Therapy in Traffic & other Stories

Therapy in Traffic & Other Stories is a collection of seven interlinked short stories set largely in Lagos, Nigeria. Each story follows an ordinary person, mostly women, navigating the quiet emotional weight of everyday Nigerian life: a bride whose marriage unravels under a secret she didn't choose, a girl born the “wrong” sex into a father's disappointment, a survivor confronting workplace assault, a woman contemplating the end of her life on the Third Mainland Bridge, a husband driven to crime by poverty and pride, a localrestaurant owner who lost her education so her brother could keep his, and a new mother penalised at work for having a baby.

The stories move between homes, offices, markets, police stations, and, most of all, Lagos traffic, which becomes the book's central metaphor. Gridlock is where its characters are forced to sit still with themselves: to grieve, to rage, to remember, to decide who they will become next. The title story gives the collection its shape and its name—a woman using the stillness of a two-hour commute as the therapy she cannot otherwise afford.

Threaded through all seven stories are themes of resilience, patriarchy and gender expectation, mental health stigma, class and injustice, and the quiet, stubborn hope that gets ordinary Nigerians through an unfair day. It is, in the author's own words, “a way of saying you are not alone.”