{"id":116524,"date":"2025-09-03T20:32:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T20:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/116524\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T20:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T20:32:08","slug":"bazaar-book-chat-reviews-a-new-new-me-by-helen-oyeyemi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/116524\/","title":{"rendered":"Bazaar Book Chat Reviews ‘A New New Me’ by Helen Oyeyemi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking for your next read? Welcome to Bazaar Book Chat<\/a>, an inside look at our editors\u2019 Slack channel, where we candidly review the latest literary releases.<\/p>\n

A New New Me: A Novel<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez (senior news editor)<\/p>\n

Hi @here! Welcome to another edition of Bazaar Book Chat. This August, we read A New, New Me by Helen Oyeyemi. The novel, set in Prague, follows the life of a woman named Kinga, who has dissociative identity disorder (DID) and awakens as a different version of herself every day of the week. Each of her personalities\u2014Kingas A through G\u2014has different motivations, storylines, and beliefs, including their own thoughts on whether they should all come together to become a single Kinga, as they once were.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure we all have a lot of thoughts.<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri (senior designer)
I want to say I liked it, but I\u2019m also not sure what was going on majority of the time.
\ud83d\ude022<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck (senior designer)
Same here! I feel like I tried really hard to keep track of so many details, but after a certain point, I just knew I was going to miss some things because it was so complex.<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri
Just when I thought I understood what was happening, all of a sudden she was a nun, she drank tea that made her not be able to talk, the turtle attack @PonzoGary just reminded me of… I was constantly thinking I skipped a page.
\ud83d\ude022<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee (assistant editor)
HAHA the world building was so strong that it was a little disorienting.
\u2757\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Totally. This was such a wild read. Once I got the hang of what was happening with her changing personalities, it really kept me so entertained. I needed to know how these personalities would come together\u2014or not! But I agree that the random side storylines were superrrr twisted and confusing. And they never really got resolved, which is the weirdest part.
\u2757\ufe0f2
I have no idea what happened at the end. I reread it like three times, lol.<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo (art director)
I started out trying to pay close attention to everything and expected a straightforward narrative and it took me a while to just enjoy the surreal deadpan absurdity without looking for too strong a through line, or resolutions.
\ud83e\ude773<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
I was expecting it to be so different based on the description of the book. I thought the majority of the plot would revolve around the mystery of the man in her pantry, but then when you find out in the second chapter that that\u2019s not the case, I was like oh… so… what\u2019s going to unfold next?
\u2757\ufe0f2<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri
Definitely, I wanted more than one day with each of them.<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
I agree with something @PonzoGary said earlier to me, which is that so many of these little details didn\u2019t really pan out to anything, so they just felt distracting, as opposed to coming back around and feeling rewarding.
\u2757\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri
Did anyone have a favorite Kinga?<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
I ALSO wanted more than one day with each of them! I feel like I breezed through the book but I wanted more time with each, and I wonder if that would\u2019ve helped make some of the more random details feel more purposeful.
\u2764\ufe0f3<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
So basically\u2014for our readers\u2014the Kingas (A-G) keep a diary in which each one tells the others what happened on her assigned day. And at one point, they all even start fighting about who is doing what chores wrong and making bad decisions and plotting against the others. <\/p>\n

I think my favorite Kinga was the evil B.
\ud83d\ude023<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
Kinga-B for sure.<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
Kinga-B immediately letting a complete stranger of a man free with no questions asked was kind of iconic, and the absolute opposite way I would behave, lol.
\ud83d\ude022<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
I also never fully understood Kinga\u2019s male relationships\u2014her therapist, her perfumer, the tied-up guy\u2014but I like that it seemed like the tied up guy accepted all of her Kingas and matched her crazy and wanted to stick around?<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
The narrative structure of the book in general, all told from a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder was really fascinating, and it caused me to go down a huge deep-dive rabbit hole researching everything I could about why it happens to people, how it manifests, etc. I also asked my therapist a TON of questions about it, lol.
\ud83d\ude021<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo
I kept expecting something more sinister from the therapist. Like he was somehow complicit in the fractured personalities.
\ud83d\ude2e1 \u2757\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
I also was wondering if the therapist was ghosting her or just some of the Kingas, like the one who was in love with him. It felt so exhausting to be her.<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
OMG Gary, same. I felt like there was something lurking underneath… especially when the chair guy pretended to be the therapist at first.
\u2757\ufe0f3<\/p>\n

Kristina Ang (social video coordinator)
That was trippy.<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo
I also didn\u2019t understand the inciting event for how they became multiple Kingas.
\ud83d\ude022<\/p>\n

Kristina Ang
I have to say that was when I started to get really confused.<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
I wish the book had covered more about why or how (or when) the multiple identities came to be\u2014usually it\u2019s a result of something very traumatic in your youth? But there was only a brief scene with her mother where she mentioned it. I wish they had gone into the backstory further. It seemed like the multiple personalities were a device for story telling rather than a huge part of all of the Kingas\u2019s character developments.
\ud83d\udd251<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Yeah, she mentioned how it happened one day when she had a school reunion and went into the bathroom? I was like… what? But yes, for me, when the Kingas started to say that they could feel the others\u2019 presence, it all started to come together. And at the end, when she asks them all to weigh in on whether they should take a job, they all respond even though it was only Kinga G\u2019s day? So did we all think that meant that OG Kinga had come back to herself?<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
I also agree that I would have liked some more time with the personalities later in the book. It would have been interesting to see how Kinga-A reacts to everything that happened after her.
\ud83d\udc464<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo
I think the new new Kinga they reference at the end means that they coalesce to make a single identity, but it\u2019s not the same as any previous identity, including the original Kinga prime.
\ud83d\udd253<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri
But along that line, Rosa, I was confused about how Kinga-A could just take over three weeks during COVID-19. How did they (for lack of better words) turn one off and another one on?
\ud83d\udc462\u2757\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
Yes, Sarah, I had the same thought! I was like, can she just conjure one?!?
<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Right! I wish we had gotten one more week with them, or at least less side quests. Because I think the Kinga-on-Kinga dialogue was so strong and the most interesting part of the story. But agree, Gary!
\ud83d\udd252\u2757\ufe0f2<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
<\/p>\n

How do they perfectly wake up on their assigned day? If someone was actually trying to take over, wouldn\u2019t that Kinga just block others from waking up? All very confusing.
\ud83d\udc462
@SanchezRosa the Kinga-on-Kinga dialogue felt very Severance-coded.
\u2757\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
This whole book I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about Severance, lol. The innies and outies, it was all I could think about.
\u2757\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Kristina Ang
But more complicated and confusing!<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri
YES! Totally felt a little Severance-y.<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
OMG, I need to watch that. <\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
@SanchezRosa you must. Best show of the year, IMO (will be rooting for them at Emmys, lol).
<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Separately, I did think it was so funny how the non-working weekend Kingas felt like they couldn\u2019t be the bosses because they didn\u2019t contribute to the rent.
\ud83d\ude022<\/p>\n

Also, did anyone understand why the tied up man started off saying he was friends with Kinga-F but then went on to say he was in love with Kinga-G? I feel like he was not trustworthy at all. But neither was Kinga\u2019s many versions of the truth, so their relationship maybe worked?<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
Yeah, I mean, the minute he tried to impersonate the doctor, I was like THIS IS SKETCHY, and never fully trusted him after that.<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo
I wonder if maybe the events in the book didn\u2019t even happen at all, or at least not as described. What if it\u2019s all some internal dialogue\/delusion that Kinga is going through and the ending of the book is actually her finding her way back to sanity\/reality?
\ud83d\ude2e3<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
I thought he was untrustworthy, but I just assumed he had made connections with multiple of the Kingas\/couldn\u2019t keep them straight?<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Mind blown, Gary. With the ending being a turtle attack, I did wonder like okay, is this actually all just fake and we\u2019re just hallucinating now?<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo
I felt like I was.
\ud83d\ude023<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
It did feel like the entire book seemed to take place in some sort of alternate universe, lol.
\u2764\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
I psyched myself out so hard after like three hours of reading this.
\ud83d\udc462<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
I\u2019m also curious about the book\/movie adaptation that the brother starred in, lol.<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
The famous brother! Another side story that could\u2019ve been further explained, lol. <\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
And how the lady she met just HAPPENED to be ex best friends with the writer of the book version of his film?
\u203c\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
And also the tied up guy\u2019s mom? I didn\u2019t get that at all. And how the church was actually a strip club?
\u203c\ufe0f3<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo
But she still pretended to just be meeting Kinga in the beginning.
\u203c\ufe0f2
<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri
And she was the owner of the club?? And she knew there were multiple Kingas but she was talking to Kinga-B in the park like she was her new friend, Kinga-A?
\u203c\ufe0f2<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
This really tested my brain capacity.
\ud83d\ude023<\/p>\n

The most confusing side quest to me was the jumping off the building after robbing someone and then selling his belongings in like a farmer\u2019s market?
\u203c\ufe0f1 \ud83d\ude021<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri
For only 207 pages, they really packed it in.<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
They really did.<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
Oh, totally. I thought I was in for an end-of-summer beach read, and instead I got a brain blast of a book, lol.<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
I don\u2019t know if anyone else did this, but I looked up the meaning of the name Kinga just because I was curious, and this is what the bump says, lol: \u201cThis alluring girl\u2019s name is a Polish and Hungarian derivative of the Old German title Kunigunde. Kunigunde is a name that was popular in the early centuries but has fallen out of favor, paving the way for trendier variations. It is composed of the elements kunja, meaning \u2018family\u2019 and \u2018clan,\u2019 and guntho, meaning \u2018battle\u2019 and \u2018war.\u2019 Kinga is both beautiful and fierce.\u201d
\ud83d\ude2e3
<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Okay, Joellllll.<\/p>\n

Kristina Ang
Okay, research.<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Love that! She was def at battle with herself.
\u2764\ufe0f1 \u203c\ufe0f1 <\/p>\n

Kristina Ang
The name was no accident.<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Low key, though, I really enjoyed the Kinga fights, and\u2014if there is anything relatable to take away from this\u2014it felt very much like arguing with ourselves inside our own minds.
\u2764\ufe0f3 \u203c\ufe0f1<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
Agreed! It was sort of Inside Out-coded in the way that each Kinga was defined by certain personality traits, too.
\ud83d\udd252
<\/p>\n

And how all those things are always battling within us!
\ud83e\ude771<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
I was trying to explain this book to a friend, and I was like, imagine scrolling TikTok for five hours without blinking. That’s the feeling I got, lol.
\ud83d\ude022<\/p>\n

Joel Calfee
Entering an apartment complex in a parallel universe and jumping from one apartment to the next every ten minutes, trying to make sense of the convos you hear, lol.
\ud83d\ude023 \ud83d\udd251<\/p>\n

Sarah Olivieri
It was like when you\u2019re sick and you take NyQuil and keep waking up and falling back to sleep so you have seven very odd dreams all back to back.
\ud83d\ude024<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo
It definitely felt like some kind of dream narrative.<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
Yes, Rosa, but I feel like that would rot my brain in a different way than this book did, like it more hurt my brain.
\ud83d\udc461
I feel like my brain was one of those crazy detective boards you see in movies with push pins and string, and Post-it notes, trying to keep track of every detail.
\ud83d\udc462
<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
It hurt my brain in the sense that it reminded me how thin the line can be between reality and delusion, for all of us.
\u203c\ufe0f2
Very glad we read it, though. So different from anything we\u2019ve chosen in the past.<\/p>\n

Gary Ponzo
Agreed. I would never have read this otherwise.<\/p>\n

Rosa Sanchez
Hahaha.<\/p>\n

Olivia Alcheck
It was definitely entertaining! And it opened up a lot of reflection on identity and self as well as theoretical thinking.
\u2764\ufe0f2<\/p>\n

Our Bazaar Book Chat pick for September is Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Pick up your copy of the book here<\/a>, and read along with us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Looking for your next read? Welcome to Bazaar Book Chat, an inside look at our editors\u2019 Slack channel,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,428,82460,430,134,433,2387,82459],"class_list":["post-116524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-books","tag-content-type-news","tag-contentid-52e7ca50-0e82-4cd1-84ee-956eca3b9955","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-entertainment","tag-hasproduct-true","tag-locale-us","tag-shorttitle-bazaar-book-chat-a-new-new-me-by-helen-oyeyemi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}