Notes on Grief - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - ★★★

AUTHOR: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

GENRE: Memoir

PUBLICATION DATE: May 11, 2021

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A short collection of notes written by the author after her father’s sudden death. Quite intimate in tone. If you have experienced a personal loss, you will empathise with her feelings. Tough to decide whether and to whom to recommend this.

From her home in the USA, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke to her father in Nigeria on 9th June 2020. On 10th June, he passed away. Though he was due for a hospital visit, there was no indication that his health issues were so severe. The lockdown was on, as were the covid travel restrictions. As you can imagine, coping with a parent’s sudden loss cannot be easy. Adichie uses this little memoir-of-sorts to share her experience with grief.

At just 86 pages and with about thirty short notes, the book doesn’t take that long to read. But even within this limited time, it offers a powerful indication of the author’s sense of loss. As a self-confessed “Daddy’s Girl”, she obviously was struck deeply by his abrupt passing. These notes show her attempts at making sense of the new reality with a father-shaped hole in her universe. Her pain must have been exacerbated by not being able to be with her father or the difficulties of having a timely funeral because of the lockdown.

Reading this collection makes us feel like we are taking a walk through someone’s personal diary, and getting a ringside view of their heartbreak. This is not a book to be enjoyed, nor is it a book that teaches us much. It doesn’t aim to tell you how to process grief or acknowledge others’ grief, let alone offer advice on how to overcome grief. Rather, it is a very intimate sketch of the author’s emotions after losing her father, and her memories of her father. It restricts itself to her experience of grief rather than making universal declarations of what grief is or should be.

As the title indicates, the book is literally a collection of notes. Each note makes a “chapter”, with the book thus having thirty teeny chapters focussing on a particular reminiscence connected to Adichie Sr., who seems to have been a warm, kind, and intelligent person. The notes aren’t chronological, nor do they stick to one topic per note. The tone is thus exactly as someone speaking to us without a preplanned structure.

The audiobook, clocking at just 1.5 hours, is narrated by the author herself. Given the personal nature of this work, the audio is a good way of reading this memoir.

Overall, this book might be quite short but it is packed with big emotions. If this were written by some other author, I wouldn’t even have picked it up, but I am a huge fan of Adichie and would ideally like to read everything she pens.

I don’t consider this memoir at the same level as the author’s other shorter books such as ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ or ‘Dear Ijeawele’. At the same time, this book is not a feminist essay and hence cannot be compared to any of her earlier works.

Basically, this is not a must-read, but to those interested in giving it a go, it offers a heartfelt ode to a beloved father by his grieving daughter. I cannot decide how to rate a public penning of private emotions, so I’ll just hit the midway mark. This isn't a book to be purchased but to be borrowed from the library.