[2] Sumatra, a young black woman with a dissociative disorder living in Beijing, learns that she is pregnant and returns to the United States.

[4] According to Bello, in December 2021 she informed her editor that the manuscript of The Leaving contained passages taken from authors James Baldwin and Carole Maso.

The full list of authors whom Bello had plagiarized included Baldwin, Maso, Marie Cardinal, Matthew Olzmann, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Rebecca Solnit, and Bassey Ikpi.

Bello claimed that she had searched for other writers' depictions of pregnancy online, since she had never been pregnant herself, and had initially justified it to herself as "just borrowing and changing the language.

Writers such as Akwaeke Emezi and Terese Marie Mailhot defended Bello, arguing that she was receiving heightened criticism because of her race.

by Danez Smith; and a submission to her fiction workshop at Iowa, in which she plagiarized a passage from Carmen Maria Machado's short story "Inventory."

Bello apologized for her actions, saying that she had "made mistakes" and "hurt people terribly" while struggling with psychiatric treatment, external pressures, and life events.