Live for Me, Nkem by Nneka Oluoha

"A powerful exploration of the consequences of mental health issues being silenced due to cultural expectations and trauma comparison." -Paria Hassouri, award-winning author of Harvesting Rosewater and Found in Transition

How do you ask for help when your whole life has been built around pretending you're fine?

Nkem Nzenwa has everything that should make a woman happy: a successful husband, beautiful, intelligent children, and a carefully built life in suburban America. To everyone around her, and especially to the Nigerian immigrant community, her marriage to Chima looks steady, loving, even enviable.

But appearances are fragile.

Behind closed doors, Nkem is unraveling under the weight of depression, intrusive thoughts, and an overwhelming certainty that her family would be better off without her. Terrified of being judged, pitied, or seen as broken, Nkem hides her worsening depression behind smiles and silences.

As the cracks in her carefully controlled life begin to show, her marriage strains under the weight of things left unsaid. Her children sense her withdrawal. Her husband, Chima, struggles to understand the woman he loves as she slips further away from him. And buried beneath it all are painful truths about family, identity, and a lifetime spent suppressing her own needs in order to survive.

Told with emotional intimacy and unflinching honesty, Live for Me, Nkem is an emotionally suspenseful exploration of depression, motherhood, marriage, intergenerational trauma, cultural expectations, and the quiet ways people learn to keep living when they no longer recognize themselves.