In a recent interview with The Guardian’s Charlotte Edwardes, Adichie opened up about her life, including the intense curiosity that surrounds her.
She also spoke about the profound losses she has experienced and the challenges of balancing motherhood with her demanding writing career.
Adichie, known for keeping her private life under wraps, revealed that she has always been cautious about sharing too much, particularly when it comes to her family.
“I want to protect my children,” she explained. “I’m OK with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them,” she shared.
She was said to have further expressed her resistance to sharing personal details with the public, stating that for a long time, people didn’t even know she had a husband, Ivara Esege, a hospital physician, whom she married in 2009, but kept that information largely out of the media spotlight.
Explaining why she keeps her private life hidden, Adichie was quoted as saying, “So, here’s the thing, Nigerians are… they want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it.”
At the age of 47, which she reportedly described as a “grand old age” and that “I always forget how old I am. I’m not even joking,” Adichie juggled the pressures of motherhood with the demands of finishing her long-awaited novel—a task she had not anticipated taking so long.
Her return to fiction with Dream Count features the interconnected lives of four women and explores themes like the immigrant experience, the relationship between Africans and African Americans, and the societal pressures surrounding motherhood and marriage.
Reflecting on her decade-long break from fiction, Adichie reportedly opened up about how motherhood caused a creative block that left her feeling disconnected from her writing.
She was quoted as saying, “I didn’t want to leave such a long gap between novels. When I got pregnant [with her daughter], something just happened. I had a number of years in which I was almost existentially frightened that I wouldn’t write again. It was unbearable.
“There are expressions like ‘writer’s block’ I don’t like to use because I’m superstitious. But I had many years in which I felt cast out from my creative self, cast out from the part of me that imagines and creates; I just could not reach it. I could write nonfiction, and that was fine. But that’s not what my heart wanted.”
The breakthrough reportedly came when she was writing Notes on Grief, her memoir about the death of her father in 2020.
“When her father died of kidney failure, she was in her fiction-not-being-available-to-me phase, but as she struggled for the language to write Notes on Grief (2021), she noticed that something had loosened,” the report read.
It continued, “There was a willingness to let go, she says, to surrender control; a feeling similar to the way she’d felt writing fiction. She wasn’t doing anything different – not physically, at least.
“She was still “scrunched up” with her laptop on her ottoman in the corner of her bedroom. If anything was different, it was how much wiser she felt; how “hyper-aware of how fleeting life is. It makes you think about your own mortality, but also, ‘What do I care about? What matters?’”
Adichie was said to have been initially unsure if she could write about her mother, who passed away in 2021 as “there was nothing,” when she tried it head-on.
However, as she worked on Dream Count, she gradually realised that the novel was a tribute to her late mother.
“Only when I was almost done did I realise, my God, it’s about my mother. It wasn’t intentional. I’m happy that it’s not a sad book. She wouldn’t want a sad book dedicated to her,” Adichie was quoted as saying.
