'Dream Count' is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel in more than a decade
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. From 2013 into 2014, it seemed like everyone in my life was reading Americana by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Friends of mine were scouring bookstores for previous books she'd written, and when Beyoncé sampled one of Adichie's speeches in her song Flawless, forget about it. Her literary stock went through the roof.

But then she stayed quiet on the fiction front, at least. Until now. Her first novel in more than a decade is out. It's titled Dream Count. And in this interview, she talks to NPR's Michelle Martin about how in the gap between Americana and Dream Count, she was learning a thing or two about herself, about how getting to truly know herself allowed the fiction writing process to start up again. That's ahead.

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Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first three novels won prizes and critical acclaim. Two were optioned for movies and one, Americana, sold more than a million copies in the U.S. alone. But then, for some reason, the words stopped. I went through what people like to call writer's block.

which is an expression I do not like because I'm very superstitious. She did write speeches and essays on feminism, human rights and grief, even a children's book. But the novel eluded her, until now. Writing fiction is the love of my life. It's the thing that I think gives me meaning. And it's quite different. I mean, the entire process is very different from writing nonfiction.

With fiction, it's magical. Her new novel, Dream Count, just out today, tells the interconnected stories of four women, three with ties to Nigeria, the fourth to Guinea. But even before the characters came to her, she says, there was a phrase lodged in her mind, waiting to be put to use. It became the first sentence of her book. I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.

It's been floating in my head for years, and I knew I would write something with that as kind of the kernel of the story. But I really do not know how these women came. They came to me, and it's difficult for me often to talk about the choices I make in fiction in a very narrowly intellectual way because there's so much that's intuitive. You said you'd carried that line in your head for years. I wonder why.

I don't know. I think, I mean, and I consider myself fortunate to have been known, I think. And yet I question how well I've been known. One of the things that happened to me during COVID was that using my father made me question how well I knew myself. And when I heard the news of my father's death, I threw myself down on the ground and I was pounding the floor.

And I did not realize I was doing this. And afterwards, I was shocked by it because I think if you'd asked me how I would react to losing my father, I think I would have said that I would just go numb and completely cold.

And so that made me think, my goodness, I did not realize I had this level of melodrama. You know, I sort of half joke about it now, but it did make me think about how well do I know myself? How well am I known by other people? How well do I know other people? And there's just a general longing, I think, that I've always had. I mean, and I'm very fortunate. I have a wonderful family. So it doesn't come from a lack of love, but still it's there.

Tell us about the four women around whom you organized the book, your four principal characters. So Chiamaka is the Nigerian woman who lives in the U.S. She's a travel writer who wishes that she were a better writer than she is. And she's very privileged. She comes from a very wealthy family. Her best friend, Zikora, who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a lawyer, is quite different from her. Zikora is very practical.

And Omelogo is Chiamaka's cousin and she lives in Nigeria. She's a very successful banker. She's brilliant. And she's also very unconventional. And the fourth character, and this is the character that's most precious to me, is Kajatu. And she's from Guinea and she is an immigrant in the US and she experiences this very painful thing.

I'm trying to figure out how to talk about what happens to Kadiatu without giving it away. She's based on something that happened with this Nafisatu Diallo, who was a hotel worker who accused the then head of the IMF of

And also the presidential hopeful, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, so-called DSK, she accused him of sexual assault in 2011. She was a hotel cleaner and she went into his room and she said that he assaulted her. He was in fact arrested, but then the charges were dropped because all these things emerged about how her journey and so forth, at least in the eyes of the prosecution, made her an unreliable witness and

People forget that, obviously, you know, if you follow these things, it's a very traumatic experience. But this was before the Me Too movement. You said this character is very dear to you. Tell us why this was so dear to you and why it was so important to you to include this character.

I don't even want to say story. Story feels diminishing, but it's not meant to be. Yes. When I first heard the story of this woman who had accused this very powerful man of assault, I followed it very closely. I felt connected to

to her for, I think, you know, obvious reasons. She's quite different from me. She's from Guinea. I'm Nigerian. She's Muslim. I'm Christian. And she's walking class. I'm not. But she felt to me quite familiar and knowable. And I felt protective of her. But it wasn't until the case was dropped that I just felt...

something like rage, it became for me not just about her. And so this character that I've written, I've actually really invented the character. The character is not her. I mean, apart from the tiny kernel of the story of the assault. Yes, you're very clear about that. I just want to make that very clear. Yeah. So it's really not her. I've invented everything. But I think for me, that character is not just about Nafisatu Jellu. It's also about all the women. And there's so many women like her across the world.

who, because they are powerless, are not given a certain kind of human dignity. We've had a very serious conversation here, but I do have to say the book is very funny. I mean, it's very funny. Yes. But some of the—OK, all right, I will say this. The men don't come off particularly well in this book. I don't know if you feel that way, but some of them are kind of trash. At least as depicted by you in this book, some of these men are just trash. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

But you know what? I wanted to write about women's lives. And the reality of it is that for many women, the men in their lives, in some ways, shape their lives. You know, generally that women are socialized to be the ones who compromise more, who hold back their dreams for people they love, that kind of thing. And you know, I'm going to ask, are any of these people you? All of them are me, Michelle. All of them. Madame Bovary, c'est moi.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of Dream Count. It is out now. Thank you so much for joining us once again. Thank you so much. This was wonderful. Thank you. This message comes from Thrive Market. The food industry is a multibillion-dollar industry, but not everything on the shelf is made with your health in mind.

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