Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. No Advance Reader Copy included. No affiliate links used. Read my full disclosure policy here.
“I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.” writes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and never has a single sentence made me sob more. I hear you. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to talking about my dad in the past tense.
Expanding on her New Yorker essay of the same name, Notes on Grief is a moving meditation on the loss of Adichie’s father, James Nwoye Adichie, in June 2020.
He did not die of Covid-19, yet the pandemic permeates the text in the way I imagine it has impacted so many grieving people’s lives in the last 12+ months. The changing travel restrictions meant the funeral was postponed and eventually happened without Adichie, or her other siblings who live abroad, being able to return to Nigeria.
The regular family gatherings over Zoom morphed into planning and attending his funeral via Zoom. Igbo traditions are adapted to allow for social distancing and the other pandemic-related changes that have become second nature to us even though they are anything but normal.
With each vignette, Adichie shares her pain and her father’s life, and the intimacies of their relationship. James Nwoye Adichie was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics. He lived through the Biafran war. Adichie calls herself a daddy’s girl and her love for him is clear to see.
At under 100 pages, Notes on Grief captures Adichie’s realisation that no one knows how to grieve until we are forced. We think we will be prepared, but we never are. I am grateful Adichie chose to share her grief with us.
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, and is available in hardback and ebook format. The audio version is published on July 15th.