📕 Notes on Grief
Heartfelt exploration of the author’s journey through the loss of her father.
Discovered through a Goodreads suggestion, this memoir captures the complex emotions of grief with raw honesty and depth. Through personal anecdotes and reflections, Adichie shares her struggle with the reality of her father’s absence, the search for words to express her pain, and the precious memories that both haunt and comfort her.
This book is a touching tribute to her father’s life and a story about the impact of loss, recommended for anyone seeking to understand the profound effects of grieving a loved one.
About the book
| Author: | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
| Year of release: | 2021 |
| Genre: | Memoir, Essays, Biography, Africa, Death |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Average WPM: | 267 |
| Date Started/Finished: | 8-November-2022 |
| Time took: | 0.2 Hours |
How I Discovered It
Suggested by Goodreads
Who Should Read It?
Someone who wants to understand the feelings of someone who goes through grief
Top Quotes
No one was prepared for how deeply besotted with sudoku my father became after he retired, much to my mother’s irritation. ‘He won’t eat,’ she would say, ‘because he’s busy playing sudoku.’ ‘You don’t play sudoku,’ he would reply mildly. ‘It’s not Ludo.’
I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.
Summary + Notes
Chapter 3.
You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
Chapter 4.
‘You actually drink warm water, Daddy?’ I asked one day, surprised, laughing at him, after he said, with sheepish humour, that he’d read somewhere that drinking warm water might prevent coronavirus. He laughed at himself and told me warm water was harmless, after all. It was not like the nonsense that went around during the Ebola scare, when people were bathing in saline before dawn.
Chapter 10.
Ndo, in Igbo, comforts more, a word that is ‘sorry’ with a metaphysical heft, a word with borders wider than mere ‘sorry’.
Chapter 15.
No one was prepared for how deeply besotted with sudoku my father became after he retired, much to my mother’s irritation. ‘He won’t eat,’ she would say, ‘because he’s busy playing sudoku.’ ‘You don’t play sudoku,’ he would reply mildly. ‘It’s not Ludo.’
Chapter 17.
Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter. His pride in me mattered, more than anyone else’s. He read everything I wrote, and his comments ranged from ‘this isn’t coherent at all’ to ‘you have outdone yourself’.
Chapter 18.
To sit with him and talk about the past was like reclaiming gorgeous treasure that was always mine anyway. He gave me my ancestry in finely sketched stories. I not only adored him in that classic manner of a daddy’s girl, but I also liked him so much. I like him. His grace and his wisdom and his simplicity, and how utterly unimpressionable he was. I liked his luminous, moderate faith, strong but worn lightly.
Chapter 21.
A friend sends me a line from my novel: ‘Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.’ How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.
Chapter 30.
I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.