In ‘Everything Is Not Enough,’ Lola Akinmade Åkerström Embraces the Messiness of the Human Experience

International best-selling author Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s second novel, Everything Is Not Enough, the sequel to her debut novel, In Every Mirror She’s Black, turns expectations and stereotypes of Black women on their heads. Åkerström creates space for characters to become fully realized, allowing them to make mistakes and embrace anger or selfishness in ways they’re not always allowed.

Everything Is Not Enough is also a story about belonging. Kemi, Brittany-Rae, and Yasmiin live as expats in Sweden, a country well-known for its progressiveness. But still, as Black women living in a predominately white country, they experience building community from the ground up as they navigate finding trust in others while also being treated as outsiders. Åkerström confronts how each character’s personal history affects their present lives — from their friendships to careers to romantic relationships — and explores the risks we take to have it all.

Shondaland spoke with Åkerström about the messiness of the human experience, survival versus thriving, and traversing taboo topics.

ARRIEL VINSON: How did it feel writing the sequel to In Every Mirror She’s Black?

LOLA AKINMADE ÅKERSTRÖM: I actually started writing the sequel before In Every Mirror She’s Black was sold. I was writing it because we had gotten so many rejections that I had to take my mind off of the rejections that kept coming on. So, I used National Novel Writing Month [NaNoWriMo] to keep writing the stories of the women because I knew their stories needed to continue. And in an ideal world, both books will actually be just one big book. But the issue is that the industry says if you’re a debut novelist, it’s very difficult for a publisher to take a chance on a 700-, 800-page novel [by] a debut author.

Everything Is Not Enough

Everything Is Not Enough

AV: All three women are finding their place in Sweden. They’re trying to assimilate to the culture. Why did you examine where they are and how it affects their lives?

LAA: I am a Black woman living here in Sweden. I’ve been here for the last 13 years. And even though I work as a travel writer and photographer and go to other countries and write about other places, I wanted to shine a light on what it is to be a minority in a predominantly white society. The experience ranges. So, that was why I needed to spotlight three very distinct women so that people can see that Black women aren’t of just one culture. We need to be given the privilege of being individuals but to also show that not everything that glitters is always gold. There are so many incredible things about living here in the Nordics, but sometimes that green grass is somebody’s weeds from a distance that need to be pulled out. I wanted to write the book so that a lot of Black women in the Nordics feel seen, heard, and acknowledged.

AV: There’s also a commentary in the novel about strength: how Black women are supposed to be strong, what it looks like, and what it feels like to try to be strong. How does Everything Is Not Enough fight the definition of strength for Black women?

LAA: What I do with Everything Is Not Enough is I throw everybody and the reader right into the middle of the action, where we meet all three women at very different transition points. Now the judgment is left to the reader to see if you want to process their experience through stereotypes, meaning, “Well, these are strong Black women. I’m sure she’s going to roll up her sleeves and get through it,” or give them grace because they are human. That’s the reason why I wrote it this way. Black women, when we wake up every day, we meet the stereotype of strong, unflappable, we can withstand anything — but we can also break. We need to be taken care of. We need to be treated with tenderness.

In the first book, I gave them space to start making mistakes. With this book, I said, “Now you’ve got all the space, run with it and be as human and messy as you can, and let’s see if the readers are going to process your experience with their own preconceived notions of bias or prejudice, our shadow work that we need to work on.”

AV: Right. “I had you here. Now I want you to do the work as a reader.” Speaking of mistakes, you explore the consequences of mistakes as well as trauma and survival and what survival means. Tell me more about how trauma and each character’s past play a role in this novel.

LAA: One of the things that most Black women are tired of is surviving. We are dreaming and manifesting the soft life. We want to thrive. We want to be able to be in different spaces without explaining our existence in the space. What I wanted to show is that all of us are messy. Whether we are Black or white or brown, we all go through some kind of trauma in life — some more than others — and all those experiences are valid. If we do not address some of our issues or traumas, if we don’t face them — I’m a big advocate for mental health and therapy — so if we don’t reach out to some of those resources to help us, we can continue to struggle and struggle and struggle. So, yes, they’re strong in the sense that they’re still moving on even though their past is dragging on them, but they’re human, and they’re allowed to make mistakes. They’re allowed to be given the benefit of doubt because they want the same things everybody else does.

AV: The novel is also a meditation on trust in romantic relationships and how whom we choose to spend our lives with affects us. Why did each character grapple with difficult decisions in their love lives?

LAA: Kemi is obviously the quintessential career woman, power lady, and she gets pressure from her family to be with somebody of equal status — as we say, equally yoked. But she is battling all of that because sometimes what she thinks is equally yoked is just a power struggle.

What I was trying to say with Kemi’s character is “Tune out the noise, and listen to your heart.” Because when you listen to other people’s opinions, especially her being with Nigerian heritage, we know the stories — if you’re not a doctor, lawyer, all of that. So, tune out that noise, and do what’s best for you because at the end of the day, those people that are pressuring you, who tend to be parents or grandparents, they die and move on. And then you’re left with a decision you made to please them.

And then with Brittany’s story: In the quest for the soft life, let’s not forget ourselves in the process. Brittany was a character that was tired of serving people as a flight attendant; she just wanted to be taken care of, so she was willing to dismiss lots of red flags so she could be a kept woman but lost a lot. And hopefully, within Everything Is Not Enough, she found that agency again. She began to find who she was before she got into that predicament. So, that is also a tale saying, “Yes, we all want to thrive, but be careful in the pursuit of that so that you do not lose who you are on the way.”

And then Yasmiin, who had a very questionable past according to society, is learning to forgive herself and say, “My past doesn’t define who I am. My past is my past. All the power has always been in my hands. I have the power and the agency to choose the path and how I want to move through life moving forward.”

AV: Everything Is Not Enough is about the power of connection and how Black women can find ways to heal together. Tell me more about why this is at the center of the novel.

LAA: Yes, because especially in a place like Sweden and the Nordics where there are so few of us, and it highlights the importance of community, sometimes it says, “Community might actually be more important than what you personally want to do.” Community is a place you can always lean into to remember where you came from or who you are. I always say that because there are some societies that are quite segregated, where immigrants move in and then they try to assimilate. That isn’t working. Okay, they try to integrate; it’s not working. And then they just go find their communities and maybe live out in the suburbs. There’s a reason why. It means, “In these communities, I am fully seen. People see me in the morning, they say hi. Maybe they connect with some of my roots.”

What I wanted to show in the book is that, for example, Kemi and Brittany, if they were in the U.S., they would never be friends because they would have had different subcommunities they could join. But in Sweden, not so much. There are not that many subcommunities because there are not that many Black women. So, they have to try and connect on some things, whether it’s microaggressions or whether it’s “Where should I get my hair done?”

AV: That even reminds me of when you’re moving within the United States or when you’re going to college, you’re finding the people you can connect with or whom you look like. And sometimes you look back and say, “I don’t know that we’d be friends if we didn’t have similar circumstances.”

LAA: Yes, exactly. And that’s a theme throughout Everything Is Not Enough. I really drove that point home, especially with Kemi and Brittany. Even when they were interacting, you could see it. There’s one particular scene where they’re going back and forth, and Brittany’s like, “I guess you’re lonely as well, right?”

And Kemi’s like, “What do you mean?”

It’s like, “Because you are telling me all this s–t, and you don’t like me. So, why are you telling me all your business if you don’t like me? That means you are lonely. You have nobody else to talk to.” It shows that thread of connection as well.

AV: Is there anything else you want to add?

LAA: The book touches [on] a lot of issues and themes, but hopefully does it in a way that feels organic and natural, that feels raw. I talk about sex trafficking in the book. I talk about obsession. I talk about infidelity. I talk about so many taboo things that keep the reader saying, “Oh, my God, what’s going on?” And it’s freaking the reader out, but it’s also forcing the reader to examine their own biases and what it means to have grace, or give grace, or imagine themselves in similar situations. It’s a book that’s really challenging. It’s a very gray book because when it’s gray, it expands our capacity for compassion and empathy to say that life is not always black-and-white. Some people do things they do out of necessity; some people do things for survival. How much grace are we going to allow so they can fully move on and heal?

AV: Why did you choose those hard-hitting issues of our society?

LAA: Because those issues are very taboo. For us to start giving each other space, we need to start having uncomfortable discussions. With Kemi and Ragnar, I wanted to show the extent of power play. If you are struggling to prove that I’m more powerful than you, it can actually lead to consequences because power is an attractive thing. The more powerful you’re trying to be [than] somebody, it just implodes, right?

I also wanted to talk about, with Brittany and John, the things they don’t talk about in Europe. There is this whole fetishization of Black women where people are like, “Oh, I’m not racist. My wife is Black.” But then you don’t take directions from your wife. There’s a lot of that, where you see a lot of European guys with much younger Black women — some who tend to come from a trafficked past.

And with Yasmiin’s story, I wanted to talk about her husband — he’s quite a shady character — and I wanted to show what is it like at home for a shady character? Because in society, if they talk about this man on TV, everybody will hate him. He’s a bad guy. But at home, he loves his wife; he loves his son. So, I’m not excusing any behavior, but I also want to show that people do things out of necessity, out of spite, out of revenge. I want to show the full range of the messy human experience. I wanted this book to make lots of people feel seen, even though they may be hiding in shame. I see you. I understand. We’re going to give you space to grow and to make better decisions.

AV: So, what are you working on now?

LAA: Well, I’m super-excited. In October, we’re planning a fantastic book tour in both the U.S. and the U.K. And I’ve got a third book I’m working on that’s going well. That’s going to be historical fiction with a dual timeline. They’re both set in the past — one more in the ’70s/’80s and one more early 2000s.

And that’s just my art as an author because I am a photographer and travel writer. But as an author, I’m super-grateful that I get to do what I love, and I’m grateful to do it in my own voice. I always say that the first book was difficult to publish because I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want to tone it down. I didn’t want to change it just to make it more appealing and palatable for people. It’s a raw, honest book. So, I’m grateful for that because now I can write just as honestly and grow with all my books. I want to write it the way I want to write it so it feels real.

Arriel Vinson is a Tin House workshop alumna and Hoosier. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and received a B.A. in Journalism from Indiana University. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Booth, Cosmonauts Avenue, Waxwing, Electric Literature, and others. She is a 2019 Kimbilio Fellow. She tweets at @arriwrites.

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