Angel-Ajani: My Person is a bold book that kicks off with a note from the author, sort of explaining the title of the book—this is a rare choice for a novel. Can you discuss what was behind this decision? What did that phrase—and the ownership tangled up in it—mean to you as you were naming the book, and how did it shape the way you wrote Tania and Margot?
Téa Mutonji: We had desk buddies in elementary school, at least at mine, and that person was quite literally your assigned person. I think that’s kind of annoying and also kind of comforting. When I decided that Tania and Margot would have been in each other’s life from such a young age, I remembered the anxiety of being assigned a new person every year. I remembered the relief I felt. And I thought this would be an interesting introduction to give these girls, to give them this title, which also creates a sense of pride and obligation. It gave me a big enough stage to fully investigate the meaning of “my” and “person,” and to complicate that from all angles. It was such a cherry on top to also merge that with the sentiment from Grey’s Anatomy. For Tania and Margot, it’s beautiful to belong to someone, but it is also suffocating.
AAA: You’ve said there’s no romance bigger than the friendship between two girls who grow into women together. Why did a friendship breakup, rather than a romantic one, feel like the right container for the themes you wanted to explore: codependency, betrayal, the slow work of “unknowing” someone?
TM: I sincerely believe that the people who grow up with you, intimately, closely, even if it’s not perfect, imprint on you. They see you when you are becoming, when you are finding your footing. There’s something a bit uncanny by that level of confrontation. And there’s something also impossible about walking away from that. You can’t just erase the person who was there at the age of 10, if they were also there at the age of 15, and then again 25. Romantic relationships usually don’t spread like a virus like that in someone’s life. That felt like a compelling way to look at themes of codependency and betrayal. The stakes felt a bit more confusing to me. Is it codependency or is it just history?
AAA: The novel looks at race and privilege alongside Tania and Margot’s friendship, particularly around ideas of ownership and what is owed. How did you think about writing that power imbalance without letting either woman become simply the villain or the victim?
TM: For this friendship to have worked for as long as it did, there must’ve been some level of true love. That was my guiding light. We might meet them at a time where love feels sparse, but love is there, and love is what kept them together, and I think for me, the point of investigating race, and class, and privilege and just life, was to consider rather or not love is enough, when faced with the real world. That’s how they both stay human. They both had real deep love for each other. I didn’t want to shy away from that, or from politics, and class and race. I wanted to write this story from a place of discomfort. And I think power imbalance is usually sticky. And it is incredibly hard to really look at yourself the way that Tania does, the way that Margot does. But when you do, I think that it allows for a lot of grace and humanity.
AAA: My Person balances complex characters and complex issues with an admirable quality of direct, yet subtle wit. How do you find the humor inside material this raw, and does it come naturally in the drafting, or is it something you sharpen in revision?
TM: Humor comes second. First, I have to deal with my obsessive poetry. Behind all of that, I like the sound of laughter when it comes from me and especially when I am reading to an audience. I am always thinking of how written words will sound out loud, how a scene will inspire a little giggle, how a paragraph reads in the mind. I hope for something that feels balanced. And I try to make that part of my practice in a way that feels intentional and appropriate. In real life, I like to threaten people with my supposed interest in stand-up comedy. When I am dealing with material that is heavy, that is raw, I like to leave room for joy.
AAA: Your first book, Shut Up You’re Pretty, was a story collection; My Person is your debut novel. What did the longer form let you do with Tania and Margot that short fiction couldn’t? Was there anything you had to unlearn from writing short stories?
TM: There’s a tiny part of me that thinks that all novels could be an email. And, I had to take myself seriously enough to believe that I had more than the content of an email to explore. I had to unlearn this thinking that a novel can be another other than a novel. I no longer think that’s true. And allowing myself to really sit with that, means that I didn’t actually write a book about a friendship break-up. That’s just what the email subject line wants you to believe. And that’s been the greatest lesson ever.
AAA: Without spoiling it, the novel keeps the reader guessing whether Tania and Margot will actually break up or find their way back. How did you decide to sustain that tension—was it more a matter of plot, character, or something else? What other novels or stories inspired you as you were thinking through the book’s overall structure?
TM: I know this sounds so silly, but I had to spend time with both characters. I had to write drafts and drafts from a third-person perspective of Tania’s life with and without Margot and of Margot’s life with and without Tania and I had to spend enough time in both possibilities. I’m not sure that I was following a fixed structure. I feel more that I was following reasonable consequences. I read Miranda July’s Something That Needs Nothing, and I remember this heaviness feeling of love and loss. I followed a feeling more than I followed a plot.
AAA: When readers close My Person, what do you hope they carry with them—maybe about their own friendships, or about ones they’ve had to let go, generally, and more specifically, about interracial friendships in particular?
TM: I hope that people consider how much an honest conversation can go a long way. It’s hard. You have to establish safety first. And maybe, you have to just reach for that. I think most conflicts just need to be nurtured a little. And, as we grow, as we age, as we change, there needs to be room for adjustment. There needs to be an invitation to be reintroduced to the people we are spending time with. Change is beautiful. When it comes to race, in undergrad, I remember I used to tell people, “I’m black, it’s okay to say I’m Black. That’s not an ugly word, I love that word,” and I genuinely feel that my attitude towards my own reality allowed me to be a lot more confident than Tania is. And maybe it even inspired the people in my life to be open with me, uncomfortable with me, honest with me. It would be nice to think that My Person could inspire people to sit in discomfort, especially in friendships.
AAA: Finally, are you working on anything right now that you can share?
TM: For some odd reason, I am writing a second novel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Téa Mutonji is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection of short stories, Shut Up You’re Pretty was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019) and Canada Reads (2024). It won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award (2020) and the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji was a recipient of the Writer’s Trust Rising Star award (2022) and received the Jill Davis Fellowship (2021) at New York University, where she completed her MFA in fiction.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Asale Angel-Ajani is the author of A Country You Can Leave, a New York Times recommended book and Amazon Editors’ Pick for Fiction, and the nonfiction book Strange Trade. Her work has been featured on CNN, in Ms. Magazine, and on NPR. A recipient of support from the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations, she was a Hutchins Family Fellow at Harvard University. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and lives in New York City.