What is Grief if not Love Persevering? — “Notes on Grief” Review
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pens a memoir of mourning, memory, and love.
Sometime in 2020, in the thick of the COVID-19 lockdown, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s father, Professor James Adichie, died.
For me and for much of the world, it was yet another sad headline folded into a stream of sorrow we were already grappling with. But for Chimamanda, her siblings, and their now-widowed mother, it was something else entirely — a seismic loss is one way to attempt to describe it. The kind of personal catastrophe that doesn’t just shake your world but tilts it permanently. In the months that followed, Chimamanda, a writer for whom language has always been a tool of both clarity and survival, began trying to make sense of her new world, one now hollowed by absence. That’s how Notes on Grief was born.
Published in 2021, Notes on Grief expands on an essay first released in The New Yorker. It is a slim volume — just under 80 pages — told in 30 short, meditative reflections. Together, they form a memoir of mourning, memory, and love. A love that is tender, aching, and defiant. Love for her father, whose steady presence had shaped her identity from before she even had the language to name it.
Her love for her father — and by extension, for her mother — is something that has always shimmered beneath her work. But here, in Notes on Grief, it rises to the surface in sharp relief. It is raw. It is fracturing. It is honest, and it is all the book is about.
Adichie pulls us into the cacophony of emotions she experienced when her father died: the fear, the helplessness, the sharp fury. All of it compacts into an unhealthy emotional knot, the kind grief lumps often are made of. As she navigates this new terrain, she writes:
“How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”
That line lingers. It’s one of many moments in the book where Adichie’s grief and her gift with words converge to create a lingering effect.
I particularly applaud how Chimamanda calls things out, without fear or favour. She mentions a billionaire who tried to steal ancestral land in her hometown of Abba, and how his callousness caused her father distress in his final months. She doesn’t name him, but her pen is scalpel-sharp; those who know will know. And those who don’t but care to, won’t need to search too hard to find the full story.
She extends the same piercing honesty to the Nigerian church and its exhausting entanglements, and to the so-called community elders and clan heads, whose role during funerals is often less spiritual than political and transactional.
“It is common to hear stories of grieving families outraged by the manipulation of village groups who ask for money, this their only chance to exercise a trifling power.”
That line cuts close to home for a lot of people who have had to interact with this sect of villagers. The performative pageantry, the entitled posturing, the opportunistic gatekeeping of grief, all under the banner of tradition. It’s a culture that’s long overdue for a reckoning, and I’m grateful that Adichie, amid her own mourning, still found the strength to speak against it.
I remember in real time how fragments of Chimamanda’s conflict with a priest of the Catholic Church during her mother’s funeral made the news. Reading Notes on Grief now, I see the full contours of all of that hurt. The layers of betrayal. The ridiculousness of demands on a grieving family. The deeply Nigerian tendency to wield power, no matter how small or ceremonial, as though it were divine decree. And how easily compassion is lost when bureaucracy and ego step in.
I know for a fact that there is a generational gap now emerging, one that Adichie’s writing quietly highlights. A younger generation that is beginning to see through the rituals, the politics, the noise, and is choosing to opt out of the charades. They want healing, not performance. Reflection, not spectacle. What I am not sure of, however, is how fast that lone voice in the wilderness is growing and if it has the strength to do what needs to be done to demand and push for the cultural change it desires.
And maybe that’s what Notes on Grief is, ultimately: a quiet rebellion. A rejection of the pressure to “move on” quickly. A refusal to sugarcoat pain. A soft, defiant declaration that grief deserves space. That mourning is not weakness. That love is loudest in the silence left behind. That people should be left alone to mourn their loved ones in a way that feels genuine to them, in peace and dignity. That funerals shouldn’t be avenues for everyone to become a collector of taxes on the bereaved. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's pen has given us some salient notes to chew on. And chew we must.
List of books I currently have under consideration for the rest of 2025
- The Vegetarian
- Gaslight
- Purple Hibiscus
- Dream Count
- Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad
- Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow
- Half of a Yellow Sun (reading again)
- Children of Blood and Bone (reading again)
- Be(com)ing Nigerian (reading again)
- The Thing Around Your Neck (reading again)
