Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Comes to Terms with Global Fame - NEWYORK TIMES

I enjoyed reading this article on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in NEWYORK TIMES.
I loved that it opened with Eghosa Imasuen’s story. A story of his mother and his struggle with his own writing – Eghosa is the author of FINE BOYS.
“She showed me a photograph in a magazine of a young woman with beads in her hair, and she said, Look at this small girl, she has written a book of horticulture, about flowers—you could do something like that…”
You bet his mother was referring to PURPLE HIBISCUS – Adichie’s first novel, published when she was 26.
The article talks about Adichie’s family, Igbo Language, her husband, Biafra war, her writing workshop and a more detailed and emotional story of her father in the hands of kidnappers.

Of Igbo Language, the article reads :

Because of her popularity, when she decided to stick with Igbo all the way through high school, others did, too, despite the fact that Igbo was a very uncool subject that most kids dropped as soon as they could. She wanted to know Igbo deeply, not just as a family language, but her pride in the language was unusual. “There is something I call, unkindly, Igbo shame,” she says. “Igbos who grew up in Lagos try their hardest to run away from their Igbo-ness. If you meet them in public and say something in Igbo, they will not respond in Igbo.”

We lost the Biafran war and learned to be ashamed

And of her husband :

She had always imagined that she would marry someone flamboyantly unfamiliar—she pictured herself shocking the family by bringing home “a spiky-haired Mongolian-Sri-Lankan-Rwandan”—but the man she ended up marrying, in 2009, was almost comically suitable: a Nigerian doctor who practiced in America, whose father was a doctor and a friend of her parents, and whose sister was her sister’s close friend. Before they had a baby, she spent about half the year in Nigeria, and her husband would join her when he could. But her husband doesn’t want to be apart from the baby for too long, so now she lives most of the time in the U.S. “One of the perils of a feminist marriage is that the man actually wants to be there,” she says. “He is so present and he does every damn thing! And the child adores him. I swear to God, sometimes I look at her and say, I carried you for nine months, my breasts went down because of you, my belly is slack because of you, and now Papa comes home and you run off and Ignore me. Really?”

Adichie is a force to reckon with. I’m happy that I get to experience her existence. But as seen in the article –

As her subjects have expanded, her audience has, too, but visibility has its drawbacks.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE NEWYORK TIMES as written by Larissa MacFarquhar.