Master's of Writing Student Brett Brown on What He's Currently Reading: Taiye Selasi's "The Sex Lives of African Girls"

While reorganizing my storage space recently, I stumbled across several plastic bins packed with books—some I hadn’t seen since preschool. It felt like flipping through the evolution of my reading life: from I Spy, Dr. Seuss, Avi, (too many) Magic Tree House books, and Judy Blume, to Salinger and Eugenides. These days, I find myself drawn to Chloe Walsh and Mary Gaitskill—or, when I have the energy, I scour the archives of Best American Short Stories.

But the one story I keep returning to—between re-reads of Atonement—is Taiye Selasi’s The Sex Lives of African Girls. It’s haunting, unforgettable, and leaves me with goosebumps each time. Told in the second person, the story pulls you into the emotional and psychological space of Edem, a young girl growing up in Ghana. Selasi confronts themes like patriarchy, gendered violence, complicity, and power with astonishing clarity and control. The opening line—“Begin, inevitably, with uncle”—does a lot of work. That one word, inevitably, robs the narrator (and the reader, by extension) of agency before the story even begins. It signals a preordained trajectory, one shaped by the adults around her, particularly the men. Selasi sets a tone of resignation that never lets up, making the story’s tragic beats feel both shocking and eerily familiar.

There’s also a subtle Shakespearean thread running through it—specifically Othello. Like the Moorish general, Edem lives in a world where race, status, and desire interact with manipulation. Her coming-of-age isn’t a story of empowerment, but of brutal awakening. Over the course of a single day, Edem moves from innocence to painful awareness. She watches. She listens. She understands more than she should. It’s devastating, but so beautifully written. By the end, every woman in the story—Edem, her aunt, her cousin, her mother—has lost something. Selasi doesn’t just depict trauma; she maps out a system of inherited silence. The final scene is one of the most harrowing I’ve read. It’s not just about what happens, but what it means to call that moment “home.”