Name: Notes on Grief
Rating: 4.368421052631579 (76 reviews)
ISBN: 9780008470319

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A personal and powerful essay on loss from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun.

Notes on Grief

katarina

Leonie

From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father. 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 members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. In this extended essay, which originated in a 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 family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book--a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment--a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever--and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.

This felt like the first book I’ve read that fully reflects my grief when I lost my father nearly 3 years ago. The raw feelings and pain so eloquently put into words. I may have written out about 9 individual quotes from this book that I found so comforting, and made me feel less alone in the pain. 

“Enemies beware: the worst has happened, my father is gone, my madness will now bear itself.”

Thank you for this book, it helped so so much.

Alison Mejury

This felt like the first book I’ve read that fully reflects my grief when I lost my father nearly 3 years ago. The raw feelings and pain so eloquently put into words. I may have written out about 9 individual quotes from this book that I found so comforting, and made me feel less alone in the pain. 

This one empowered me most:

“Enemies beware: the worst has happened, my father is gone, my madness will now bear itself.”

Thank you for this book, it helped so so much.

i’ve often both shied away from and gravitated towards books about grief due to reasons everyone close to me knows but this one found me in a time i feel distant away from grief. still, good read — every thing is a mirror i see myself in

Mika

diya

i had to pick this up, the past few weeks have been drenched with loss. so i knew i had to pick up something where the world was not just moving on, where i wanted it to stop and grieve with me.

Kehinde Adeleke

An amazing relegation by CNA on the grief she faced when she lost her father. It made grief so real to me

Beatriz Aguiar

i wish it were longer
content made it painful to read 
great exploration of grief tho

Midori Kobayashi

damn, didn't expect to get so affected by this (yes even after reading the title)

Stef

"Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language."

Amr Khater 

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language”

Zee Abbas 

Simple prose woven with simple complexity

Agnes Johansson

I’ve decided to read three of the nominated memoirs for the goodreads choice awards and this was the first one. 

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Adichie herself which made the book feel even more personal. Adichie is one of my favourite authours for a reason: she writes in a way that makes everything the publishes engaging and real. This was a beautiful book.

A devastating essay on loss and the people we love from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun.

this is so beautiful and so full of love. impossible not to be touched and cry yourself, such specific yet universal description of grief.

Fraser Simons

This was written well, accomplished it’s intent, but I just did not connect with it whatsoever. There was an opaque quality about it, despite its ostensible conceit of being open and honest about a life event. But I just felt like it was going through the motions. 

Though, I should say I do know she’s a TERF and that might have coloured my reading of this, though I tried to accept the book as I do any other. I think it accomplishes what it sets out to do, but in a way that is like ticking the boxes of the craft being present.

Isabel Ortiz

Insightful and Enlightening 

Adichie’s Notes on Grief immediately transports the reader to a world without a beloved figure: one’s father. Gripping and full of emotional intensity that cannot be exhumed, this short novel illustrates the power of love and loss and what the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have exerted on individuals around the world, especially those who have had to navigate some of life’s greatest difficulties when separated by an ocean and closed borders. I absolutely loved this and I wish I could have read more.

Notes on Grief made me feel heard. Do I need to say more? 
Especially losing someone during times of covid, the complications that tumble on top of grief and the feeling of being utterly without control over a single aspect of your life. 

Unfortunately I could relate to a lot in these notes and I'm thankful for the author sharing her experience, as I somehow don't feel as alone in my grief anymore. 

Jen Estrella

Reading this book felt like reopening a wound that has not healed, that will never fully heal. I still can't believe she put everything I've been feeling into words. My anger scares me, my fear scares me, and somewhere in there is shame, too - why am I so enraged and so scared? I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up; afraid of tomorrow and all of the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual and that people are inviting me to speak somewhere and that regular news alerts appear on my phone screen. How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?-Grief is forcing news skins on me, scraping scales from my eyes. I regret my past certainties: surely you should mourn, talk through it, face it, go through it. The smug certainties of a person yet unacquainted with grief. I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief's core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the center of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts. I torque my mind firmly to its shallow surface alone. I cannot think too much, I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there's no point, what's the point, there's no point to anything. I want there to be a point, even if I do not know for now, what that point is.

Kerry McHugh West

Charlotte

From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father. "Essential." —Booklist 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 members 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 family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.

Notes on Grief

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