Notes on Grief

From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father.

Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope. written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father's death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.

In this extended essay, which originated in a 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 on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humour-Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father's death with threads of his lite 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 had stayed connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria.

Elegant, moving ... An affecting pacan to the author's father, James Nwoye Adichie. The first professor of statistics in his country, James lived an eventful and sometimes fraught life. Funny and principled, he died during the pandemic-not of the virus but kidney discase. Adichic moves through some of the classic stages of grief, including no small amount of anger...

Eventually, she reflects on a newfound awareness of mortality and finds a

'new urgency' to live her life and do her work. - Kirkus Reviews

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie