October 25, 2009|By Mary Carole McCauley | Mary Carole McCauley,mary.mccauley@baltsun.com
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is in a situation simultaneously so thrilling and yet so uncomfortable that it's hard to figure out just how much she is to be envied and resented. On her 31st birthday, the Columbia novelist and short-story writer won a "genius" grant - which is not unlike being anointed king - and was given $500,000 to use as she pleases. In her native Nigeria, she is so famous she sets fashion trends.
Now, all she has to do is spend the rest of her life living up to all the accolades.
"After the hyper-high of getting the MacArthur award in 2008, panic set in," she says. "I don't have to do anything for the money. But, the award comes with a lot of expectations - especially my own."
Now 32, Adichie is one of the younger MacArthur recipients, and the prestige conveyed by the award has attracted a phalanx of new readers in the U.S.
On Monday, area residents can catch her at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, where she will read from her new short-story collection, "The Thing Around Your Neck."
The audience will see a slender, pretty woman with almond-shaped eyes. What might or might not be on display is Adichie's contradictory mix of self-doubt and a self-assurance that borders on audacity.
Her magnum opus so far is her second novel, "Half of a Yellow Sun." The author was 26 when she began weaving a tale of the Nigerian civil wars in the late 1960s, which occurred long before she was born. The book tackles Nigerian politics, ethnic cleansing, and the systematic starvation of a million Biafrans.
"She's fearless," says Robin Desser, Adichie's editor at Alfred A. Knopf.
"She has a sly sense of humor, she doesn't worry about offending people, and she has an incredible ear. She loves to eavesdrop, and she gets down on paper how people talk, which means how they think, which means how they feel. Then she pulls back and has something political to say, but not with a sledgehammer."
This year, Adichie has been, literally, all over the place. She spent about four months in Nigeria, four months on a book tour, and four months in the Columbia home filled with African art that she shares with her physician husband. Recently, the house was brimming with visitors - a sign Adichie isn't actively working on her new novel.
"I need a lot of space and silence to write," she says. "When I'm focusing on a book, I work around the clock. Once, I didn't leave my home for five days straight. I don't return phone calls for months."
It's why she prefers to work in the U.S. In Nigeria, Adichie's rock-star status makes it difficult to concentrate. She's stopped at the mall by autograph-seekers, the distinctive pattern of beads in her braids is widely imitated, and Nigerian parents are naming their newborns, "Chimamanda."
The writer says she is "ridiculously lucky" to have two countries - Nigeria, which she left at age 19, and the U.S.
"I'm emotionally invested in Nigeria, and my sensibility will always be Nigerian," she says.
Though she grew up in an egalitarian household, the outside world could be limiting. Maleness was explicitly prized in Nigeria, as was Western civilization.
"I started writing stories at about age 6 that were just like the books we read in school," she says, "about children with blue eyes and poodles who played in the snow. My mother kept all my stories and occasionally threatens to give them to local journalists if I don't do what she wants."
Though Adichie can be critical of her adopted country - "The Thing Around Your Neck" contains pointed observations about the U.S. - she has "an immense affection" for her second home.
"It is the only Western country that makes an effort to address its past," she says. "And, I have space here. If I'd gone to school in Britain, I wouldn't have developed the sense of possibility I acquired here."
Remarkably, by the time Adichie was 22, she had found a publisher for her first novel, "Purple Hibiscus," about a young girl's relationship with her abusive father.
"You can never match the high of being published for the first time," she says. "I stood in my brother's study screaming into the phone. I felt a sense of destiny, that I was doing what the universe, the spirits, my great-grandparents, wanted me to do."
Even before "Purple Hibiscus" was published to widespread praise, Adichie began work on "Yellow Sun," a project that consumed the next four years.
"That book took a lot out of me," she says. "I'm obsessed with death and think about it all the time. But I told myself, 'I'm meant to write this book, and nothing will happen to me until I finish it.' "
Adichie pours herself so intensely into her writing that completing a novel feels a little like her own demise.
"When I finished it, I went into the deepest depression in my life, and it lasted for 15 months" she says. "After I sent the book off, I called my editor and told her I wanted it back. I was bereft."
