Notes on Grief

A Memoir

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Narrated by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Length: 1 hr and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

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: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post).

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.

Expanding on her original 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 humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life 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’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria.

In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.

©2021 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“This intimate work implores, jerks us out of callousness, moves grief closer.... Notes on Grief lays a path by which we might mourn our individual traumas among the aggregate suffering of this harrowing time. Our guide, Adichie, is uncloaked, full of ‘wretched, roaring rage,’ teaching us how to gather our disparate selves and navigate the still-raging pandemic. In the texture of many of these sentences you can almost feel where the writer has resisted bearing down with her refining tools - language and memory - so as to allow her emotional reality to remain splintered and sharp. Adichie is a consummate world-builder.... Over the course of these 30 fragments, we witness a shift in perspective, an assurance that whatever comes next will never have been created before.” (Sarah M. Broom, The New York Times Book Review, front-page review)

“Notes on Grief makes visceral the experience of death and grieving. In poetic bursts of imagistic prose that mirror the fracturing of self after the death of a beloved parent, Adichie constructs a narrative of mourning - of haunting and of love. Notes on Grief becomes a work larger than its slim size, universal in the experience of the loss of a parent, and the struggle to mourn that loss.” (Hope Wabuke, NPR.org)

“Elegantly spare...brutally frank.... With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief is both achingly personal and stunningly familiar to anyone who has felt the ‘permanent scattering’ [of grief]. Written and published less than a year after her father’s death, Adichie’s pain on these pages is so palpable that one can almost taste its bitterness. She captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite.... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided.” (Leslie Gray Streeter, The Washington Post)

She has such a way with words

My heart broke as I listened. CNA has always captivated me with her words, and even with her own heartache, she was able to put this together to help the rest us share in her pain and understand ours better.

Helped me grieve

I lost my father too. It was unexpected and I was very unprepared for life without him. It is heartening to learn others know grief as intimately as me. I felt less alone listening to this, and found myself thinking about my father each chapter. Adichie’s prose is beautiful. Her narration was perfect. The chapters are short which is good when you feel like your world just ended. This collection of stories illustrates the many faces of grief and highlights the connection between love and grief. Adichie makes clear that there is no wrong way to grieve and confirms that life is indeed different after such a loss.

A beautiful and deeply moving book

Having just lost my own father recently, I found the book deeply moving and related. I was weeping while listening. A beautiful book. Thank you.

A Daughter’s Beautiful Tribute

Adichie writes beautifully of her Father after his Death, encapsulating all of the Stages of Grief: Shock, Denial, Remembrance, Anger and even Acceptance and Joy at his life well lived, not in a clinical or self-help tone, but as a daughter who deeply loved this man who meant so much to her.

Cultural differences aside, anyone who has lost a loved one will identify with her sensitive words. Four Stars.

Touching story, written and performed so lovingly.

This was truly beautiful. Speaking from someone who recently lossed her father too. Thank you.

Comforting and Touching

There has not been a publication by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that I have not enjoyed. Her ability to write so vividly made me grieve with her and family, especially since she lost her mother as well. I was also able to process some losses in my own life. Grief is a process and I am grateful for this book for guiding me through it.

Ndo

I loved the message around this beautiful word I learned by listening to this experience. Ndo
I wished everyone just said Ndo to me instead of coming up with empty or thoughtless feel good words. Heartfelt thank you!

Comforting

Reading this in a season when I was experiencing grief was extremely comforting. the writing was beautiful. My one complaint is that I wish the book was longer

TRUE

This book made me cry. Cry with the memories of the loss I felt for my mother and my father. This book expressed the feelings I felt but for years was unable to express. It was like I finally had the best interpreter in the most awful situation for a most accurate and beautiful book to share. THANK YOU.

Wow… just wow!

All I can say is that I lost my father about six months ago and this author was able to put into words the absolute anguish most of us usually can’t describe when we are ripped away from someone we love. The entire work was moving, raw, gripping and so familiar that it comforted me just in knowing I’m not going crazy and I’m not the only one that feels this deeply.