Notes on Grief
by
88/99
Critics
86/99
Readers
n/a
Scholars
77/99
Rating
98/99
Volume
76/99
Rating
96/99
Volume
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About This Book
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.
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Reviews
"Adichie does not reach for a narrative."
"Most of all I liked having a companion, rather than a guide, who didn't try to advise me how to grieve properly but told me what it is like."
"Adichie's father didn't die from COVID-19, but that doesn't make the aftermath of that loss any less relevant ..."
"It is hard not to wish for more from Adichie, to know how she might contend with this loss over time, but what we have here will have to be enough for now."
"She is saying don't go and she is saying goodbye and she is also saying sorry – for the writing of grief is to acknowledge an ending and, thus, as Jacques Derrida had it, as soon as you write, you are asking for forgiveness."
"one of our century's most gifted artists of language makes visceral the experience of death and grieving."
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