Have you ever read a book, found it fairly thought-provoking, got to the end, and then realized that you had gotten the entire book completely wrong?

I read The Marriage Monitoring Aunties’ Association and it wasn’t what I expected. I thought it was going to be a light read about a single, middle-aged woman in a British-Nigerian community. (I just had a thought. With everything else I got wrong, maybe this was supposed to be that and I missed that too…)

Anyway, the story is about Sade. She’s a 50 year old single woman. To British society she looks successful but to her Nigerian community she is an absolute failure of a woman but she is single and childless.

She has also internalized this view of her self-worth to the point that she is making choices that physically harm her. She has painful fibroids but will not have a hysterectomy because she won’t be able to have children. She’s 50 years old. She isn’t going to be having children. But she has an alternative surgery that removes the fibroids without taking out the uterus even though the recovery is harder. All that matters is retaining her theoretical child-bearing ability.

She is part of a singles ministry at her church that exists mostly to tell women to pray to meet men. It is of course run by married people. It is a beautiful send up of how the church claims to value single people while constantly marginalizing and belittling them. I loved it.

Her mother and her mother’s friends constantly tell her how much of an embarrassment she is for not being married. They shame her for owning a home and having a good job because no man is going to want her if she acts like she doesn’t need him. She starts to learn to stand up to these women through the story.

She does meet a man who is a pastor’s kid. He’s left the church and points out a lot of these issues. He starts to open her eyes to how she’s been brainwashed to devalue herself just because she doesn’t fit the mold that they all want her in.

Now we are in spoiler territory.

You get to the end of the book and there is a lot of Will They – Won’t They get together. He moves to the U.S. for work for a bit. Then he comes back and says that he needed to get his head on right. He started meeting with a pastor and he came back to believing in God so they can go ahead and get married.

It turns out that this book isn’t a thoughtful critique of the church and its effect on people. It was actually marketed as Christian fiction. It wasn’t a cautionary tale in the way I thought it was. It was cautioning people not to walk away from the craziness that their church is teaching. If you just hold onto your beliefs long enough, it will all work out for you.

I was shocked.

I liked my version of the story more. In my version, Sade was moving away from everything that was holding her back. She was realizing that she could be more than the person who had to fit into a tiny box. I was really sad when I finished this book and realized that the author didn’t see her personal growth as a good thing.