Notes on Grief

A Memoir

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Narrated by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

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.

Outstanding!

The author explains how complex and complicated grief can be. After losing 3 sisters, my mother and my best friend, I clamor for anything that can explain how I feel.

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.

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!