Nigerian author and communications professional Roseline Adidi has released her debut poetry collection, The Lie I Bought, a reflective work examining the beliefs people carry about success, love, identity, relationships and personal worth.
The collection grew out of years of personal reflection as Adidi navigated career changes, life away from home and questions about belonging and self-perception.
Okay News reports that the book challenges assumptions people often accept without questioning, including expectations around the age at which success should come, what love should look like and how achievement or relationships can shape a person’s sense of value.
“Sometimes we live according to stories we never stopped to question,” Adidi said. “This book became my way of asking whether those stories were still serving us and what truths we are ready to embrace instead.”
Adidi holds a Master’s degree in Public Relations and Corporate Communications from Kingston University London and has built her professional career around storytelling and communications.
In The Lie I Bought, she turns that experience inward, using poetry to explore emotions and experiences that can be difficult to express directly.
“The title came from a simple but uncomfortable question,” she said. “What if some of the things we’ve accepted as truth about ourselves and our lives were never true in the first place? I wanted to explore those questions through poetry.”
The collection addresses themes including heartbreak, healing, identity, becoming, self-worth and the emotional consequences of beliefs people inherit or adopt over time.
While rooted in Adidi’s own reflections, the book also engages with questions that are familiar to many young Africans navigating social expectations around career progress, relationships, marriage and personal success.
Rather than presenting poetry as a source of fixed answers, Adidi said she wanted the collection to create room for readers to recognise their own experiences.
“I didn’t write this book because I had all the answers,” she said. “I wrote it because I kept asking questions. My hope is that somewhere in these pages, readers might recognise a part of themselves. That someone reads a page and thinks, ’I have felt this too, but I never had the words for it.”
Adidi is also extending the themes of the book beyond the page through a series of online monologues.
She plans to host a virtual event titled Beyond the Pages: An Evening of Poetry & Conversation, where readers will be able to hear selected poems, discuss their meanings and engage directly with her.
The Lie I Bought is available through Amazon worldwide and on Selar for readers in Nigeria.
