I arrive early to meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian-American writer, feminist, author of Americanah. Her home, just outside Baltimore, looks Scandinavian somehow amid the snow crust and woodland. Adichie is mid-photoshoot, but the stylist shows me through to the kitchen, telling me to help myself to roast chicken and rice. At a desk in the corner, Adichie’s nine-year-old daughter is wearing headphones and absorbed in what looks like homework. In the middle of the room, watched over by a nanny, are two smiling, 10-month-old boys, one sitting in an activity centre, shrieking with joy, the other gnawing a toy. I’d read a lot about Adichie’s life in the last few years: the sudden death of her father, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, in 2020, the second shock of her mother’s death months later in 2021. I’d heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2023 discussing how motherhood is a glorious gift that comes at a cost: “I could probably have written two novels had I not had my child.” Nowhere had I heard that she’d had twins.
“You’ve met my babies,” Adichie laughs when she appears in a vibrant orange dress. She sits to remove the hair extensions she has worn for the shoot. “I want to protect my children. I’m OK with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them.” Later, she tells me that for a long time people didn’t know she had a husband, either – she married Ivara Esege, a hospital physician, in 2009. “So, here’s the thing, Nigerians are … ” Nosy? “They want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it.”
