It’s been 13 years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s impassioned We Should All Be Feminists TED Talk, which was sampled by Beyoncé, printed on a Dior T-shirt and started a global conversation. And it’s 12 years since the author last published a work of fiction, the million copy-selling Americanah. In the intervening years, she’s undergone several seismic life events: the birth of her daughter (now nine), the death of her father in 2020, the arrival of her twin sons in 2024, but none more arresting than the death of her mother, the year after she lost her dad. ‘I made peace with losing my father, but I haven’t been able to make peace with losing my mother,’ she says from her home in Baltimore. Four years on, she’s still full of ‘disbelief’ and ‘rage’. What does she miss most about her mother? A deep sigh is followed by a long silence. ‘I just miss knowing that she’s there.’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel, Dream Count, is dedicated to her ‘beautiful, beloved’ mother Grace, and mother-daughter relationships feature throughout. After finishing the 416 pages, she was surprised to see her mother in the characters, just as she was surprised by her grief. ‘I’d had a very good relationship with my mother but, when she died, I found myself full of almost savage self-recrimination, because I felt that there were many times when I could have been gentler with her, I could have shown more grace, and I didn’t.’
The heart of Dream Count, the interconnected story of four women, is distilled in its opening sentence: ‘I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being’. Isn’t this the ultimate conundrum with our mothers? ‘There were times when I felt that my mother knew me too well, and I resented that. And then there were times when I felt she did not know me sufficiently, and I also resented that.’ Now the shoe is on the other foot. ‘I can read the most subtle changes in my daughter’s expression. But then sometimes I look at her and there’s still a mystery to her.’
Becoming a mother to a daughter helped Adichie understand her mother better, particularly around the ‘overprotectiveness’ she’d once resented. ‘I’m trying very hard not to live my daughter’s life. We are born with our own personalities. I don’t want mine to overshadow hers.’ Adichie tells me a story. She was nine, the same age as her daughter is now, and she refused to eat her ‘swallow’ – a type of starchy African food. On this occasion, her mother gave her permission to not eat the swallow. She vowed she’d be the same if she ever had a daughter. ‘Now, it’s become metaphorical.’ There are still parental boundaries – ‘I’m an African mother, so I am going to tell her what I think is right and wrong,’ she laughs – but she wants her daughter to have that same feeling of choice.
Adichie’s world-renowned and Beyoncé-endorsed feminism is easy to spot. Throughout Dream Count she exposes the reality of women’s bodies and how they are ‘shrouded in shame’, something that’s missing from literature, she says. ‘Women are suffering’ and we see that in stories of genital mutilation, fibroids and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. It is yet another thread that connects Adichie to her mother, but here in a positive way. She remembers her mother hugging her when she started her periods, telling her she was a woman. It’s thanks to her mother that she has no shame about her own body.
She is determined to pass this on. ‘I react very strongly when friends say things that I consider a way of teaching girls shame. I don’t want anyone talking about chubbiness as something terrible. We’re starting too early to make girls overly self-conscious about their bodies, teaching girls to find flaws in themselves. I see all these 14 and 15-year-old girls already riddled with [shame] when they’re perfect. I want to protect my daughter as much as I can from that rubbish.’
As we speak across the Atlantic, it’s impossible to talk about motherhood and women’s bodies without mentioning the ongoing attacks on abortion access in the US. What’s it like to watch in real time? ‘Surreal. I cannot imagine a man being told that this one thing that is yours, your body, is something you cannot decide what you want to do with. We are saying that women are not fully equal human beings, because the one thing that is hers she cannot control.’
Becoming a mother in the US was an eye-opener. ‘I found it surprising that progressive people seem to think that a mother should do it all. In my culture, you’re not meant to do anything for weeks.’ Adichie and her husband are currently ‘recycling cousins’ to help with the twins. ‘I wish the Western world was structured in a way that saw motherhood as something worth supporting in very practical terms’.
There’s been much talk of Adichie’s return to fiction and, in many ways, this is a novel about wistful dreams. But there’s a painful reality in her words, perhaps because of the pain of her recent reality. ‘Literature is the only thing we have left to tell us the truth about anything, really – and women, in particular.’
‘Dream Count’ (Fourth Estate) is out now