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Notes on Grief

Notes on Grief

BiographyPsychology
Pages
80
Published
2021
Language
English

Synopsis

In the summer of 2020, isolated by the pandemic and separated by an ocean, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lost her father, James Nwoye Adichie, suddenly and from afar. Notes on Grief, expanded from a New Yorker essay, is her attempt to hold that loss in words, written in the raw early weeks when grief was still disbelief.

In short, piercing sections, Adichie moves between memory and immediate pain: her father's gentleness and dry humor, the particular textures of Igbo mourning, the strange bureaucracy of dying during lockdown, and the anger, guilt, and physical shock that grief brings. She refuses easy consolation, insisting instead on the specific weight of one beloved life.

Brief and unflinching, Notes on Grief is a small book about an enormous subject. It is both an intimate portrait of a father and a clear-eyed meditation on loss itself, and the way love does not end when a life does.

Prose complexity
4/10

Vibe

SadMelancholicEmotionalReflective

Genres

Biography Psychology Self-Help & Psychology Memoir Essays Biography & Memoir

About the author

C
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book...

Frequently asked questions

  • Is this book a full-length memoir?

    This work is a slim, meditative volume expanded from an essay originally published in The New Yorker, consisting of thirty short, distinct reflections on loss.

  • How does this book relate to the author's other writing?

    While the author is widely known for her novels and essay collections, this specific text serves as a departure from her fiction, focusing entirely on the personal, visceral experience of mourning her father.

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