Shirlene Obuobi
Shirlene Obuobi is a Ghanaian American author, physician and cartoonist.
Quotes
- The most fun, is when people tag their friends and say ‘that’s me.
- I have things that might be relatable if you’re from my background but might open your eyes if you’re not
- I was pretty intentional about making the main character me, and making her a woman and black. Part of the intention of that was to humanize the profession, in general, and humanize the experience
- In order to love fully and wholly some of us have to willingly cede our power, even at the loss of great privilege
- One of the most important things you can know about a patient is who they love and who loves them
- Falling in love requires vulnerability, and most people are insecure, withholding, or uncertain
- A Book to Die For: An Interview with Shirlene Obuobi 18 July 2026
- I’d been terrified that writing about someone like me would make me a fraud
- writers of color being accused of penning autobiographies every time we wrote about characters who shared aspects of our identities is a shared experience!
- I’ve never been a person who noticed or cared how the books I loved were categorized—I simply wanted to go on a journey with characters I found fascinating
- Have no ego when it comes to your writing
- Shirlene Obuobi: On Writing From Experience 24 June 2022
- I like to do all the things people tell me I can't do
- I write to process. But I also do it to escape.
- I wanted to kind of strip away this idea of who we were supposed to be, with a story
- people don't always appreciate how few love stories there are for women who look like me
- A lot of my friends are queer, and don't get to see themselves written as much more than stereotypes in these books
- It was important for me to talk about the extra weights that a lot of Black people in medicine feel
- I think more of us would be better doctors if we held on to the things that we were passionate about outside of medicine
- Creating art is one of the more human things we can do
- The Fun Of Medical Fiction With Shirlene Obuobi, MD 1 December 2022
- I’ve written my entire life, but I’ve always been scared to write about a character who was like me. I thought it delegitimized me as a writer
- Most writers write from experience, but it’s those of us whose experiences are considered “alien” or “niche” who get scrutinized for it
- I really wanted to challenge the concept of Black women, especially dark skinned ones, being strong, capable, and noble all of the time
- It was so important to me to really present a woman with her features, her identity, as fully human and fallible and still deserving of love
- For many of our parents, self-determination is a luxury, and something they may pursue later in life: survival and success are more paramount
- Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb 23 June 2022
- You meet so many people on the worst days of their lives, you know, and you see so many different families, so many different people under pressure, and it really informs how you think about love, how it manifests in the hardest moments
- I was looking at relationships around me and realizing there's a lot about these dynamics that is actually deeply unhealthy and not at all beneficial towards women
- It almost doesn't exist for what a man, and particularly a white man, can do to me
- But what I mean by that is that I love love, and I think there are so many different forms of it, and that in order to love wholly in the way that most of us want to be, you need to be loved in community
- A Black woman who has a history of domestic violence is critical to the way that she thinks about and approaches and receives love
- My books, they're going to be about Black women who are complex, who are imperfect, who can be capricious and hasty and make mistakes, and who still, in all of that, deserve to be loved in multiple ways