Globally acclaimed and award-winning Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie, has revealed that she gave birth to twin boys in 2024, adding to her family, including her nine-year-old daughter. In a recent interview with The Guardian’s Charlotte Edwardes, Adichie spoke about the intense curiosity surrounding her life, the profound losses she has experienced, and the challenges of balancing motherhood with her writing career.
Adichie, who has disclosed very little about her personal life, said she was always careful not to give away too much, especially about her family.
She clarified, “I want to protect my children.” “I’m OK with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them,” she shared.
She was said to have further expressed her resistance to sharing personal details with the public, stating that for a long time, people didn’t even know she had a husband, Ivara Esege, a hospital physician, whom she married in 2009, but kept that information largely out of the media spotlight.
Explaining why she keeps her private life hidden, Adichie was quoted as saying, “So, here’s the thing, Nigerians are…
they want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it.”
At the age of 47, which she reportedly described as a “grand old age” and that “I always forget how old I am. I’m not even joking,” Adichie juggled the pressures of motherhood with the demands of finishing her long-awaited novel—a task she had not anticipated taking so long.
The interwoven lives of four women are the focus of her return to fiction with Dream Count, which also examines issues such as the immigrant experience, the bond between African Americans and Africans, and the social pressures associated with marriage and motherhood.
Adichie reportedly talked about how motherhood caused a creative block that made her feel cut off from her writing during her ten-year hiatus from fiction.
“I didn’t want to leave such a long gap between novels,” she was cited as saying. Something just happened when I became pregnant [with her daughter]. I had a number of years in which I was almost existentially frightened that I wouldn’t write again. It was unbearable.
“There are expressions like ‘writer’s block’ I don’t like to use because I’m superstitious.
The breakthrough reportedly came when she was writing Notes on Grief, her memoir about the death of her father in 2020.
“When her father died of kidney failure, she was in her fiction-not-being-available-to-me phase, but as she struggled for the language to write Notes on Grief (2021), she noticed that something had loosened,” the report read.
It continued, “There was a willingness to let go, she says, to surrender control; a feeling similar to the way she’d felt writing fiction. She wasn’t doing anything different – not physically, at least.
“She was still “scrunched up” with her laptop on her ottoman in the corner of her bedroom. If anything was different, it was how much wiser she felt; how “hyper-aware of how fleeting life is. It makes you think about your own mortality, but also, ‘What do I care about? What matters?’”
Adichie was said to have been initially unsure if she could write about her mother, who passed away in 2021 as “there was nothing,” when she tried it head-on.
However, as she worked on Dream Count, she gradually realised that the novel was a tribute to her late mother.
“Only when I was almost done did I realise, my God, it’s about my mother. It wasn’t intentional. I’m happy that it’s not a sad book. She wouldn’t want a sad book dedicated to her,” Adichie was quoted as saying.
PUNCH reports that Dream Count is scheduled for release on 3 March 2025 as the highly anticipated new work will be published in the UK and the Commonwealth by 4th Estate, and in the US and Canada by Knopf.
