Notes on Grief

Praise for Notes on Grief 'Notes on Grief is a moving account of a daughter's sorrow and it is also a love letter to the one who has gone. Adichie wants him back; she wants to rescue him from death and to tell him once again how much she adored him. She is saying don't go and she is saying goodbye and she is also saying sorry - for the writing of grief is to acknowledge an ending and, thus, as Jacques Derrida had it, as soon as you write, you are asking for forgiveness' Observer 'That grief of mine, no longer singular, was subsumed in the collective wail. That is, until Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's visceral exploration of her own father's unexpected death that month. In 30 short sections, Notes on Grief lays a path by which we might mourn our individual traumas among the aggregate suffering of this harrowing time.' New York Times 'Feels raw, even for a book about grief. Some wait years to preserve these thoughts; Adichie is examining them now, constantly stepping into her grief and then, with the same feet, twisting away again to look at herself and examine what is happening to her... It is no salve for her own grief, but Adichie's brave observance of her own pain, will be a gift to those also suffering their first year of loss in these strange times' iNews When you send a great writer into the valley of the dead, the reportage is better quality. In 1961 CS Lewis wrote A Grief Observed of the year after the death of his wife; in 2005 Joan Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking about the same time span after the death of her husband. Into this tradition falls Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ... For fans of the famously private Adichie - this is fascinatingly intimate. It is also delivered in the most readable, tender bites for any of the many of us whose attention has been shot by the harrowing of this past year' The Times