How cardiologist Shirlene Obuobi turned personal pain into the paranormal romance ‘Die For Me’
In this exclusive, the bestselling author and cardiologist Dr. Shirlene Obuobi opens up about the upcoming novel “Die For Me.”
Before Dr. Shirlene Obuobi wrote an upcoming paranormal romance novel about a Black woman who falls in love with a monster, she was confronting her own unsettling reality.
The cardiologist and bestselling author was leaving an emotionally abusive marriage and grappling with questions about power, vulnerability, and survival when the inspiration for “Die For Me” first struck her.
“I was asking this question about power dynamics because I was still with my ex, but I was on the way out,” Obuobi told theGrio over Zoom during a recent interview.
“I felt like the wool had been pulled over my eyes. 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,” she continued. “For the first time, I was having to actually confront the fact that I sleep next to the person who’s most likely to kill me. I was realizing, ‘Oh shoot, they don’t protect us. There actually isn’t a limit. It almost doesn’t exist for what a man, and particularly a white man, can do to me.’”
The result of those inquiries, “Die For Me,” arriving on shelves July 14, is a seductive paranormal romance and psychological thriller about Sean, a cardiologist navigating the aftermath of domestic violence, who finds herself drawn to a handsome, albeit much younger, stranger while attending a colleague’s wedding. The deeper their connection grows, however, the less human he appears to be.
“When I first announced the book, everybody was talking about, ‘oh, it’s a vampire book,’ but I never correct them,” the author explained.
“I never specify, because it is the kind of book that is potentially more enjoyable if you go into it blind,” she continued. “It is meant to be a layered book, so for people who just want to enjoy a fun ride, they will enjoy it in that aspect, but for people who are searching for a deeper commentary, there’s a lot of commentary on aging, on race, on patriarchy, on all sorts of things.”
She added, “I joke that this book is actually about the patriarchy, about loving within a power dynamic, but if you don’t want to see it that way, you just want to have fun, sure, go ahead, ignore all that!”
For Obuobi, part of that commentary stems from a lifelong love of the paranormal romances that defined the early 2000s. Books and series like “Twilight,” “The Vampire Diaries,” and “True Blood” offered plenty of opportunities to imagine falling for the monster. Rarely, however, did that fantasy belong to Black women.
“When I was coming up with the idea of ‘Die For Me,’ I really wanted to lean into those paranormal romances of the early aughts,” she said. “I enjoyed them, I immersed myself in them, but I was never going to be able to be a Bella Swan.”
Instead, she wanted to create a story that allowed a grown adult Black woman with her own complicated history to occupy that role. It also wasn’t a far stretch for the writer to imagine. By day, Obuobi works as a cardiologist at Brown University’s Cardiovascular Institute. By night, she writes romance novels. “Die For Me” marks her third book, following “On Rotation” and “Between Friends and Lovers,” which similarly place ambitious, deeply layered Black women at the heart of the story.
“I say that I’m a romance writer, but I’m a romance writer who de-centers romance, and that sounds really contradictory,” she said. “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. And so that is central to a lot of my work.”
That philosophy is shaped as much by her work in medicine as it is by her writing.
“I say all the time that knowing who loves your patients is one of the most important things that you can learn,” she explained. “Knowing what love looks like often for Black women, who so often are the ones carrying families and doing an immense amount of the emotional and literal domestic labor within their families, and how that affects their care, all of that gets enveloped in my writing.”
Sean’s identity, she added, is essential to how the character understands and receives love.
“Sean being a Black woman, a Black woman cardiologist, a Black woman who has a history of domestic violence is critical to the way that she thinks about and approaches and receives love,” Obuobi said. “It might be something that most readers might not key in on, but it is absolutely a big part of her character.”
That same desire to care for and advocate for people who look like her also helped lead the physician into medicine.
“I’m not always completely joking when people are like, ‘How did you end up being a cardiologist?’” she said. “After I give them the typical [answer,] I end up in the same place: a savior complex.”
As one of the few Black women in a field where only a fraction of cardiologists look like her, Obuobi has spent years witnessing the inequities that shape healthcare outcomes. During her training on Chicago’s South Side, she saw Black patients routinely encounter barriers to life-saving care and opportunities. Those experiences continue to inform both her worldview and her fiction.
“At the end of the day, one of the reasons why I like writing about love is that we’re actually just writing about humanity and connection,” she said.
That humanity remains at the core of everything she writes, whether it involves contemporary romance, medical dramas, or creatures lurking in the shadows.
“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,” Obuobi said. “My work is for people who are craving that and who aren’t necessarily looking to see themselves exactly on the page, but are more so looking to meet somebody new.”