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Next week, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will publish her first novel in more than 10 years, Dream Count, a sweeping, continent-traversing account of romantic love, love between friends, and love between parents and their children. In some ways, it is the novel that prompted, as Adichie says on this Thursday’s episode of The Run-Through, “a kind of joyous reunification with the self,” following a period in which she found herself unable to write fiction. In this conversation with podcast cohost Chloe Malle and Vogue senior editor Chloe Schama, the author discusses her new book, what it’s like to be an accomplished writer with an unapologetic love of clothes, and why she isn’t overly concerned with her books being banned.
Chloe Schama: I know I speak for the entire Vogue team when I say how much we loved your essay featured in our March issue. It’s called “The Story of My First Love” and describes the puppy love you experienced with your first boyfriend and then, sadly, his unexpected death. Can you tell us a little more about what it was like to revisit that part of your life?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I’ve actually written about him a long time ago, in a much longer essay that was also about the rising phenomenon of armed robberies in Nigeria. But it just kind of made me go back in a way that I hadn’t in a while and write about it in a different way. There’s something about first love in general. Sometimes it’s not a wonderful experience for people. Mine was until it wasn’t. And I’m a person who’s kind of addicted to nostalgia. It takes me very little to become very nostalgic. But this one in particular—I wrote about it in a way that’s different from how I have written about it in the past. And I felt quite moved at the end. And I hoped that I was also in some ways paying tribute to him.
Chloe Malle: I want to know about being photographed by Annie Leibovitz and being styled for your Vogue shoot because I loved those photos so much. Have you worked with Annie before? What was that experience like?
Adichie: Annie actually had photographed me before about 10 years ago, and she came here to our house. It’s wonderful when you’re working with a photographer who thinks of you not as an object to be photographed but as a human being. So Annie really wanted to talk about where I was, and I just really appreciated that. She just really cared about what I thought about what we were doing. And I remember thinking, I don’t know anything about photography. You shouldn’t care about what I think.
Malle: Your last novel, Americanah, was published in 2013, and you’ve published several nonfiction works since then, but you’ve also had three children. What is that transition in and out of their world and into this world you’re creating like?
Adichie: Fiction is the love of my life, and when I got pregnant, my daughter is nine now, I just felt that something happened. I just could no longer write fiction, and I struggled for quite a while. And it felt like being shut out of yourself. Because I think that the truest self that I have is the self that writes fiction. And I couldn’t reach that self. And so getting back to writing is a kind of joyous reunification with the self.
But having children also means that you don’t have as much time to devote to the work. And I’m a writer who’s quite obsessive. So when I’m in, when I’m inside my fiction, I don’t want to do anything else. And until I had my daughter, that worked out well. Romantic love was never a problem. I could always put it aside to focus on my fiction. But maternal love—a part of me is terrified that my daughter will grow up and say my mother’s writing was more important than me.
But I feel so fortunate to be a mother. I think I’m a different writer because I’m a mother. There’s a new plane of understanding, and I think it’s a higher plane of understanding and access to certain kinds of emotions.
Malle: As you said, it felt like you were locked out of a certain part of yourself, not being able to write fiction for a long time. What was the key that reopened that for you?
Adichie: I don’t actually know. Some parts of this book had been floating in my head for years, but I actually started writing this novel knowing I was writing a novel after my mother died, and maybe it was my mother that unlocked the door for me.
Malle: We’ve been talking a lot about the five-year anniversary of the beginning of the COVID lockdowns, and it did feel like, for the characters in the novel, that is a sort of an unlocking of different nostalgias.
Adichie: COVID is like this wide, almost blank canvas on which you can impose all sorts of permutations of human response. I mean, nobody alive has ever experienced a proper universal plague. My experience of the first few weeks was just one of utter surrealness. I was at home here with my daughter, and my husband is a doctor, so he was working. And I was terrified that he would bring it home and especially terrified for my daughter. And then my father died. My father died weeks into lockdown. So the lockdown then became for me this intense grieving period, and it’s very strange to grieve when the world is grieving and also when the world is shut down. It just really was a very surreal time for me.
Schama: I liked what you said about maternal love making your kind of understanding of yourself and your writing richer, and it resonated, I think, because I always find that there’s a overblown dichotomy between the mother and the artist. But do you have rituals and routines that help you carve out time for both being a mother and an artist?
Adichie: There’s certain things I’m very clear about. I have to have time with my children every day when I’m home. It doesn’t really matter when. I just make it happen. It has to happen. And I think part of it is just the anxiety that comes with that kind of love. I was joking with my best friend earlier today, and I said to her, “I’m terrified of going on book tour next month because I’m worried that my babies wont know me when I come back.” And it’s just for a month, and I’ll be home a few days during the month, but it’s a huge deal for me.
Schama: How does the character first take shape for you? Is it the name? Is it the place? Is it a combination of the two?
Adichie: I often say, half jokingly, that I feel like I’m inventing things when I’m talking about how I wrote my fiction because so much of it is not entirely conscious. There’s a lot that is—I think about things obviously, but then there’s a lot that’s intuitive. Generally, characters come to me in different ways. Sometimes it’s mood. I don’t always see them physically. Actually, if you asked me to describe some of them in detail, I might not be able to. But if you asked me to tell you how they would react to any situation, I would tell you. I know them internally much more than I know them externally.
Schama: There’s a lot of diaspora themes in this new book. Did you have a handful of places you wanted to put your characters?
Adichie: Sometimes it’s easiest to write about what one knows. So you know, there’s Nigeria, there’s parts of the US. Philadelphia is a city that’s very close to my heart because that’s where I went to college. And I never pass on an opportunity to make fun of New York City. It’s also telling a modern African story, because I think that many of the stories we know about Africa don’t actually engage with the idea of the global presence of Africans.
Malle: Chimamanda, I feel like you have been such a beacon for smart women being allowed to wear things you like wearing and dressing up. How are you thinking about your book tour? What are you wearing? What would you say to your younger self who thought that maybe a serious writer needed to wear dark colors and not dresses?
Adichie: It’s interesting because this was actually something that I learned in America. This idea that the intellectual life is somehow opposed to an interest in appearance really doesn’t exist in Nigeria. My mother was the head of the nonacademic part of the university, and my mother dressed up every day. I care about appearance because I was raised by my mother, and my mother in fact made it almost a moral imperative. So if you heard her talking about people who did not present themselves well, you would feel that they had somehow committed some sort of crime. Taking care of your appearance was an act of courtesy to other people.
But I did go through a period when I wore clothes I did not like because I felt that that was what I was supposed to wear. So at some point, you know, I thought, you know what? I want to wear the high heels because that’s actually what I like. And so I started with high heels, and then I started with color.
Malle: Are there designers that you love?
Adichie: There is a designer called The Ladymaker. Her name is Ifeyinwa Azubike, and she’s just really wonderful. Like Maria Grazia [Chiuri], she likes women. There’s another designer I really admire called Nkwo. I’m always looking to find new people.
Malle: What is it like raising a daughter in America and how she presents herself and how she gets dressed for school?
Adichie: You know, there is increasing informality in the American public space that is horrifying to me. I think again about my mother, who said that to present yourself well was a courtesy to other people. I find myself, when I’m in the US, I sort of tilt towards the slub. So if we’re sort of just going out to grab something, sometimes I’ll just pull on raggedy leggings, and my husband once has said to me, “Are you serious?” And then I said, “Wait, America is getting under my skin.”
When we are in Nigeria, my daughter dresses better and she decides what she wants to wear. When we’re here, she doesn’t. So we have a thing where I say, “Are you going to wear one of your raggedy tops?” And then she’ll say, “Mama, it’s not raggedy,” but I’m thinking, My God, it is. And then her friend comes to visit, and I think, You’re all raggedy. This is just terrible.
Malle: Do you dress your twin boys in matching outfits?
Adichie: I do. I do. Until they’re old enough to decide, I will enjoy it.
Schama: We’re obviously in a very tumultuous political climate in many ways. Do you have any new thinking on book bans and what it’s like to publish a book at this moment in our political history?
Adichie: Book bans don’t work. I mean, they’re bad in the sense that they’re disruptive. But in the end, I really do believe that literature will triumph. I know that for me as a reader, when you tell me that a book is banned, that’s the book I want to read. And I also think, honestly, when I was told that my book was banned, I was very pleased because you do not ban a thing that doesn’t have power. In the end, you cannot ban the human imagination. Like, the same way that this administration is wiping certain words from government language is sad. But it will not succeed because you just cannot. There’s something you cannot kill in the human spirit and imagination.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
