“It’s the same thing that brings us down and lifts us up”
Chude Jideonwo: I was very honoured when Aunty Betty [Irabor], as we call her in Nigeria, invited me to do a reading of her book at the launch in Lagos. That’s because it’s such a powerful book.
It’s a memoir but it’s essentially a biography of her emotions.
She looks back at her life as she does in the #WithChude interview and talks about the threads of worry, of fear, of insecurity that brought her to this point in her life and her experience with the dogged voice saying “you are not enough” - the same that follows some of us for most of our lives.
Though she is this highly and incredibly accomplished person, and like I once said, she’s responsible for an entire industry of lifestyle magazine publishing, she was brutally honest and incredibly vulnerable in this book.
She talks about her attempt at suicide. She talks about going to the psychiatric hospital in Lagos, Nigeria to get help. She talks about the shame in risking her driver knowing that she needed psychiatric help in a country that still has a lot of stigma around mental health. She talks about losing her father, her brother, she talks about getting support from her husband. She talks about everything in this small book. You will read it in one sitting.
She has been the Ana Wintour of West Africa atleast and to find her so human, so vulnerable gives many women and people, especially young people, the courage to understand that they are not alone.
That these fears, these worries are universal and no matter who or what you are or what level of life you are in, it’s the same things that brings us down and the same things that lifts us up.
Dust to Due is a memoir in courage, in vulnerability, in growth, in wisdom and in urterly being human. I’m very grateful that she has given this book to the world.