The queue to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's seminar at the Book Fair stretched for kilometers. Her "Dream Accounting" is long-awaited – it's been a full twelve years since the highly acclaimed "Americanah" was released. After that novel, she lost the ability to write fiction.
Fiction is my life's love, it's a calling and a gift from my ancestors. Not being able to do what is most central to your life is really a terrible feeling, she says.
Several life-changing events occurred, she became a mother and lost both her parents. She wrote about the grief after her father in an essay.
I was really daddy's girl, I idolized him. But I was also mommy's girl and I didn't realize that until she had died. It's very sad. I think we often take mothers for granted.
Mothers and sisters
Therefore, the new novel is full of relationships between daughters and mothers. It's about four women who travel back and forth between Nigeria and the USA, while they ponder their dreams about careers and families. Romantic love is not in focus, sisterhood is more important.
I have always claimed that a deep, female friendship is revolutionary. Because everywhere, girls are raised to see each other as rivals, she says.
She wanted to portray women's lives and bodies – so much is shameful, she emphasizes. One of the women's stories is based on real events. It's about the cleaning lady who reported the French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn for sexual assault in a hotel room.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie couldn't let go of how easy it was to ridicule the black, poor, and immigrant woman in the media.
This was before #metoo, before women had started telling their stories. Three years later, it might have been different, then she might have gotten justice.
Confident
Three of the women in the book come from privileged families, a conscious choice because Ngozi Adichie thinks that African wealth is rarely respected in the West.
If you're African and rich, it means you must be corrupt or have done something shady, she says and adds that capitalism has become "crazy" with its enormous gap between billionaires and workers.
Several of the women in the book are ambitious and confident – something that also characterizes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The world doesn't expect you to be confident as a girl, often it's stamped as arrogance or that you're "difficult". But I never questioned it and I think it was because of my mom.
Born: 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria
Lives: Alternately in the USA and Nigeria
Background: Debuted in 2004 with "Lila hibiskus" (in Swedish in 2010). Had a major international breakthrough with "Half of a Yellow Sun" which was released in 2007, and which the same year was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also written the short story collection "That Thing Around Your Neck" (2011) and the novel "Americanah" (2013), which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and was chosen as one of the year's ten best books by The New York Times.
She has also written "All Should Be Feminists", "Letter to a New Parent" and "Notes on Grief".
She has a master's degree in creative writing from John Hopkins University and a master's degree in African history from Yale University and is an honorary doctor at several American universities.
Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages. In 2025, she will be awarded the Book Fair's prize, the Mermaid.
... capitalism:
It's a time when capitalism has become ridiculous. And I say this as an Igbo, my people were traditionally traders. But it's something other than what's happening now, you overemphasize shareholders and underemphasize workers, it's not sustainable.
... living in the USA:
America is so strange now. One of the saddest things this administration has done is to get ordinary people to stop trusting each other, to be suspicious in an unhealthy way. Now there's open racism and I don't know if you should be grateful that people are showing their true selves, maybe they just hid it before. But it's uncomfortable.
... love:
I'm a hopeless romantic but usually don't want to admit it. For women, you're expected to be in a certain way and sometimes I hate that I am, since it's expected of me. But there's no point in living without love. Romantic love is fine, but my life has been shaped by the love of friends, and the love for siblings.
... her mom:
Mom never apologized for her ambitions, but she didn't make a big deal out of it either. It was natural. She didn't give speeches about how important it is for women to be ambitious, and if you had asked her if she was a feminist, she would probably have said no, probably because that word is so often misunderstood. But mom had seven children, she lost one, and was a very present mom. She was extremely protective, sometimes unreasonably protective. But I took it all for granted.
