Girl, Woman, Other is the story of 12 Black British women who are interconnected in unexpected ways. The novel reads as a long series of run-on and fragmented sentences, employing a stream-of-consciousness style to blur together the women’s stories across geographies and time. Their stories converge at the after-party for Amma Bonsu’s play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey. It’s a groundbreaking night. After racism and discrimination kept Amma on the margins of the mainstream theater world for years, her play, centered around the stories of powerful African women, premieres with five-star acclaim at London’s National Theatre, a revered cultural institution predicated on exclusion and reserved for the white middle and upper classes.
The novel begins with Amma’s story. Amma still sees herself as the 20-something radical lesbian who, along with her best friend Dominique, made waves in the theater world with their Bush Woman Theatre Company, which gave voice to the women of color whom the mainstream theater world has historically silenced. Amma criticizes her once-radical friends who sold out in middle age, failing to consider how debuting her play at the National Theatre undercuts her formerly radical beliefs. Yazz, Amma’s college-aged daughter and a member of the “woke” generation, criticizes her mother’s generation for being out of touch. Yazz struggles to find love and community at her predominately white university while struggling to accept what feels like a bleak future in the face of rising white supremacy, far-right nationalism, and environmental collapse.
Dominique stays out of England, a place where she has never felt fully accepted. She moves to Los Angeles with her girlfriend, Nzinga, who quickly becomes abusive. After the women break up, Dominique remains in Los Angeles. However, she returns to England to surprise Amma at the premiere of Amma’s new play.
Carole Williams, the daughter of a proud Nigerian immigrant mother, Bummi, grew up in a council flat and attended a struggling public school where teachers like Shirley King and Penelope Halifax burned out and became jaded. To Bummi’s dismay, Carole assimilates into white, British culture, seeing it as the only path toward achieving financial stability and success as a Black woman in England. Shirley, Carole’s teacher, spearheads Carole’s assimilation. Shirley is also Amma’s close friend from childhood— they were the only Black girls at their primary school. Shirley encourages Carole to separate herself from her childhood friends like LaTisha. (LaTisha is a Black kid growing up in public housing with no father in the picture, and these conditions make Shirley believe that LaTisha will eventually succumb to teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, or gang affiliation). After getting into Oxford, a place where she initially feels so out of place that she wants to leave, Carole marries Freddy, a white, English man and becomes Vice President of an important bank.
Bummi, meanwhile, has her own secrets. She’s settled down with a boyfriend, Kofi, but still yearns for the woman with whom she had a secret affair following the death of her beloved husband.
LaTisha focuses on turning her life around after her father’s abandonment upended her life when she was a teenager. She works hard as a grocery store manager to provide for her three children. Because Shirley convinces Carole to cast LaTisha out of her life, LaTisha and Carole never realize that they share a painful secret–they were both sexually assaulted by a local boy, Trey.
Shirley was always ordinary and conservative compared to Amma, but she becomes a public school teacher because she wants to make a difference in the lives of Black students like Carole. She’s bright-eyed, progressive, and successful at the beginning of her career, and she loathes teachers, like Penelope Halifax for their racist, stereotypical views of their students. After years on the job, Shirley loses her passion and starts to complain about her students just like Penelope does.
Penelope, a white woman, considers herself a groundbreaking feminist because she has stood up to her male colleagues throughout the years. However, her second-wave feminism is not intersectional. Despite Penelope’s progressive feminist views, she remains deeply racist, which shows up in the way she disrespects her multiracial students and Bummi, who becomes her housekeeper.
Shirley’s mother, Winsome, wonders how her daughter, who is blessed with so much, can be so miserable all the time. Winsome falls in love with Shirley’s husband Lennox in a way she’d never been in love with her own husband, Clovis, whom she settled for when she first arrived in London from Barbados. Winsome and Lennox carry out an affair that Shirley never discovers.
Morgan, a popular LGBTQ+ internet activist, finds themselves in the audience of Amma’s play on assignment to write a review and, upon running into Yazz at the after party, realizes they met previously at one of Morgan’s guest lectures. Morgan is multiracial. Their family endured years of racist abuse in the small English village where their family farm, Greenfields, stands. They struggle with severe internalized racism because of their past. When Morgan realizes that they are non-binary and changes their name and pronouns, it’s their grandmother, Hattie, who supports them wholeheartedly while the rest of the family struggles to accept their identity.
Hattie is a powerful woman, still robust in her 90s, and her identity is firmly rooted in the farm. She married Slim, an African American man who was both proudly Black and politically involved. Their children, however, reject their Black identities because of the cruel racism they experience. Hattie is haunted by the unsolved mystery that haunted her own mother, Grace, throughout her life: the question of her father’s identity, a man she knows only as “the Abyssinian.” Grace has always been proud of her Ethiopian ancestry, even though she never got to know her father. Grace, a multiracial woman, grew up motherless in England in the early 1900s. She was working as a maid when a wealthy, landowning, white Englishman asked her to marry him, which is how she came to call Greenfields her home.
Amma’s play is the connecting force that directly and indirectly brings these 12 women together. The women wind up in the audience of Amma’s play for different reasons, but they’re all there to witness a momentous occasion: the premier of a play by and for Black women at London’s most esteemed National Theatre, a bastion for the white and wealthy. While they all agree that it’s a significant moment of change and progress, the women in the audience have complicated feelings about what this moment means and if it speaks to their own identities and experiences. It’s this coming together that ultimately highlights both the power and limitations of stories as a bonding and representative force, becoming, too a meta-commentary on the novel itself, which is sweeping celebration of both the interconnectedness and individuality of the twelve women at the heart of this story.
Girl, Woman, Other ends on a shocking DNA discovery. Penelope, who long knew she was adopted, finds out that she’s the baby that Hattie gave birth to at 14 and named Barbara—the baby whom she loved but had to give up to avoiding bringing shame to her family. This revelation challenges Penelope’s racist beliefs and shows her how all identities and forms of oppression are intersectional. While this single moment doesn’t magically rid her of her deeply embedded racist thinking, the immediate and overwhelming love she feels when she sees her mother’s face for the first time makes her realize how wrong she was to hold and perpetuate her racist beliefs. Through both this homecoming and the after-party for Amma’s play, the novel ends on a note of togetherness that celebrates community in all its imperfection and complexity.
