Notes on Grief
by
83/99
Critics' Rating Index
84/99
Readers' Rating Index
90/99
Scholars' Citation Index
98/99
Volume of Reviews
92/99
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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.
Reviews
"In less than 70 pages, she grapples with her pain and chaos of grief, pays beautiful tribute to her father, and moves herself to be able to write about him in the past tense ..."
"'You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language,' she writes."
"grief is sensation, and Adichie gives an eloquent account of how it hurts: the air turns to glue as she gasps at it, her sides ache, she cries with her tired muscles."
"Adichie's exquisitely forthright chronicle of grief generously articulates the harrowing amplification of sorrow, helplessness, and loss during the COVID-19 pandemic, making this an intimate and essential illumination of a tragic time."
"Any one of us who have lost loved ones — even that euphemism feels deficient, for we have not lost anyone; we know too well what happened to them — can relate to Adichie's anger and her compulsion to reshape it into guilt ..."
"In Notes on Grief, by turns fierce, tender and raw, [Adichie] reveals a more private self ..."
"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."
"what is most memorable in this tribute is Adichie's father's love for his family and their enduring love for him ..."
"A book on grief is not the kind of book you want to have to give to anyone."
"brief but deeply poignant ..."
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