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 third novel, coming out on March 4. 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 materialized 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 over a million copies in the United States alone. The 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, 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.”
Lexy Bloom, Adichie’s editor at Knopf, recalled “Dream Count” arriving as a fully formed book. “It’s about dreams deferred,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s also about sex and power and mothers and daughters. That’s on every page, in every story line.”
There was a problem, though. For legal reasons, Knopf told Adichie that she’d have to write an author’s note explaining that Kadiatou was not, in fact, Nafissatou Diallo.
Adichie wasn’t pleased, especially since Kadiatou’s relationship with her daughter, Binta, was the one in the book that most reminded Adichie of her own bond with her mother.
“Those are the characters that are least like me on the surface,” Adichie said. “They’re not Nigerian. There are differences in language, religion, class. But there’s something in the connection between mother and daughter that is my mother in a way, and also my sense of regret.”
Adichie felt she had no choice but to heed Knopf’s request. Her sons were infants and she wasn’t sleeping, but she holed up for a few days to make some requested edits and write the author’s note.
“When I’m in a good place, I call it overcautious,” she said of her publisher’s concerns. “When I’m in a bad place, I call it cowardice. I wish it wasn’t so; I wish we lived in a different time.” As in, a less litigious time, with fewer worries about social media blowback, and more commitment to what she called “imaginative storytelling.”
Bloom declined to discuss legal considerations about “Dream Count.”
Marilyn Nelson, who was tickled to learn of Adichie’s connection with her work, offered a poet’s perspective. “Sometimes,” she wrote in an email, “current events seem to cry out to be written about in poetry and fiction as well as journalism, because people have to understand them in order to stop them.”
Toward the end of our interview, Adichie’s husband came home from the gym, stopping to chat. “This is the unfortunate man I married,” she said. “He’s a sensible physician.”
Soon after, there was an escalation of baby sounds: a wail, a belly laugh, a chortle. When asked if she knew which son we were hearing from afar, Adichie said, “Of course.”
Then Adichie talked about her own mother. How “emotionally acute” she was. How protective and proud, sometimes effusively so. How, along with Adichie’s father, she made each of her six children feel “uniquely seen.”
Adichie said, “There’s so much now that I look back on and I think, My goodness, these two people really did well. I’m exhausted and I’ve only recently become a mother of three.”
She added, “My mother has become a model to try and emulate. I don’t know how she did it.”
Adichie’s author’s note might have been written under duress, but it doesn’t read that way. It’s a powerful coda, explaining her interest in Diallo — her familiar West African mannerisms, the way she became “a person failed by the country she trusted” after her case was dropped.
“My mother would, I think, have liked the character of Kadiatou,” Adichie writes. “I imagine her reading this novel and then sighing and saying, with a kind of resignation and fellow-feeling, Nwanyi ibe m. My fellow woman.”
Ever the devoted daughter, she gave her mother the last word.
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