‘Notes on Grief’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail – and never without touches of rich, honest humor – Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book – a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment – a work listeners will treasure and share now more than ever – and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie’s canon.