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Hindustan Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Book Review: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie paints a true picture of grief through immigrant lives
Since her dazzling debut, Purple Hibiscus, announced her as a literary force in 2003, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has worn many hats — novelist, essayist, cultural critic. Yet each of her new works manages to somehow deepen our understanding of her unique voice. With her latest work, Dream Count, Adichie returns not just to fiction but also to the intimate terrain of memory, identity, and grief; threading these themes through the lives of four immigrant women. At its heart, her new book is a quiet powerhouse. It is Adichie, doing what she does best: capturing the inner weather of her characters with prose so elegant it almost glides past you until it punches you in the gut. The novel unfolds through four interwoven narratives. There's Chiamaka (Chia) — a Nigerian travel writer marooned in the US by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic — but we quickly realise that marooned isn't quite the right word. Chia chooses to stay, clinging to the messy safety of disconnection, even as her family pleads for her return. Then there's Zikora – Chia's steely friend and a successful lawyer – juggling courtrooms and personal silence. Omelogor, Chia's cousin – trades finance for academia, chasing a degree — and goes for something like a reinvention in a landscape that rarely offers clean slate for women. Finally, there's Kadiatou – Chia's Guinean housekeeper – whose story is reminiscent of real-life events relating to the emotionally thunderous case of a New York hotel housekeeper named Nafissatou Diallo. Through these women, Adichie crafts a kaleidoscope of the overlooked immigrant experience during the pandemic. The lives of these women overlap in subtle and profound ways, echoing the novel's deeper concern with how we connect and disconnect, how we remember and forget, and most piercingly, how we grieve! Adichie has spoken of this book as being 'really about my mother,' and it shows. There's a personal weight humming beneath each chapter, not in overt autobiographical detail, but in the novel's aching awareness of loss and the disorienting stillness that often follows. Set against the global stillness of the pandemic, Dream Count becomes both a time capsule and an elegy. The book pulses with contradictions of real life as moments of loneliness are laced with humour and silence holds space for unsaid love. The trauma often hides in the small, quiet things such as a dinner left uneaten, or a voicemail never returned. But perhaps the most remarkable achievement is how this work of writing sneaks up on you. It's not loud, not even plot-driven in the traditional sense yet by the end you realise something profound has shifted within the characters, and maybe within yourself as well. Title: Dream Count Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Publisher: HarperCollins Price: ₹599
CBC
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie subverts expectations of traditional Nigerian women
WARNING: This article and audio interview may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it. The wait is over for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's hugely anticipated return to fiction. Known for her detailed representation of Nigerian women and culture, Dream Count follows four women who live large on the page and resonated deeply with two Canada Reads alumni, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Mirian Njoh. Adichie is the bestselling author of novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of A Yellow Sun and Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013. Since then, Adichie has turned to nonfiction, writing powerful essays that became Ted Talks and short books, including We Should All Be Feminists, which was sampled in Beyoncé's song Flawless and inspired a T-shirt from Dior. Dream Count is Adichie's return to fiction after 12 years and it weaves the perspectives of four women, moving between Nigeria, Guinea and the United States. Rutendo and Njoh reunited on The Next Chapter with Antonio Michael Downing to discuss the complex feelings and reflections the women of Adichie's fiction brought up. For those that have been living under a literary rock, what can you tell us about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? Kudakwashe Rutendo: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a polarizing Nigerian American writer. Her breakout Americanah made huge waves in the literary world and then it was felt like Americanah, Half of the Yellow Sun, her prose is singular and she manages to invoke so much of being Nigerian American, or just being Nigerian into her writing and showing the culture and viewing it in an honest way where you're not coddling it — you're showing its best parts, you're critiquing it. I think that's the honest way to love if you're showing the deficits and the whole parts all in one and she manages to illuminate that in her prose and in her work. And in a subtle way as well where the culture is the writing. She's been on the scene forever and we've been waiting for this book forever. She manages to invoke so much of being Nigerian American into her writing ... in an honest way. Mirian, there are four women in this book. I've heard it described as four interlocking novellas. Each section is about one of these women. First up, we meet Chiamaka and as the title suggests, she's tallying up her dream count, the men that she's loved and lost. What kind of entry did she give you into this novel? Mirian Njoh: I think she was a great opener because I think was the strongest voice to me. Her story stuck with me the greatest and it's interesting 'cause each of them has different themes that stood out very strongly and hers always seemed to me to be the idea of pursuit. On a superficial level, she's a travel writer, so there's just a level of pursuit and going to different places and exploring and capturing and documenting. But she also has that same fervor for seeking and pursuit in her personal life and in the loves that she's seeking. And it's interesting how she flips the notion of a body count, which is something that's often weaponized against women, particularly, and she turns it into a dream count when she recalls the past loves of her life and the love that she's been seeking in these people. Three of the main characters move between Nigeria and America as Chimamanda Adichie does herself. The three women are connected by friendship and family and they're all struggling to some extent with this same stuff. They're all trying to find something, some degree of being seen and almost always by men because they see each other really well. What brings those three characters together in terms of what they're seeking? MN: What you're saying is they're seeking to be, to love, to be loved and to be seen. And I think that is kind of the beauty of the way that their stories are interwoven and I think that their stories are truly dependent on each other, they each sustain each other. Because when you look outside of the bubble of these three women and the safety, the love, the vulnerability and just the rawness that exists between them, they are truly themselves with each other. But then you look at their chosen family dynamic and then you look at their biological family dynamics or even their cultural dynamics and you see how they can't fit. Some of them are actively avoiding their parents and siblings, actively avoiding their aunts. Even with one of the characters who leaves Nigeria and she seeks respite in the U.S., ironically enough, she doesn't find it. They're seeking to be, to love, to be loved and to be seen. - Mirian Njoh There's a clash here because they are essentially very non-traditional women who are trying to do a very traditional thing, which is fall in love, get married, have a baby, things like things around that. KR: I also wonder if this might be a new traditional way to be a woman because I'd also say that a lot of their values were distinct from just clear cut Western values. It was interesting. One of my cousins got traditionally married so it was funny for me weighing the values of that. There is a difference. I feel like these women go against the traditional grain in many ways and I think they also subvert the Western grain as well because they're Nigerian. There's a class thing happening here … but there's also a gender thing going on here, right? KR: I don't think we can talk about being a traditional Igbo culture, but also any African culture without getting into gender politics because they're so ingrained in gendered roles and gendered expectations and even in this book, it's a huge aspect. And I think it's often what the women are rebelling against or sometimes falling into because it's their safety. It's what you understand. I think it's often what the women are rebelling against or sometimes falling into because it's their safety. MN: It's interesting if we look at our outlier Kadiatou and we think about gender because on one hand, I would say she is, in the most extreme sense, subject to gender practices because she undergoes female genital mutilation. But then that also ends up being part of the key that gets her to this next phase of her life, this thing that in a way is like her American Dream. But then the ironic thing is that once again, that whole dynamic of her gender comes into play when she ends up embroiled in a sexual assault scandal. Her identity and character is assassinated and she is called so many things, a con artist, a prostitute. And we see the system really ring her out. Do you also seek a "merging of souls", as Chiamaka says? KR: I think that everyone should seek fulfillment and I say this knowing that I don't believe that… Also, I don't think it was the message of the book. What really got to me is this idea of a dream count. I was like, it's just not disqualifying the affections that we felt. I think oftentimes you're focused on ends like it had to have been a relationship or it had to have been fulfilling, or we have to have dated or just all these things that are so inconsequential. For me, it was like all the things that make you tender, you should honour them. All the people who have given you any tenderness. WATCH | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Bookends with Mattea Roach: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CBC
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Mother-daughter relationships shape Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's return to fiction
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest novel, Dream Count, her character Chiamaka is found alone in the pandemic, reflecting on her past relationships that didn't go the distance. She looks back at all the men she's been with, not as a body count, but as a dream count, as in the dreams of a life together never realized. Despite some of the questionable men of her past, Chiamaka is still holding out hope for a relationship in which she is fully known by someone else — and tries to learn about herself from the frictions of her entanglements. For Adichie, the isolation of COVID was the perfect backdrop for Chiamaka to undergo this introspection. "It makes you aware of your own mortality," said Adichie on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "It gives you an opportunity to look inward in a way that ordinary life just doesn't." However, the idea of being known by someone else can be elusive, she said, because it's almost impossible to totally know oneself. In her own life, the sudden death of her father during lockdown showed her versions of herself she didn't recognize. She explained that she saw herself as someone who reacts to difficult situations by "going cold" — but upon hearing that her father died, she was "taken aback by the melodrama" of her response. "I threw myself down on the ground and I was pounding, pounding the floor and did not realize I was doing this. I was just so overtaken by the devastation of the news." "I was surprised that I had reacted in that way," she said. "And so I started thinking about how much I knew myself and the idea that we can surprise ourselves and we do surprise ourselves." Coming back to fiction The bestselling author of novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of A Yellow Sun and Americanah, Adichie was born in Nigeria and now splits her time between there and the United States. Americanah won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013, but since then, Adichie has turned to nonfiction, writing powerful essays that became Ted Talks and short books, including We Should All Be Feminists, which was sampled by in Beyoncé's song Flawless and inspired a t-shirt from Dior. Dream Count is Adichie's return to fiction after 12 years and it weaves the perspectives of four women, moving between Nigeria, Guinea and the United States. She dedicates the book to her mother, who died in March 2021. And whereas her grief for her father left her grappling for language, she said that losing her mother actually brought her back to fiction. "You're so unwilling to accept something that it then forces a different kind of eloquence on you," Adichie said. "I really think that my mother, in a kind of strange and spiritual way, I feel as though she kind of helped me start writing because she realized that I might go mad if I didn't." You're so unwilling to accept something that it then forces a different kind of eloquence on you. Unwittingly, Dream Count became a novel about the power of platonic love, celebrating female friendships and mother-daughter relationships. "I did not even realize how much of the book was about mothers and daughters until I was almost done and I went back and read what I had," said Adichie. "My mother's spirit is here, I thought. In a more prosaic way, I'm dealing with my issues." The mothers and daughters in Dream Count love each other very much — but sometimes don't understand each other — yet are there to support one another when times are difficult. "Part of my grieving process has been regret because I think that there are times when I was short with my mother in ways that I did not need to be and it made me think about how mother-daughter relationships can be much more complicated and sometimes unnecessarily thorny than daughter-father relationships." Lessons from motherhood Adichie also now has a daughter and twin boys, an experience that has taught her a lot about herself. "I've learned that I'm not endlessly patient," she said, laughing, and explained how powerful her feelings for her children are — a love and obsession that she could never have imagined. But beyond that love for them, she's also gained a level of uncertainty that fuels her. "I think I'm less smug and also slightly less sure," she said. "That has been good for me. Even just as a writer, there's a kind of uncertainty that I think feeds creativity." "I'm still self-confident and I don't apologize for that. But maybe it's that terror at the heart of loving children. I'm just constantly worried about my children. I think it does something to you and I think I like what it's done for me." While becoming a mother did help Adichie get closer to knowing herself, she's still uncertain about who she really is — and so are the characters in Dream Count. "It just feels to me that it's something that we will always long for and never quite get there," she said. "But maybe the longing is the point."
The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Chimamanda effect: Nigerians delight at first novel in a decade from their beloved daughter
When Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie asked participants at her annual writers' workshop in Lagos to introduce themselves, one woman was so excited to be close to her idol that she immediately burst into tears. 'She asked someone to get me water and my heart just melted,' says writer and actor Uzoamaka Power. '[That workshop] was one of the best moments of my life.' That was June 2015 and the 25-year-old Power had read 'every single thing' Adichie had written but most deeply connected with Purple Hibiscus, the 2003 novel partly set in the Nsukka campus of the University of Nigeria where Power had studied. Now 34 and a Nollywood star, Power is brimming with anticipation ahead of the release of Dream Count, a long-awaited new novel from Adichie whose last book, Americanah, came out in 2013. In fiecely patriotic Nigeria, Adichie, regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 21st century, has reached folk hero status. While her feminist stances have made her a divisive figure among some, her simple to digest style and insistence on writing about everyday experiences have won her fans. 'She made it OK to explore our inner lives, even if we were 'ordinary',' says Saratu Abiola, a writer and policy strategist in Abuja. 'She really elevated relatability.' Power agrees. 'In many ways, Chimamanda gave me permission to be ordinary and to be comfortable, and to be strong and to be solid in my ordinariness. Even for something like natural hair that people might consider trivial,' she says. 'To be able to live in this world and know that somebody as powerful as Chimamanda is fine with travelling and doing all these great things that she does and still looks gorgeous does something for young girls and women alike.' The publishing industry was also influenced by Adichie's style, says Ainehi Edoro, founder of literary blog Brittle Paper and associate professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison. 'Before her, African fiction often came packaged with a kind of ethnographic weight – expected to 'explain' Africa to a western audience,' she says. 'But Adichie's work wasn't performing 'Africanness' for an outsider's gaze; it was literary, intimate, contemporary. She helped shift expectations – both in publishing and among readers – so that the next wave of African writers didn't have to over-explain, dilute or justify their stories.' After her first two novels, Adichie became well-known in literary circles but it was a Beyoncé collaboration in 2013, the same year that Americanah was released, that saw her influence grow exponentially and elevated her to rock star status. 'I'd say she transcended being a literary favourite when she teamed up with Beyoncé on Flawless and started to occupy more mainstream stages,' says Abiola, who has compared the roll out and anticipation for Dream Count to that of 'a big music artist's upcoming album'. 'Nothing we love more than seeing a fellow Nigerian in the lights.' In 2022, Adichie privately declined a national honour from the government, according to her spokesperson, but her home town conferred on her the chieftaincy title of Odeluwa – Igbo for 'the one who writes for the world'. Diehard fans began substituting their English first names with their Nigerian ones, including Power, who dropped Doris for Uzoamaka after a chat with Adichie at the end of the 2015 workshop. Young women began following her Instagram for style tips and became cheerleaders for what they called her 'rich aunty' style, while playfully leaving comments on her posts like: 'What happened to Kainene?', a reference to the Half of a Yellow Sun character who does not return home at the end of the Biafran war. Isioma Onyegikei, author of the novel Aegis, sees Adichie as a bridge between older and contemporary African literary excellence. She says people have taken to Adichie because she is visible enough for many to feel 'like they are able to touch her'. 'I read Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta growing up but somehow they felt like an imagination,' says Onyegikei. 'It's different with Chimamanda,' she adds. 'I watch her videos, see her … share her pain of loss and it feels very relatable because she's succeeding, she's in her prime, using the same apps that we use and it almost feels like I can touch her and be the same person one day.' On X, young feminists banded together after Americanah came out, holding conversations on gender-based violence, traditional gender roles, natural hair and equal opportunities for women – or the lack of – in the workplace, while calling her 'my president' and 'our leader'. The debates stirred the platform so much that the term Daughters of Chimamanda emerged first as a descriptor, then as a slur, for Nigeria's feminists. Perceptions of her began to change on social media after her stance on transgender people triggered worldwide debate in 2017. Adichie has argued – and continues to do so – that the experiences of people who previously lived as men and were accorded male societal privileges before transitioning to be women, are significantly different from those of people who were born female. Another comment, in a 2021 video – 'I often say to young Nigerian feminists, please do not use feminism to justify your wickedness' – displeased some of her Nigerian fan base, partly because some said it had been weaponised on X. Nevertheless, her literary icon status holds fast and many of her readers see her as a multidimensional figure, much like a character in one of her books. 'Chimamanda is very interesting,' said Onyegikei. 'Many of the people – particularly guys – who hated her guts for her stance on feminism now stan [admire] her for her stance on transwomen. The people who stanned her then for her views on feminism can't stand her because of transwomen. All in all, love or hate her, you must respect her.'
Telegraph
02-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘I've always been willing to take the consequences of speaking my mind'
'The writer in me is very curious to see how this will end,' says Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We are at her home in Maryland. She is wearing what looks like a pair of vibrant silk pyjamas and we are sharing a bar of very rich dark chocolate; inevitably we have arrived at the subject of American politics. In the next room, her brother Okey – here from Lagos for a few days – is keeping half an eye on her 10-month-old twin boys who are marauding around in a makeshift soft prison constructed from cushions and chairs. Her best friend is here from New Jersey, and the house is filled with laughter and light. We are talking Trump. 'I think we use words like 'unbelievable' very easily,' she says, 'but if there's any point in human history where that word is truly apt, it is now. It really is. There is an aura of disbelief when I wake up every day and read the news. It's not just that he's come back, it's the manner of return. There is a kind of utter recklessness that is both confusing and also frightening. You cannot love a country and treat it so recklessly – love demands a certain carefulness. All this talk of 'America First' – there is no love there, there really isn't.' She is surprised, she says, at how muted the response from the opposition has been. Surprised and shocked. 'Anyone who has even a basic understanding of egomania knows that the Trump/Musk alliance will not last, but there's this entertainment factor that Trump brings which I think is why he won the first time, and even the second time. But we need to remember that lives are at risk. 'People who voted for him are going to suffer with all these lay-offs. I have a friend who works in early childhood education and it's really sad listening to her – she says every day she gets to work and there's a new memo, and she's been told the next academic year won't be renewed – this is for children whose parents can't afford to buy them crayons. 'I thought Nigeria could do ridiculous things politically, but this is worse than Nigeria.' Adichie is 47, but looks about 20 years younger. She grew up in Nsukka, in south-east Nigeria but moved to America to go to university and live with her sister, who is a doctor here, and she now splits her time between Maryland and Lagos. Her husband, Ivara, who she calls IV, is a physician, who recently took early retirement to be a stay-at-home dad and help with the twins. They have a nine-year-old daughter, who is currently at school. Dream Count is Adichie's highly anticipated new book. It is 11 years since her last novel, Americanah, which sold more than two million copies, and won several awards. Her highly acclaimed debut, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003, followed by Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Biafran War, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction. She has always said that fiction is the love of her life, but she is more than just a novelist; she was awarded the MacArthur fellowship in 2008, and delivered two wildly successful Ted Talks, We Should All Be Feminists and The Danger of a Single Story. She has written a children's book, a collection of short stories, and her work has been translated into 55 languages. Her essay Notes on Grief, written after her father died, was a moving elegy of human yearning. Her words have been sampled by Beyoncé and she has delivered a Reith Lecture – which gives a pretty good idea of the diversity of her reach. So here we are in her lovely open-plan colonial-style house near Ellicott City, with lots of art on the walls, a piano, and bookcases filled with desirable editions of desirable books. The kitchen island is covered in snacks, and Adichie is getting ready to put on a new dress for the photo shoot ('and the vanity that lives healthily in my soul is concerned about that dress fitting – because I don't really have any backup'. ) The house is entirely surrounded by trees, bared by the season. It's a woody outpost away from the endless highways of Maryland. This is a friendly neighbourhood, Adichie says, almost like a caricature of a liberal diverse community. 'It's as if we're in a little progressive bubble – there's us Nigerians, then a white American couple, a Bangladeshi Muslim couple, an Asian couple, an African-American woman and her white husband – and they're all really lovely.' She doesn't want to waste any more time on talking about Trump, and we move on to her novel, which she doesn't much like talking about either. 'I never did like talking about my books and I particularly don't now. I feel very fragile about this one. I feel almost new to it. It has been a while – the landscape has changed, publishing has changed – it feels all new and not always in a good way. Of course I have been writing during that time – but not fiction. This one is almost precious; I hope people will connect with it.' The book is not short, around 400 pages, but it skips along. 'I told myself that after Americanah, the next book would be short, so that the readers of the social media generation would be able to finish it, but I guess I don't know how to write short books.' Set between Nigeria and the US, Dream Count tells the interlinked story of four women, and their ambitions and desires, their boyfriends, their social lives, and quite a lot about the food they eat. There is Zikora, a lawyer with an overbearing mother determined to marry her off; Chiamaka, an aspiring travel writer who is spoilt but inherently likeable; Omelogor, a banker who finds a way to redistribute ill-gotten wealth to enterprising village women ('I had fun writing that'); and Kadiatou, an open-hearted, dignified Muslim who grows up in Guinea and works for Chiamaka. The reason that Adichie's fiction is so compelling is the way she inhabits her characters completely; they have lived in her head for a long while and she talks about them as if they were real people, friends of hers. Zikora had already appeared in one of her short stories. 'And I knew I was going to write about Chiamaka because I've always imagined this very dreamy, privileged woman who, as her friends would say to her, but very lovingly 'you're such a soft and spoiled person'. There's something I admire about being able to move through the world with a kind of resistance to practicality. 'For a long time I've wanted to write about the reality of women's lives in a very straightforward way – because this is how I approach my fiction, I don't like to hide. I wanted to write about childbirth, female cutting, premenstrual dysphoric disorder – because I care about them.' What makes the book so absorbing is the amount of detail threaded into the characters' lives; their flaws, thought processes and dialogue are so believable. She is a big eavesdropper, she says. 'I am, I am! Whenever people are talking – I'm listening, of course, but what I'm thinking about is material. What is usable. And even when I wasn't writing fiction, I was still very alert to the world, listening and eavesdropping and asking people inappropriate questions. I'm amazed sometimes about what people will tell you.' There is a bit of her in each of the women, and inevitably, several bits of her friends, too. But, she says 'they're often wrong about which bits'. One character who is outside her experience is Kadiatou, who grows up in a small village in Guinea, experiences heartbreaking family bereavement and horrendous FGM, and moves to America to join her husband, Amadou. Adichie, who has never been to Guinea, describes life there so vividly that it's like watching a film. There is a lot about cooking; Adichie is big on food – okra, ndappa, poulet yassa, fouti, latchiri – evocative words that make your mouth water. 'I cannot tell you how much time I spent watching women from Guinea cooking on YouTube! And my Nigerian friends were horrified – they said look at what they're doing! They're doing it wrong! Nigerians always think their cooking is superior.' What happens to Kadiatou is inspired by – 'inspired by' being the important phrase here, not 'based upon' – the case of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who was working as a housekeeper in a hotel in New York and who claimed that she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former director of the IMF, who was arrested very publicly when he was on the plane about to return to France. He pleaded not guilty and in the end the charges were dropped, which was down to 'credibility issues' on the part of Diallo. 'They dropped the case because she had lied on her asylum application,' says Adichie. 'So the message is – if you're assaulted, you'd better be perfect. You'd better be utterly sinless.' The case lodged in Adichie's mind, but Kadiatou's story is different from Diallo's – except for the extremely harrowing account of the assault itself, which Adichie felt was sacrosanct. I knew about the Strauss-Kahn case but had not made the connection while reading the book until Adichie's author's note at the end. It is a beautifully written addendum about a person who 'became, in my imagination, a symbol, a person failed by a country she trusted' – but Adichie did not want to do it. 'I did not want to write the author's note. I was pretty much made to by my [American] publishers. Publishing has become – when I'm in a good mood I say 'overcautious'; when I'm in a bad mood I say 'cowardly'. There's a pre-emptive defensiveness. They kept on at me to make all these stupid changes, and even asked me if I could find a way to put in the story that Strauss-Kahn denied all the charges. There's a reason that it's a novel! It's fiction! 'I tried to make it as personal as possible, but it has a kind of defensiveness that I don't like, and which is not me.' She feels strongly that 'art requires a completely free imagination to go wherever we want. I firmly believe that art can and should take from real life and we can enhance it; asking me to change these things is stifling my ability to imagine.' Dream Count is dedicated to her mother, Grace, who died in 2021; her father, James, had died the year before, in June, when Adichie was stuck in America, unable to get there because of Covid. When she was told about her father's death, she became unhinged, 'utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor,' she wrote in Notes on Grief. 'My grieving surprised me,' she says now. 'I would never have imagined myself as a person who reacted by throwing myself down – my response was so physical, so dramatic. Normally there's a coldness to the way I deal with pain – I would have thought I would just freeze and go numb, but instead it was an exercise in melodrama. 'He was such a good man. His wisdom, his dry humour – such a good man. I think my father dying I have in some ways made peace with now, but my mother's death I have not.' Adichie was in Lagos. Her mother was in Abba, at the family home, 500km away. Her mother had been feeling unwell one Sunday, and was admitted to hospital, but had seemed to recover, and was eating. She was moved to a different hospital because the small private hospital she had been in did not have the right protective equipment (to cope with the Covid requirements) but died shortly after. Adichie is visibly emotional when she talks about her. 'She went so quickly, and there is a lot of confusion, and a lot of regret. There are times when I worry that I took my mother for granted; and my mother was a fantastic mother, we were close, but… I worry that sometimes I didn't extend as much grace to her as I did with my father, I judged her more. 'After my father died I asked her to come and live with me here, but I understood that it was important for her to stay [in Nigeria] near where my father is buried. My parents were very close, and when my father died the light just left her. I had thought she had at least 10 years left – she was 78 – and I remember thinking, I'm going to find every possible way to bring the joy back into her life. I can make up for all the times I was a stupid teenage know-it-all. And so I almost felt cheated when she went so fast.' She has five siblings: two in Nigeria, two in America and one in England. 'It really shook us and splintered us – we're all kind of flailing, I think, because we were so close. And that was because of my parents. I had not realised that until they were gone.' The grief still rears its head. 'That is the nature of things, and I think it's a consequence of love. I try to hide it from the people around me because I think there's a limit to people's empathy, especially Nigerians. Nigerians are horrible about it: 'Oh it's happened – move on.'' Her daughter reminds her of Grace, and she sees her father in the face of one of the twins – 'scholarly and curious'; the other twin, she says, reminds her of IV's father. 'I'm so grateful for them, and my daughter, they've helped me so much to cope.' What was your reaction when you found out you were having twins? 'Shock! I still sometimes look at them and think, who are these two tiny people in my house?' For several years, Adichie used to hold a vibrant writers' workshop in Lagos. It ran into controversy when a young writer, one of her students whom she had befriended and helped, accused her of transphobia, despite the fact that Adichie has always stood up for LGBTQ rights in Nigeria and supported trans women. This was because she had said, in a 2017 interview, that 'trans women are trans women', and an essay she wrote in response to the ensuing backlash. She is bored of talking about this now; apart from anything else, it was eight years ago. But she hasn't run the workshop in several years. Is that why? I ask her. 'I think that must have played a role, yes,' she says, though life – and death – got in the way. First Covid happened, then her parents died, and she was writing the book, and all the while trying to get pregnant. 'But maybe the reason I kept saying I'm busy is because there's a part of me that just felt I didn't want to be confronted by a bunch of ungrateful twats.' She laughs. 'Honestly, with this generation there is just an incredible amount of entitlement, and I don't have time for it, you know? But I will do it again – I was supposed to do it last year but then…' she trails off, and waves her hands toward the boys. 'I don't want people's negative energy to dictate how I behave, because that would be giving them too much power. But I'm still human. So I will do that damn workshop again – maybe this summer. 'I believe in fundamental things like gratitude and loyalty – I think those things matter. And we live in a time now where it's very easy to dismiss them – it's also a time of the self-absorbed; it's a generation that claims to be progressive but it's also quite neo-liberal; it's actually quite conservative.' Freedom of speech, and the power of words, was the subject of her Reith Lecture in November 2022, and is something she feels very strongly about. 'We must insist not only on truth, but also on nuance,' she said in the lecture, condemning the fact that young people now are afraid to ask questions, in case they are the wrong questions, and that the biggest threat to free speech today is fear of social censure. Is there anything she herself regrets saying? I don't mean the opinion she expressed, but the saying of it? She looks at me. 'You mean because of the quote unquote backlash? No, no, no. I said what I believe. Nope. I had thought I shouldn't talk about certain things, but then this is who I am. I don't know how to be a person who's not saying what she thinks. 'I've always been willing to take the consequences of speaking my mind. And there are consequences, and they're hurtful – but, nope. Don't regret it.' 'Social media has reshaped the traditional power dynamic by giving some access to the powerless, it has also made it easy to mistake the loudest voices for the truest,' Adichie said in her lecture. She blames social media for everything. It's to do with language. 'The meaning of language has been distorted,' she says now, 'and it's so crazy. I really think that social media has robbed this generation of young people of the ability to see human beings as messy and complex. It has made everything so black and white; it has really flattened things – we cannot have conversations where we talk about complexity, or where we acknowledge that the other side might have a point – and it's bad for the way the world works.' Her daughter is only nine so it's not yet an issue, but when she's around her cousins, Adichie makes them turn off TikTok. 'I think it's poison, I really do.' But what can be done? 'I've been thinking about that a lot – what if you put sensible women in charge of the tech companies? I think the goals would change. I do wonder if there's a way that social media could be made gentler. What if we changed the algorithms? What if you had to use your real name to use X?' Needless to say, she's not on X or any similar platforms, but she is on Instagram, which she describes as 'a celebration of vanity'. Adichie loves dressing up. In May, she is co-hosting New York's ultra-fashionable, high-end Met Gala, which has the theme of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. 'I'm more excited about that than my novel!' she laughs. She has been assigned a designer, she won't say who, but they'll work together, though one thing she will insist on, she says, is 'whatever the dress, I still need to wear proper underwear! Because these days when they make dresses I feel that they just find the most ridiculous places to cut out things, and I just think, why? 'So that's my demand – proper underwear and a bra, thank you very much.' She was taken aback to be asked, she says, but she's looking forward to it. 'I like fashion and there's an element of art and craziness too: fashion, art and craziness, I love them all.'
