In the Royal Academy’s Collection Gallery, a unique dinner was taking place in front of an impressive 16th-century copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Among the guests were Sam Mendes, the writer- director Hannah Rothschild, Kristin Scott Thomas and Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web. They had all gathered to celebrate the wisdom of one person: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who had just delivered her witty and brilliant lecture ‘An unknown writer’s beginnings’ moments before.
We were eating before Jesus, his arms wide open with sanguine benevolence. It felt like a curious echo: Adichie at the centre of the dinner table surrounded by her disciples. But such is the power of her words. While her award-winning novels – , Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah – are transportive, incisive portraits of family and societal conflict within sweeping political contexts, her lectures and essays seem to encapsulate truths of the modern age, whether she is examining grief, championing storytelling or speaking out against artistic censorship. Her prescient ideas have helped define feminism for the 21st century, the message adopted and the word spread not just via bestselling books or TED talks, but also through the lyrics of Beyoncé or Maria Grazia Chiuri’s launch collection at Dior.
Adichie had concluded her talk with the sentiment: “I like to think of literature as my religion… fiction is in many ways like faith, which is a leap of the imagination.” When we connect a couple of months later in February – she in her bright Maryland home, hair up, and clad in a coral sweater; me in London – I remind her of the last time we met: how the setting had amusingly reinforced that parallel between fiction and faith. I ask whether she finds herself turning to the latter more nowadays. “I think that is such an important and relevant question, so the short answer is ‘yes,’” she responds. “You know how young people say, ‘I felt seen?’ You just asking that made me feel ‘seen.’” She gives a deep laugh. “But seriously, it’s not just that we live in – at the risk of sounding melodramatic – perilous times. We do. It’s also that after my father died and then my mother died, everything changed for me. I changed. I have felt this awareness of how fleeting life is, and suddenly this deep longing for meaning. That’s all tied up with the idea of faith.’”
EMMA SUMMERTON
Wool and silk dress, slingback heels, both Dior; gold and lacquer ring, Dior Joaillerie
Indeed, the past five years have been brutal for Adichie. In 2020, during the pandemic, she unexpectedly lost her father Professor James Nwoye Adichie to kidney failure, and her essay ‘Notes on Grief ’ was written in the aftermath. Her mother Grace Adichie died the following year, on her father’s birthday. Their relationship, she says, had been good, but she is still filled with emotion about it. “There’s a lot of regret. I think of all the ways I could have done better and been better with my mother, for my mother,” she says. “I’m in this sort of crazy place where I just cry stupidly for no reason. If we’re fortunate to have a father and mother who are loving, I think there is a tendency for girls to extend more grace to their fathers, and I’m an example of that. I feel like I want to start a campaign to tell daughters not to do this any more.”
But somehow, in the wake of grief, Adichie has written , her first novel for a decade, since her difficult pregnancy in 2015 left her unable to dive back into novel-writing. “I half-jokingly say that pregnancy robbed me of the ability to easily enter a creative space to write fiction,” Adichie says. “Fiction is the love of my life. Fiction is the thing that matters to me. So, in some ways, I’m grateful that I could write non-fiction, but that was not the thing that my soul wanted.”
“When my mother died, I couldn’t think. I was so reduced there was no other option but for fiction to come back”
She remembers thinking: “What if I never write again? It was an unbearable thought, because it was just a thing of terror,” she says. “Pregnancy is this wonderful blessing, but it can also be, for a creative person, like being cast out. It can make you lose your ability to create. The body and the creative impulse have a very interesting relationship.”
For Adichie, working on Dream Count was a reprieve from the realities of grief. Characters began to surface – she knew, for instance, that she wanted to write about a woman from Nigeria, but who lived in Abuja, rather than in the country’s cultural centre Lagos. “When my mother died, I couldn’t even think. I was so reduced that there was no other option but for fiction to come back. So that’s when I started writing Dream Count. It was only when I was almost done that I realised, ‘My God, this is about Mummy.’”
The result is an ambitious tale that introduces the interconnected stories of four women: Chiamaka, Zikora, Kadiatou and Omelogor. The story moves back and forth in time, uncovering the women’s personal journeys, which take us to a number of cities, including Washington DC, London, Conakry in French Guinea and the Nigerian capital of Abuja. “When I was writing parts of Chiamaka’s and Omelogor’s sections, there was a playfulness in my spirit. Even though there was no joy in my life at the time, I could find slices of joy, and sometimes I would laugh. I hope there are parts of this book that will make people laugh. I really believe it is essential.”
EMMA SUMMERTON
Muslin tunic, silk skirt, both Dior; white gold and diamond earrings, from a selection, Dior Joaillerie
Dream Count is not a melancholy book. It opens from the perspective of Chiamaka, a Nigerian woman “so sophisticated and travelled, yet so innocent and new”, living in America. She writes about travel but has aspirations to publish a novel. The first chapters are set during the pandemic, when she is physically alone. Her story is reflective, driven by “the desire to be truly known” as she revisits all of her past romantic relationships – looking at her “dream count”, as she calls it. Each section is told from a different character’s point of view: Zikora the lawyer is Chia’s friend and a single mother; Kadiatou – the only one of the four from French Guinea – works for Chia’s family while keeping a job as a hotel maid; and Omelogor is Chia’s astute and amusingly scornful cousin, whose success within a Nigerian bank prompts her to reassess her moral compass. It’s a book about love, friendship and the judgements and mistakes we make along the way, but it’s also a penetrating look at the societies the women operate in and the men who have made an impact on these women’s lives.
The narrative changes direction with Kadiatou’s pivotal story, which, in some ways, forms the book’s poetic and moving core. She is the least vocal, and yet she is the most constant; an outlier who is granted asylum to come to the US. “She’s poor, she’s an immigrant, she’s not formally educated,” explains Adichie. “But it was also important to show there’s a lot of nonsense she recognises in people; she can see hubris very clearly, even if she doesn’t call it out.” In one upsetting scene, a young Kadiatou is taken by her mother to undergo female genital mutilation so she can be “marriageable”. Research for this part was key: Adichie spoke to lots of women from Guinea whose mothers had been cut, to represent the process accurately. “I take that sort of thing seriously. I don’t believe in hiding behind the idea of art and getting something wrong.”
“I’ve always been very interested in how we have socialised to be accepting of what is dangerous for us, and how much of a coping mechanism that is,” she goes on. “But for me, the larger question is: ‘How is society structured? In the end, who is benefiting?’ It’s fundamentally about repressing a women’s sexuality, and it comes from a place of control, masked by the language of culture. Writing it was difficult, but I did feel it was necessary, because this is the reality for millions of girls in the world. If there’s nothing else we can do, we can at least bear witness.”
Kadiatou becomes the centre of a high-profile case, the facts of which are based on real-life events involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was formerly the managing director of the IMF. In 2011, he was accused of rape by Nafissatou Diallo – a maid at the hotel where he was staying – and the case, which received global media attention, was brought to trial. At the time, Adichie had written an essay that criticised the power dynamics between Strauss-Kahn and Diallo, questioning why “the character of his alleged victim is considered relevant but his character is not”. Diallo was a figure who lingered in Adichie’s imagination, and she was keen to offer an alternative narrative. “I did not want to open Kadiatou up to pity. Sympathy, empathy – yes. I wanted her to have dignity, and for the reader to respect her. There are so many women who are invisible, but have a lot going on in them.”
EMMA SUMMERTON
Silk dress, slingback heels, both Dior; pink gold, diamond and lacquer earring (sold singly), Dior Joaillerie
Her story probes deeply held assumptions about the idea of America and uncovers the failures of the gatekeepers – the judicial system, the journalists – who ‘carelessly’ wield their power. In the light of President Trump’s recent re-appointment, when I ask whether Adichie is reassessing her own relationship with her adopted country, she quips: “We broke up a while ago…”
“I’m not cynical about America in general,” she clarifies. “My heart is in Nigeria, but I don’t always have that sense of possibility there. I do have to say that with the second election of a man I do not think is in any way qualified to be president, a bit more has shifted for me.”
Adichie makes an interesting distinction between the two countries she calls home: her characters come to America – still perceived as a place of possibility – to fulfil their dreams. In many ways, the concept of aspiration underpins each story. She explores the tension between dreaming and the expectation that comes with being a woman, a wife, a girlfriend, a female employee, an immigrant. When Kadiatou is asked what her dream is, she reflects that the question is “the kind of thing only idle people could conceive”. In the context of the novel, it becomes a feminist act to dream. “I think that to dream often means that you dare to put yourself first,” Adichie says.
With that in mind, I wonder how the dynamic of prioritising writing with a growing family plays out. Adichie and her husband are now parents of twin boys, who were carried by surrogate and are 10 months old. She made a deliberate decision early on, with her family and daughter, who is now almost 10, to be open about her novel-writing. “They know that when the writing thing is going well, I’m nice to be around. The opposite is also true.” When she gets grumpy, she tells her daughter: “Mama is writing rubbish”. “I felt that I needed her to understand writing fiction is the love that I have – next to her and next to the other people I love. This is the central motive. It’s not a job, it’s a vocation.” Terrified her daughter would think her mother’s writing is more important than she is, Adichie has an open-door policy while she works. “She can come in at any time. Though I wish she would not exercise this privilege as frequently as she does!” she says, laughing.
“I think that to dream often means that you dare to put yourself first”
Adichie is not a “hyper-organised writer who wakes up at six”. “I have no plan, and no structure,” she says of the way she approaches her days. She looks around the room behind her, comfortable and white with shelves, a desk, art on the walls. It’s meant to be her writing room, but she hardly uses it for that particular function, instead curling up on an ottoman upstairs. Her suburban American life is quiet and pleasant, “and asks nothing of me”. The schools are good here, although she says: “I think it’s strange that I’m in the group of people considered the ‘grown-ups’. There’s still a part of me that watches from the outside, thinking, ‘Really?’ In Lagos, where she also has a home, she’s more social, goes out more, has friends over for dinner all the time. “The reason I love both is because I have both, you know?”
Her international and high-profile friends include the fashion designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, whose Dior creations she wore on Bazaar’s shoot in New York. “She’s an intellectually engaged person. She genuinely likes women. And I just love that she’s wide-rangingly curious.”
Dream Count – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Adichie takes me on a tour of her house. She shows me the photograph hanging above her desk that she took of her ancestral hometown in Nigeria, with her father’s Mercedes in the corner, a picture of a woman sitting cross-legged that she has had since grad school, a piece by Carrie Mae Weems. There are paintings by young Nigerian women – intimate, figurative, up-close images. “I love coming home to them,” she says, nodding as she speaks. “Everything kind of becomes OK.” She wants me to meet her twin boys, crawling on the floor in a large room. As we approach the end of the call, she props one of her babies on her hip; he looks at the screen with interest. Adichie gazes at him happily. In her lecture, she told the audience: “In my view, a novel is sublime while the novelist is the dream.” To read Adichie’s words is to live that dream with her.
is out now. This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK. The special collectors’ edition is available to buy from 13 March in Waterstones.
Credit: harpersbazaar