For Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, fiction is a calling. Last week, the former Radcliffe fellow and 2018 Class Day speaker visited Harvard Square to mark another milestone in her vocation with the release of “Dream Count” — a book more than 10 years in the making.
The author of four novels, Adichie published her third, the critically acclaimed “Americanah,” in 2013. For a while, she worried there wouldn’t be another.
“Dream Count” is “actually quite an emotional moment for me because in some ways, I can’t believe that I’ve actually written a novel,” Adichie told a packed crowd gathered in the First Parish Church for an event sponsored by Harvard Book Store. “At some point, I wasn’t sure that I would ever write a novel again, and I was terrified. It was an unbearable thought. And so I feel this immense gratitude to be here, to have people actually come out, and hear me talk about this novel.”
“Dream Count” follows four interconnected women as they pursue love and self-discovery through hardships. The first, whose story opens the book, is Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer from a privileged background living in the U.S. The narrative also follows her hyper-independent cousin, Omelogor, living in Nigeria; Zikora, a Nigerian lawyer in Washington whose life isn’t quite going to plan; and Chiamaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, whose tragedy unites the characters.
The backdrop is the pandemic, when, as Adichie puts it, “The world sort of stopped briefly, and it was so surreal and so unique, that people reacted in all kinds of ways.” Even so, the novelist had a lot more on her mind than just COVID.
The new book is “about many things,” Adichie said. “It’s about thinking about the other lives that we might have led. Sometimes, even when we’re content in our own lives, we still imagine other paths that our destiny could have taken us on. And I think it’s also about knowing about how much one knows oneself, about how much one knows other people.”
“Dream Count” was shaped in part by personal shocks that revealed hidden interior truths, Adichie said. In 2020, when her father died from complications of kidney disease, the intensity of her grief surprised her. Instead of the numbness she expected, she began weeping and pounding the floor.
“I started thinking about self-knowledge after my father died,” she said. “I found myself thinking about what love is, and one of my conclusions is that to love a person is to attempt to know them. But at the same time, I think we’re limited by how much we can, in fact, know even ourselves. The fact that we that we can surprise ourselves is just endlessly fascinating to me.”
During the Q&A portion of the event, longtime fans and new readers alike praised Adichie for her rich characters and narrative skills. Some sought advice for dealing with political uncertainty. One aspiring novelist wanted to know how to write fiction without giving too much away.
“I think you do have to give too much of yourself away,” Adichie answered. “Fiction is my vocation. I think it’s the reason I’m here … And so when I’m writing fiction, I don’t think about my audience. I really do feel as though I’m suspended in this just wonderful, magical place.”
She added: “When it comes to fiction, the whole point of it is that you have to let go. You have to be willing to go wherever it takes you. That I think, is the fundamental requirement of writing good fiction — a certain kind of truth, a certain kind of, what I like to call radical honesty.”
Adichie gave birth to her first child, a daughter, in 2016, followed by twin boys in 2024. Asked about balancing work with family life, she said, “Motherhood is the greatest lesson that I’ve had in my life, but it does come at a cost. It requires a kind of balance and things that you need to step back from for a while, and it just is the way it is. When I started to feel that I was in that horrible writer’s block space, I would make time to read poetry … I did that in service to my writing even though the writing was not happening. There are small ways in which you can still hold onto whatever it is that you want to achieve, even if you are not able to fully engage with it at the time.”
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