Notes on Grief
Books | Family & Relationships / Death, Grief, Bereavement
4.1
(93)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
**Pre-order DREAM COUNT, the searing, exquisite new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie now!** A devastating essay on loss and the people we love from the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. 'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language' On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.
Memoir
AD
Buy now:
More Details:
Author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Pages
96
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Published Date
2021-05-11
ISBN
0008470316 9780008470319
Community ReviewsSee all
"Brilliant, clear, heart-breaking. <br/><br/>This book puts words to feelings that are indescribable."
Cassie Sandberg
"I read Notes on Grief with my whole body because I, too, lost my mother unexpectedly during the early days of the pandemic. She was 60. I hadn’t seen her in person for months. We FaceTimed every day, and then she was gone. Though my family culture is entirely different from Adichie’s, every emotion she describes felt familiar. Her grief mirrored mine in ways that were almost eerie in their accuracy. When she reflects on how the pandemic gave us a false sense of control—washing our hands, staying home—and how one loss shattered that illusion, I felt that same shift. Suddenly, death wasn’t abstract. It was personal, close, and unavoidable.
This is a short book, but it contains a depth of feeling that’s hard to put into words. Adichie captures the strange, disorienting shape of grief in a way that felt both intimate and universal. Her words helped me understand my own loss more clearly and reminded me I’m not alone in it."
Kasey Driskell
