Notes On Grief

From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of We Should All Be Feminists and Americanah, a profound reckoning with loss, written in the wake of her father’s death. During the brutal summer of 2020, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beloved father, a celebrated professor at the University of Nigeria and an irreplaceable figure in a close-knit family, succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Notes on Grief is Adichie’s tribute to him, and a moving meditation on loss. Here Adichie offers a candid snapshot of the shock, loneliness, and disillusionment that followed the news of her father’s death. Her family, unable to be together except for on video calls, struggles to go through the rites of mourning amid a global crisis of unimaginable scale. As Adichie wrestles with his passing, she recalls with vivid, poignant detail who her father was: a remarkable survivor of the Biafran war, a man of kindness and charm, and a fierce supporter of his youngest daughter. Here is a uniquely personal, profound work of remembrance and hope by one of today’s luminaries—a book to bring us together in a time when we need it most.

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

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: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). 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.

About Grief is a refreshingly down-to-earth book about an issue that blindsides many people. Written in a warm and conversational way that is, at times, deeply moving, at times, surprisingly amusing, and always practical, it covers a wide range of issues facing people in grief. Originally developed as a wildly popular class, Marasco and Shuff have done the footwork for readers who wish to know more about this complex subject. Using a variety of sources, including books, films, music and many hours spent walking and talking with people in grief, the authors distill their candid insights into a series of short, single-topic-essays that can be easily digested in one sitting—a format they found grieving people preferred. This is not a book written by clinicians, so there's no cold jargon. It's not a memoir of one individual's grief, so it has something for everyone. And it's not a soft-peddling inspirational book with dew-sprinkled leaves on the cover. It's a wise, plainspoken, comforting book about an intimidating topic. As one reader recently said of About Grief: Reading this book is like having a smart, entertaining friend around—at a time when you really need one.

The limits of fifteen-year-old Kambili’s world are defined by the high walls of her family estate and the dictates of her fanatically religious father. Her life is regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, prayer.

A Grief Observed is a collection of Lewis's reflections on the experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. The book was first published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk as Lewis wished to avoid identification as the author. Though republished in 1963 after his death under his own name, the text still refers to his wife as "H" (her first name, which she rarely used, was Helen). The book is compiled from the four notebooks which Lewis used to vent and explore his grief. He illustrates the everyday trials of his life without Joy and explores fundamental questions of faith and theodicy. Lewis's step-son (Joy's son) Douglas Gresham points out in his 1994 introduction that the indefinite article 'a' in the title makes it clear that Lewis's grief is not the quintessential grief experience at the loss of a loved one, but one individual's perspective among countless others. The book helped inspire a 1985 television movie Shadowlands, as well as a 1993 film of the same name. Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, lay theologian and Christian apologist. He is best known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

The authors explain how Kubler-Rosss famous "Five Stages of Dying" apply directly to mourners themselves. In this, her final book, completed shortly before her death, the authors own experiences and spiritual insight explain how the grief process helps survivors live with loss.

Part memoir, part handbook for the heartbroken, this powerful, unsparing account of losing a premature baby will speak to all who have been bereaved and are grieving, and offers inspiration on moving forward, gently integrating the loss into life. Inglis’s story is a springboard that can help other bereaved parents—and anyone who has experienced wrenching loss—reflect on emotional survival in the first year; dealing with family, friends, and bystanders post-loss; the unique survivors’ guilt, feelings of failure, and isolation of bereavement; and the fortitude of like-minded community and small kindnesses. Inglis’s unique voice—at once brash, irreverent, and achingly beautiful—creates a nuanced picture of the landscape of grief, encompassing the trauma, the waves of disbelief and emptiness, the moments of unexpected affinity and lightness, and the compassion that grows from our most intense chapters of the human experience.