Necessary Fiction operates in two major modes: the past of deprivation and the future of attainment. It is upfront about this right from the opening chapter, in which Ziz makes bastard money over the span of a few pages. The only character who complains about money, Black, a sort of bodyguard for Ziz, is ultimately okay, given Ziz’s fair benevolence and Black’s proximity to Truth Circle. The immediate question that arises is: why situate a book in a city as poor as Lagos, and have little to no poor major characters? 

Necessary Fiction’s answer is that money is freedom, but as one character says: ‘freedom is not a synonym for happiness.’ Its combating question seems to be: let’s assume for a moment that you have money and can do anything, what choices will you make? The novel’s characters move back from studies abroad, lashed by homesickness; they find themselves trapped in marriages consoled palely by diamonds, subservient to whomever is the source of money. But this assumption of boundless wealth is a mighty one to make, given that the emotional redemptions the characters can afford are tied to their wealth. Money, for instance, which affords one bodyguards for a triumphant gay marriage, becomes a kind of deus ex machina. (Here, one can imagine Ziz disclaiming on behalf of the novel: ‘I’m not inspiring.’)  

But it is not just money. We find Maro wanting a lover and immediately getting a lover; May wants a mentor and gets one the next week. The characters’ journeys are situated in retrospect; the present is so shorn of continuity it leaves these zones severed, hanging in the air, the daily intimacies not matching the scale of the feelings they spur, so that the feelings risk teetering over the edge of cloying, therapy-speak. Necessary Fiction is brilliant at depicting the range of emotional experience, but does so in singular increments, like stacks of essays.  

In a novel concerned with the un-making of bonds and re-making them from the ground up, we are largely told rather than shown how this happens. The novel’s first two sections barely feature the women who will take over the next third of its pages, and Ziz and Maro’s grief retreats to the sidelines as we progress. Truth Circle, for all its beauty, suggesting an anchor for the characters, showing them holding space as they navigate their daily lives and struggles, doesn’t repeat in the novel after its first early appearance. It drops away after that initial cataloguing of woes, making it tempting to read it as a trick to pull in all kinds of readers, with each (yet-unknown) character’s sections headed as: struggles with losing a parent, death, drugs, anger, parental estrangement, national grief, religion, Lagos, society and neurodivergence. With the succinct fulfilment of each heading, it is difficult to imagine these characters holding three more Truth Circles, not to speak of it featuring as a core component of their lives. When the characters all come together again, it is all the way at the end, a handful of pages.  

There is an argument to be made for this. For all its ambitions at depicting havens, Necessary Fiction doesn’t want to be the sitcom, Friends; its core is much too dark. Boundaries are an important motif—boundaries crossed, such as that between life and death; boundaries upheld in the most intimate settings. One could read each character as an independent world unto themselves, concentrated with history. The problem with that argument is that relation is the superior motif. These characters tell us they are repeatedly saved by their friendships, they talk and think often about this safety, but the novel’s depiction of said friendship doesn’t run like a gusting river through their lives. 

By taking away the pluralizing ‘s’ in fictions, the novel’s title also refers to a daring claim on the book’s cruciality. Its real life-saving properties. For example, in a blogpost that pops up about halfway into the book: 

This is for us whose hearts are still breaking for our childselves and all the selves in between, who have found it hard to admit that the lives we have lived are too heavy for us to carry. This is for us who are only now learning to turn our love inward and care for ourselves… for us whose childhoods ended too fast. For us and the helplessness that boiled in us… I am sorry about all the secrets we could never tell anyone. I’m sorry no one saw the miracles we performed to keep our lives. But we are here, and praise the substance of our spirits for bringing us this far. We deserve garlands of grace on our heads. Take yours…  

A blogpost is one conceit for this channelling of the book’s intentions; Osunde’s third-person narrator is irreverent and will repeatedly break the fourth wall to deliver a line to the reader like, ‘Remember the sensation [of the EndSars protests]? A phone in your hand, triumph screaming out of the screen as people gathered with charged rage tucked behind the ear like small flowers.’  

We swim between perspectives with the most crucial goal of slipping beyond the ether into readerly recognition. This desire is most strongly declared through one of the characters who practices Earthseed, a religion based on Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower; they say, ‘When I first read that book and saw that [people] called it fiction I was like errrr… no it’s not. But no one else around me believed me. I didn’t care. I took Earthseed up as a religion.’

Thus, the paradoxical corollary required to enter Osunde’s fiction is that it is not fiction, but rather a healing space, a way of life, a therapeutic contract between redemptive words and hurting reader. The proof of its veracity lies in the raw articulations of its characters’ despair; its litmus is a truly remarkable inexhaustibility of emotional stockpiling. If you fail to be touched as intended, rinse your hands and walk away, it is simply not for you. This is at once a metaphor for queer life and survival—virtue is contained within infinitely, ahistorical, untouchable by external factors, unlocked only by sibling eyes—and at the same time a genius pre-empting of all faults⎈