Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stopped by Late Night With Seth Meyers to discuss her first novel in 12 years, Dream Count.
Adichie’s novel, published last week by Knopf, follows four women in Nigeria and the U.S. during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant.”
Meyers noted that Adichie said she was inspired by her mother to write her novel.
“I started writing after my mother died, and it was such a devastating thing,” she said. “I kind of feel as though my mother opened the door to my creativity again, because I couldn’t write for a number of years. So the [time] that it took to write this book is not because I wanted to take a break. It’s because I was forced to take a break because the writing wasn’t happening.”
Meyers asked Adichie if she always knew her novel would be about four women with interconnected lives.
“I think I always knew it was four,” she said. “I wanted to write about women’s lives, and I wanted to write something that wasn’t very narrow.…Maybe I thought there would be three, maybe five, but I kind of knew it would be more than two women. But for me, the magic of writing fiction is that it’s a discovery. Characters speak to me when I’m working.…People who do not write fiction do not understand this. When I say a character surprised me, people say, ‘Well, you’re stupid, because you wrote the bloody book.’ But this is, in fact, true!”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
