Head Above Water was published in 1986 by Ogwugwu Afor. The autobiography covers Emecheta’s life from her arrival in London in the early 1960s — following a husband who would prove abusive and unsupportive — through her emergence as a published novelist. The title is literal: Emecheta spent years keeping her head above water — financially, emotionally, physically — while raising five children alone, working as a library officer, and writing novels in the early hours of the morning before the children woke.
The autobiography fills in the factual reality behind the fiction. The events described in In the Ditch and Second-Class Citizen are recounted here without the mediating distance of novelistic form, and the effect is startling — the fiction, it turns out, understated the hardship. Emecheta describes sleeping on the floor because she could not afford a bed, feeding the children before feeding herself, and writing In the Ditch longhand in exercise books because she could not afford a typewriter.
The book is also a publishing memoir — an account of the struggles of a Black African woman writer in a British literary establishment that was overwhelmingly white, male, and reluctant to take seriously the experiences she described. Emecheta’s determination to publish on her own terms — eventually founding her own press, Ogwugwu Afor, when mainstream publishers showed insufficient interest — is a story of entrepreneurial courage.
Collecting Head Above Water
First edition (Ogwugwu Afor, London, 1986): Paperback.
Market values:
- First edition: $40–$100
- Very good: $20–$50