Notes on grief

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 mermbers

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 fanmily

home in Abba, Nigeria.