Lemonada. This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Forgo, so welcome to the show.

Today, author Chima Manda Ngozi Adichie.

She emerged at the age of 26 with her debut novel, Purple Hybiscis, a coming-of-age story about a teenage Nigerian girl torn between her Igbo heritage and the fanatical Catholicism of her

westernized father. That was published in 2003. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun,

arrived three years later, informed in part by her family's stories of surviving the Biafran

War between 1967 and 1970. Adichia herself grew up during a period of

military dictatorship in Nigeria, where journalists routinely mysteriously disappeared.

This made her, I think, an ardent defender of the press, and by extension, free speech.

But it's been more than a decade since the publication of her most popular novel, Americana,

which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013.

In the intervening 12 years, Chimamanda has mostly published essays on feminism,

gender, the Me Too movement,

grief, and the function of race in America. You may have read those essays in The New Yorker and the Atlantic. We dive into all of those topics on the back half of this episode. But we begin

with her latest novel, Dream Count, set in Washington, D.C. during the height of the

pandemic, it focuses on the interconnected stories of four women and how they've come to understand

one another through experiences with their friends, family, and lovers. At its core, it's about

the domain of the human heart, an allergy for dreams deferred,

for what was or what could have been, if not for a wrong turn or two. The book is dedicated to

Chima Manda's mother, who passed away in the spring of 2021, which was less than a year after losing her father in

2020. You can feel them both in the margins of dream count. You can also feel Chimamanda

throughout our back and forth working through this insurmountable loss. We do a lot of

working through in this conversation, for that matter. I know many of you are coming to this

...