Mother-daughter relationships shape Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's return to fiction

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest novel, Dream Count, her character Chiamaka is found alone in the pandemic, reflecting on her past relationships that didn't go the distance. 

She looks back at all the men she's been with, not as a body count, but as a dream count, as in the dreams of a life together never realized. 

Despite some of the questionable men of her past, Chiamaka is still holding out hope for a relationship in which she is fully known by someone else — and tries to learn about herself from the frictions of her entanglements. 

For Adichie, the isolation of COVID was the perfect backdrop for Chiamaka to undergo this introspection. 

"It makes you aware of your own mortality," said Adichie on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "It gives you an opportunity to look inward in a way that ordinary life just doesn't."

However, the idea of being known by someone else can be elusive, she said, because it's almost impossible to totally know oneself. 

In her own life, the sudden death of her father during lockdown showed her versions of herself she didn't recognize.

She explained that she saw herself as someone who reacts to difficult situations by "going cold" — but upon hearing that her father died, she was "taken aback by the melodrama" of her response.

"I threw myself down on the ground and I was pounding, pounding the floor and did not realize I was doing this. I was just so overtaken by the devastation of the news."

"I was surprised that I had reacted in that way," she said. "And so I started thinking about how much I knew myself and the idea that we can surprise ourselves and we do surprise ourselves."

Coming back to fiction

The bestselling author of novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of A Yellow Sun and Americanah, Adichie was born in Nigeria and now splits her time between there and the United States. 

Americanah won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013, but since then, Adichie has turned to nonfiction, writing powerful essays that became Ted Talks and short books, including We Should All Be Feminists, which was sampled by in Beyoncé's song Flawless and inspired a t-shirt from Dior.   

Dream Count is Adichie's return to fiction after 12 years and it weaves the perspectives of four women, moving between Nigeria, Guinea and the United States.

She dedicates the book to her mother, who died in March 2021. And whereas her grief for her father left her grappling for language, she said that losing her mother actually brought her back to fiction.

"You're so unwilling to accept something that it then forces a different kind of eloquence on you," Adichie said. "I really think that my mother, in a kind of strange and spiritual way, I feel as though she kind of helped me start writing because she realized that I might go mad if I didn't."

You're so unwilling to accept something that it then forces a different kind of eloquence on you.- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Unwittingly, Dream Count became a novel about the power of platonic love, celebrating female friendships and mother-daughter relationships.

"I did not even realize how much of the book was about mothers and daughters until I was almost done and I went back and read what I had," said Adichie. "My mother's spirit is here, I thought. In a more prosaic way, I'm dealing with my issues."

The mothers and daughters in Dream Count love each other very much — but sometimes don't understand each other — yet are there to support one another when times are difficult. 

"Part of my grieving process has been regret because I think that there are times when I was short with my mother in ways that I did not need to be and it made me think about how mother-daughter relationships can be much more complicated and sometimes unnecessarily thorny than daughter-father relationships."

Lessons from motherhood

Adichie also now has a daughter and twin boys, an experience that has taught her a lot about herself. 

"I've learned that I'm not endlessly patient," she said, laughing, and explained how powerful her feelings for her children are — a love and obsession that she could never have imagined. 

But beyond that love for them, she's also gained a level of uncertainty that fuels her. 

"I think I'm less smug and also slightly less sure," she said. "That has been good for me. Even just as a writer, there's a kind of uncertainty that I think feeds creativity."

"I'm still self-confident and I don't apologize for that. But maybe it's that terror at the heart of loving children. I'm just constantly worried about my children. I think it does something to you and I think I like what it's done for me."

While becoming a mother did help Adichie get closer to knowing herself, she's still uncertain about who she really is — and so are the characters in Dream Count. 

"It just feels to me that it's something that we will always long for and never quite get there," she said. "But maybe the longing is the point."

This interview was produced by Katy Swailes.