Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of three novels, Purple Hibis­cus (2003), Half a Yellow Sun (2006), and Ameri­canah (2013); a collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009); and three works of nonfiction, We Should All Be Feminists (2012), Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017), and Notes on Grief (2021). Her bestselling work has been translated into over thirty languages. 

Adichie earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and a master of arts degree in African history from Yale University, and she was awarded a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University. In 2008, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. Adichie has received honorary doctor­ate degrees from many universities, most recently the University of Fribourg in 2019. 

Adichie has been widely interviewed, on film and in print, and has herself interviewed or held public conversation with Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Angela Merkel. She is a dynamic speaker, and her 2009 TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” is the most widely viewed TED Talk of all time. She generously agreed to speak with me in April 2022 to discuss Notes on Grief, the humanizing effects of literature, and her work as a public intellectual. 

Helena Feder: Your most recent book, Notes on Grief, is a moving, visceral account of your love and loss of your father. I was struck by the sentences, “I regret my past certainties” and “There is no way through” (13). What can grief teach us about living? About writing?

Chimamanda Adichie: Thank you. I am struck that you are struck by those sentences. You being struck by those sentences I find moving, because those bits also meant a lot to me. Grief was an education for me, and it has educated me about grief, but I am now looking to learn lessons about meaning—though it seems to me I have been learning about that too, though maybe not consciously, because I do live my life differently now. In other words, I am a different person today, different than I was the first week of June 2020 when my father died. And if I had to articulate it, I am much more aware of and alert to mortality and, therefore, meaning has become so much more important to me. I have come to see that the life that matters to me is the life that has some kind of meaning. I feel like I am on a search; I question myself more—Does this matter? And what does this mean? What am I doing? 

Feder: Grief has taught you about the art of living. 

Adichie: I think so, and I think I felt a bit emotional when you pointed out the part about regretting my past certainties because I do regret them, and because grief pushes you away from that place of certainty. Before grief I really felt very strongly that one must feel everything that one feels. I felt that looking away from pain was some kind of failure or weakness, and I do not think that anymore. Not at all. I think that people cope in different ways. I know, for exam­ple, that I continue to look away from my mother; the fact that my mother died is something I have not faced. It is a feeling close to shame.

Feder: To lose both your parents… I am deeply sorry for your loss, but also very grateful that you have written about this profound experience. It is like Kundera’s awful lightness that comes with such weight—as you’ve mentioned shame, grief is often entangled with guilt (as we see in Notes on Grief). Is guilt a way of saving ourselves from terrible weightlessness, of maintaining an illu­sion of control, of our humanity? 

Adichie: I really like that idea. Yes, I think that is such a good way, and a very healthy way, of framing guilt. I do think you’re right; I think that shame and guilt come from a sense that we have not done enough, that we could have done better. Losing my mother opened up this well of regret. It is so final; you do not have the opportunity to fix anything. The guilt that grief brings is so difficult; I think I am going to take what you’ve said and keep it, this idea that feeling guilty is our way of remaining human. I like that a lot.

Feder: Nothing seems more personal than grief; as you have said, everyone grieves in an individual way. And yet, despite being so deeply personal, in writing grief may achieve a kind of universality (not, of course, the kind of universality that, as you have it in We Should All Be Feminists, “can silence spe­cific experiences…”). 

Adichie: Yes, and one thing I think that is similar to grief is love, in the way that we all love and are loved but it feels incredibly specific. One feels things and thinks, “Nobody has ever felt this before, not in the way that I am think­ing and feeling.” I started to recognize this interesting duality of grief when I started reading about it, after my father died and I was trying to find language for what I was feeling. In almost every­thing I read were things I could recog­nize but I also I read so much that made me think, “No, that is not my grief.” This is when I started to realize that like love, and like literature—in the way that literature is universal, that every good story somehow has been told—the spe­cifics of it is what makes it, or makes it work. Obviously, I wish I hadn’t had to learn about grief.

Feder: At one point in Americanah I believe Ifemelu realizes just what you’re saying now. Near the end of the novel, she thinks, “Love was a kind of grief. This was what the novelists meant by suffering” (583). 

In Notes on Grief, you write that, with death brought closer, you wrote from a new sense of urgency (66). Does this urgency shape your fiction as well? Do you write everything differently?

Adichie: Yes, absolutely. I think very differently about my writing, and I am writing differently. I don’t know if that is good or bad; we’ll see if I manage to finish the damn thing. I even have a sense of urgency about time. I think one of the many things that grief has done is that it has made me paranoid, think­ing “I hope I manage to finish whatever I start.” Before my father died, I had this grand plan of a long, very intensive thing I might do, and now I don’t want to do it. I don’t think I want to spend six years researching a novel. I think I will probably writing many shorter things. It is a strange thing: it is a sense of urgency that comes with a desire to be less urgent about life. I don’t want to say “intentional” because I have a deep aversion to psychobabble—these words are thrown around so often they lose meaning—but the young people on social media would call it “intentionality.”

Feder: Yes, or “mindfulness.”

Adichie: Yes! I just want to know what I am doing and why I am doing what I am doing.

Feder: Which seems like a gift, as awful as grief is.

Adichie: So, going back to when you asked about lessons for living, I think that is what it would be.

Feder: You have said that “literature humanizes people” (University of Fribourg 2019). I believe this too, but I often find my belief challenged by the events of the world, from the academy to global politics. For example, Vladimir Putin claims he reads Hemingway and Russian novelists (see “Vladimir Putin’s Reading List” in The New Yorker) and “likes to spontaneously recite Russian poetry or quotes from foreign classics…” How can one, or can one, reconcile this belief with the ways in which systemic forms of oppression continue to grow?

Adichie: Oh, I don’t know. I think about this as well. I didn’t realize that Putin says he reads Hemingway. I am actually reading a biography of Putin right now. It is a strange thing, but one wants to try to understand the root of evil madness. I think there is a lot about Putin that has to do with his sense of masculinity. It almost feels like a cari­cature. What I can say is that the exis­tence of the Putins of the world is not enough to make me rethink the idea that literature humanizes people. I have seen many other examples, and my life is one as well. Literature has done a lot for me. And so, while I spend a lot of time trying to understand the Putins of the world, I still continue to hold on to this idea.

Feder: That’s a wonderful answer. Along these lines, I wanted to ask about a few moments in Americanah that struck me, moments when the novel itself seems to feel that fiction is not enough. For example, when the narrator tells us that a woman in a crowd in the Manchester Airport “would not understand his [Obinze’s] story … because people like her did not approach travel with anxiety about visas.” Or when Shan claims that one “can’t write an honest novel about race in this country”? 

Adichie: The woman at the airport, if she had read Obinze’s story, then maybe she would start to understand. She has not had the chance. I think what the novel is trying to explore there is the idea that the reason we are unfamiliar with one another is because we do not know one another’s stories. So, while that moment could be read as a possible failure of fiction, it is really an opportu­nity. The more people’s stories become familiar to me, the more they become familiar, and understandable. That does not, of course, necessarily mean they become sympathetic. I can understand people with whom I fiercely disagree.

Feder: It would, though, have been easy for the novel to make fiction seem all powerful, and to its credit it does not do that (though this must, at some point, be every novelist’s temptation). On the other hand, fiction is an exercise in shared vulnerability. “Cell One,” the first story in The Thing Around Your Neck, seems a case in point.

Adichie: I would like to think that this is what most of my writing is about, and what I look to fiction for generally. One of the things that I want my fiction to do, and what I want to find in other people’s fiction, is find how and when the shiny surface of the present cracks, because it does. So, for example, I am really interested in reading about a really powerful person and coming to realize the thing that terrifies her or him. And you realize, my god, we really are all just muddling along, all of us humans in the world. I find that comforting.

Feder: Literature values individual stories and experiences and cultivates understanding and nuance. Is literature, then, inherently democratic? 

Adichie: I think we can say yes, though I could argue both sides of this ques­tion. When you read a story, you’re in this world a writer has created, with the rules the writer has created for it that you have to adapt to. So, there is a level of dictatorship there … but the experi­ence of literature is democratic. What I love about a good story is that anybody can get into it. The example I like to use is reading the Russians growing up, and not knowing how to pronounce the names of the characters, in Chekov and Gogol for example. Though I didn’t always get the details, and some things seemed so strange and unusual to me growing up in Nsukka, Nigeria, I got the human parts of the stories. I find it really democratic, that someone grow­ing up in a small town in Iowa will feel a connection to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and someone in India will feel a con­nection to Ibsen.

Feder: Is this why honesty is so import­ant in fiction?

Adichie: Yes, and yes. I really like to say this to people who are starting out writing, how important it is to be hon­est, even though it is easier not to tell the full truth, to protect yourself. It is easy to worry about who is going to read what you write and how it will make you look. But I like to think of fiction as a site of radical honesty. Fiction allows that because even you, as the creator, are still somewhat removed from it. It is that strange duality—you’re deeply committed but still removed. 

Feder: Yes, you are not the work. I feel, though, that writers are finding it hard­er to be honest, let alone radically hon­est. Some of my students, for example, are afraid to say what they think, and have said this—no matter how open, welcoming, and tolerant the environ­ment. People are attacked so quickly and easily; it seems a difficult time to say anything nuanced about so many things—especially those that matter most to people.

Adichie: That is true, and it really wor­ries me. Not for myself, but for people starting out. It is not an environment that enables creativity, or art. It is unfortunate, but true. I think it started in America, but America has exported it everywhere in the world, this lack of tolerance or nuance especially for subjects that are considered political or contested. It comes from an impulse I admire. We want to be kind and we want everyone to be okay, but I think that impulse can be abused. And I think it has been, because it has led to a kind of censorship, a self-censorship because one is aware of the potential pitfalls and thinks, “Let’s not even go there.” It worries me so much because it is through fiction that I have often found out the truth of things. And now, at times, you cannot get that. For example, I was reading a novel by Edna O’Brien, whose work I admire, in which a racist and homophobic comment was made by a character about James Baldwin (he is not named in the novel, but I could tell it was about him). I was personal­ly upset by it—of course literature it supposed to elicit feelings in us—but I also felt a kind of gratitude. Today, you would not see that in fiction. But the truth is, some people were talking about Baldwin in that way at that time. It felt true, and you could tell from the whole world view of the novel that it did not endorse the character’s perspective, but felt it was important to tell the truth of what was being said. It made me think about some of the work that is being produced now and will be in the next ten years: we cannot wish away oppres­sion. It is so much better to be honest about the world we live in, and I think we still live in a world that is racist, a world that is misogynist, a world that is deeply homophobic. 

Feder: I agree, and it is not a good envi­ronment for creativity, or for democ­racy. This brings me to your talks, and your books We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. How do you see the relationship between literature and public life or popular culture?