Damilare Kuku Writes Lagos Like a Loaded Gun in Women Rent Men and Secrets Here

Ara Ikoyi is desperate for a story. Juicy Mbelu is desperate to be heard. Somewhere between those two needs, Women Rent Men and Secrets Here explodes into being.

Damilare Kuku’s third book doesn’t tiptoe into its themes or politely ask for your attention. It grabs you by the wrist and drags you into a Lagos estate buzzing with scandal, secrets, judgment, and money-fuelled intimacy. A woman has allegedly killed her sugar daddy. The internet has already decided her guilt. The law is catching up slowly. And a writer, who is the narrator, thinks this chaos might just save her career.

Women Rent Men and Secrets Here moves like a Nollywood film that knows exactly when to cut, linger, and drop the bomb.

Ara Ikoyi isn’t just a narrator; she’s a working writer under pressure. Three bestsellers behind her and nothing to show for the next one. That creative drought feels familiar in a deeply human, yet uncomfortable, way.

Juicy Mbelu, her neighbour, is the opposite kind of pressure. Viral, accused, and reduced to a headline before she ever opens her mouth.

When Juicy agrees to tell Ara her story, it comes with conditions that feel harmless at first and then slowly turn sinister. Ara must follow instructions. She must tell the story exactly as Juicy tells it. No edits. No softening. No moral cleanup.

This is where the book sharpens its teeth. Because storytelling here isn’t neutral. It costs something. Sometimes reputation. Sometimes safety. Sometimes your own secrets.

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At its core, Women Rent Men and Secrets Here is about women who enter relationships for financial survival or leverage, and the danger that comes with that bargain.

Kuku doesn’t romanticise these arrangements, but she also doesn’t flatten the women inside them. These are not morality tales written for social media applause. They’re messy, practical, and deeply Nigerian.

Money. Power. Sex. Silence. These things circulate constantly in the background, and the book keeps asking an uncomfortable question: who actually gets punished when things go wrong?

Juicy’s case is already decided in the court of public opinion. The justice system trails behind, clumsy and compromised. Kuku’s critique here is subtle but firm. Once the public chooses a villain, the law becomes theatre.

This book is Lagos. Not the Instagram version. Not the aspirational skyline. The real one.

Psychotic beggars. Police officers who linger too long. Power outages. Estate gossip. The quiet hypocrisy of “conservative” spaces where the wildest things happen behind closed doors.

At first, I resisted it. I thought, this Lagos is doing too much. But then I remembered: Lagos always does too much. That’s the point.

Even readers unfamiliar with Nigeria will feel it. The chaos reads exaggerated until it doesn’t. Until you realise truth often sounds fake when written plainly.

This book reads like a well-directed film. The chapter divisions are intentional. The pacing builds suspense instead of strangling it. You can see scenes. You can hear voices.

Kuku’s writing is loud, dramatic, and unashamed in this one. She loves her em dashes and uses them recklessly. As a writer surviving in a ChatGPT-shaped world where everything wants to sound clean and neutral, that excess felt rebellious. Refreshing, even.

The characters border on the fantastical without losing their grounding. They are colourful, exaggerated, but never stupid. The story respects the reader’s intelligence while still indulging in spectacle.

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The ending felt rushed. Not mysterious. Not cliffhanger-ish. Just… fast. I stared at the last pages thinking, this can’t possibly be enough space to land this plane. And it wasn’t. I wanted more room to sit with the fallout.

Still, these are flaws that exist inside a story that largely succeeds at what it sets out to do.

Women Rent Men and Secrets Here is not trying to impress you with optics. It’s trying to tell a story, and it does.

It’s sharp, chaotic, uncomfortable, and deeply entertaining. It reminded me why I fell in love with storytelling in the first place, and why Nollywood, when done right, works so well. Because spectacle without stupidity is powerful.

If you’re looking for a tidy moral lesson, look elsewhere. If you want a story that trusts you to think, feel, and sit with discomfort, this one delivers.

Get the book. Read it fast. Argue with it later.