Tomi Adeyemi — #1 New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the Children of Blood and Bone trilogy — radiates something that’s hard to fake: genuine, hard-won joy. In a conversation with Women Amplified host Lisa Bennett, she reflects on what it means to step fully into womanhood, why authentic joy is inseparable from authentic sorrow, and how she learned to stop performing happiness she didn’t feel.
Joy That’s Earned, Not Performed
There’s a difference between people who perform joy and people who’ve walked through fire to find it. Adeyemi is the latter. Her joy, she says, is as potent as her sorrow — the two aren’t opposites, they’re partners. She feels everything at full magnitude.
What changed in her later twenties was the pressure to perform. She stopped feeling like she had to project happiness when she wasn’t there. That shift, she says, came with womanhood — a stage she describes as entirely undersold.
“No one ever told me it got better.”
What Womanhood Actually Feels Like
Adeyemi describes the transition from girlhood to womanhood through a vivid metaphor: being taken away from every role she’d ever played — daughter, girlfriend, overachiever — and placed simply in the soil. Stripped of the labels, she asked herself: what’s actually going to grow?
What grew, she says, was a woman. And the experience of womanhood — in all its abundance, complexity, and collaborative potential — has been nothing like what she was led to expect. Society markets girlhood extensively. Womanhood, she argues, gets undersold at every turn.
She also reframes the stages of a woman’s life — maiden, mother, wise woman — not as roles defined by whether you’ve had children, but as internal seasons every woman moves through on her own terms.
Strength vs. Power
Adeyemi draws a distinction that cuts deep: most women know they’re strong. Far fewer know they’re powerful.
Strength, in her framing, is what gets us through. Power is something bigger — a reconnection to purpose, to what we were meant to create. She describes what happens when women tap into that as a meadow of purple and pink flowers slowly covering the planet. It sounds poetic because it is. But she means it literally as a vision of what becomes possible when women stop being separated from their own potential.
Magic as a Real Thing
Magic, for Adeyemi, isn’t metaphor — it’s a lived experience. She describes moments of hitting absolute rock bottom and finding that the earth itself was there. The concept of turning to the earth when you have nowhere else to turn runs through her new novel The Siren and through her own life.
She connects this to the Big Bang: from nothing, everything came — and is still expanding. That, she says, is the original magic. It’s not separate from us. We just need to be reconnected to it.
“You are also a flower of nature.”
Doing the Work
None of this arrived easily. Before Children of Blood and Bone became a phenomenon, Adeyemi spent five years on a manuscript that was rejected 63 times. The turning point wasn’t a sudden belief that she had what it took — it was a decision to dedicate herself to developing what it took.
She describes her work ethic in vivid terms: red-eye flights, relentless attention to detail, a mind that doesn’t rest until everything is in order. And when she saw Meryl Streep say “I love to work” in a recent film, she wept — not because it was surprising, but because she finally felt seen and released to say the same thing out loud.
The work, for Adeyemi, is not separate from the joy. It’s part of it.
The Bottom Line
Tomi Adeyemi’s version of joy isn’t a disposition or a personality trait. It’s something she built, lost, rebuilt, and earned — through years of isolation, rejection, hard creative labor, and a deliberate process of stripping away every role she’d been playing to find out who she actually was.
Her invitation to other women: don’t wait to feel worthy of it. The struggle you’re in right now is the exact thing that will make your joy, when you find it, real.
This post is based on an episode of Women Amplified, the podcast from the Conferences for Women, featuring Tomi Adeyemi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Children of Blood and Bone trilogy and author of the forthcoming The Siren (September 29th).
