To walk into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stately brick home outside Baltimore is to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that small children live there. It’s not that the kitchen floor is a Lego minefield or that the double staircase is lined with low-hanging fingerprints — quite the opposite. It’s that the house rings with expectancy, as if biding time until the next step in a carefully choreographed routine, which, if you think about it, isn’t all that different from the mood in the lead-up to a much-anticipated book.
For Adichie, that book is “Dream Count,” her fourth novel, which came out Tuesday. Forged during the most difficult period of Adichie’s life, it explores the braided lives of four African women, with motherhood as a load-bearing wall.
In real life, Adichie has a 9-year-old daughter and 10-month-old twin sons, who materialised briefly in a blaze of succulent-cheeked glory. It was clear, as she bounced a baby on each hip and pointed to the spot where her daughter took her first steps, that Adichie is enjoying, as she put it, “being a mama.” But the central inspiration for “Dream Count” came from her own mother, Grace Ifeoma Adichie, who died in March 2021. The book is dedicated to her.
“I was not consciously aware that I was writing a novel about my mother,” Adichie said. “I thought I was writing a novel about female connection.” Later she said, “I just want her to come back.” Adichie straddles the worlds of fiction and nonfiction, author and public figure. She’s as likely to appear on The New Yorker’s table of contents as she is on the cover of British Vogue, and her ambidexterity has as much to do with courage and candor as it does with talent.
Lately, it also has to do with loss.
As Adichie wrote in “Notes on Grief,” published in the aftermath of her father’s death, she said, she learned “how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” Her first two novels, “Purple Hibiscus” (2003) and “Half of a Yellow Sun” (2006), were well received, as was her story collection, “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009). But Adichie’s third novel, “Americanah” (2013), about a young Nigerian woman finding her way in the United States, launched her from the shelves of the literati to the windows of chain bookstores.
The book sold more than 1 million copies in the United States alone. The New York Times selected it as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013, heralding Adichie, who is from Nigeria, as a “fearless writer,” attuned to “the various worlds and shifting selves we inhabit.”
Fans flocked to YouTube to watch Adichie’s TED and TEDx Talks, “The Danger of a Single Story” and “We Should All Be Feminists,” which now have more than 43 million views. The latter inspired a gift book, was sampled in a Beyoncé song and spawned a Dior T-shirt ($920) that graced the runway at Paris Fashion Week in 2016.
Then came two more pocket-size manifestoes: “Dear Ijeawele” (2017), advice to a friend on raising a feminist daughter and “Notes on Grief,” (2021) which packs a library’s worth of loss and disbelief into 80 pages.
In the past, Adichie said, she’d been “self-aware” in her nonfiction — restrained and careful, measuring every word. The period after her father died, Adichie said, “was the first time that I wasn’t.” Then, less than nine months later, her mother died, too. This tidal wave of grief was “a gutting, an excavation,” she said. It brought her to a “skeletal emotional place.” This time, she turned to fiction.
The first line of “Dream Count” had been rattling around in Adichie’s head. It reads, “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.” One character, a lawyer named Zikora, came from a from a story she’d written years before. The others — a travel writer, a banker and a housekeeper — took shape gradually. Three of the women are from Nigeria; the fourth, Kadiatou, is from Guinea. Adichie said the character was inspired by Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel employee who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician and economist, of sexually assaulting her in his Manhattan hotel suite in 2011. Adichie had followed the case closely.
“It’s what happened but it’s filtered through my imagination,” Adichie said.
She wrote part of “Dream Count” in Lagos, Nigeria, part of it at her local public library (wearing a hoodie, “looking a bit crazy”) and a decent chunk while scrunched on a low ottoman in her bedroom, despite having a desk nearby.
No matter where she was, Adichie said, she struggled to get to that “intense, hyper-focused, obsessive, mad and ultimately joyful place” where she can think of little else but the story in front of her. One day, as she was on the verge of “creative malaise,” Adichie plucked a book of poems from her shelf: “Faster Than Light,” by Marilyn Nelson, the former poet laureate of Connecticut, with whom she’d crossed paths with years before.
“I started reading and something magical happened,” Adichie said. “I came back.” A number of the poems in Nelson’s collection are historical — about Emmett Till, George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee Airmen. “She had done what I longed to do and what I admire most in literature, when the writer is able to blend heart and head,” Adichie said. “It just made me think, ‘Get up and go write.’ It wasn’t subtle and dreamy. It was immediate. That’s never happened to me before.” From there, the novel flowed. Adichie said, “Fiction is the thing that makes me happiest when it’s going well. I’m much nicer to be around, except that nobody ever sees me.” — The New York Times
GRAPH POINTS
1. Adichie's first two novels, “Purple Hibiscus” (2003) and “Half of a Yellow Sun” (2006), were well received, as was her story collection, “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009).
2. “Americanah” (2013), sold more than 1 million copies in the US alone. The New York Times selected it as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013
3. Fans flocked to YouTube to watch Adichie’s TED and TEDx Talks, “The Danger of a Single Story” and “We Should All Be Feminists,” which now have more than 43 million views. The latter inspired a gift book, was sampled in a Beyoncé song and spawned a Dior T-shirt ($920) that graced the runway at Paris Fashion Week in 2016.
4. “Dear Ijeawele” (2017) was advice to a friend on raising a feminist daughter and “Notes on Grief,” (2021) which packs a library’s worth of loss and disbelief into 80 pages.
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