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May 08, 2024

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Her Debut Children’s Book, Writing for Her Daughter, and ‘Celebrating the Ordinariness of Black Women’s Lives’

By Emma Specter All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Chimamanda

By Emma Specter

All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has more or less conquered the adult literary world with her wide and varied body of work, which includes the novels Americanah, Purple Hibiscus, and Two Halves of a Yellow Sun; the widely circulated essay We Should All Be Feminists; and the short-story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. But these days, she’s facing two new frontiers: motherhood and children’s-book writing, both of which have come to occupy her attention in the years since her daughter was born.

Adichie’s latest project, the children’s book Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, which is illustrated by Joelle Avelino, is due out on September 5 from Penguin Random House; recently, Vogue spoke to Adichie about honoring her recently passed parents with the pen name she chose for her foray into children’s books, and the kid’s book series that’s captured her own daughter’s heart. Read the full interview below:

Vogue: What drew you toward writing your first children’s book?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Before I had my daughter, who is going to be eight in October, people would sometimes ask me, “Why don’t you write a children’s book?” I would say, “I’m never going to do that because my vision is too dark and I don’t want to traumatize children.” (Laughs.) You know, I start writing something and before you know it, somebody’s dying. I wasn’t going to write a children’s book, and then I had my daughter and everything changed. Suddenly, I wanted to write a children’s book for her. I’ve been taking notes for almost eight years, but it was also in some ways the consequence of grief, because my parents died, my father and my mother shortly after. It’s just the kind of devastation that I really still cannot make sense of, and so from that, I got to honor them. That’s why I decided to write a children’s book in using this sort of made-up name, which literally means “child of Grace and James.” My parents were Grace and James. I also thought there was something lovely about writing a book for my daughter and writing it as a daughter; I loved the echo and the resonance to it. Really, I just hoped that my daughter would like the book.

How did the story of Chino and her sleeping scarf come together for you?

Well, when my daughter was still really a baby, she pulled my scarf off my head and started playing peekaboo with it. I just found it to be sort of beautiful, and for me, it was a perfect example of how you can find so much beauty and joy in the most ordinary things. I wear a scarf to sleep every night, and I think most Black women I know do that too, and it just seemed to me to be this wonderful way of celebrating the ordinariness of Black women’s lives. I think obviously that many changes are afoot in publishing and in storytelling in an attempt to be more diverse, but I still think that there’s a lot about ordinary Black life that is still largely unfamiliar to what one might call mainstream storytelling. That was the psyche of writing about this very ordinary, very common, but also somehow still unfamiliar thing, the idea of wearing a scarf to sleep. I thought, This part of my daughter’s story is worth turning into a book.

What does it feel like to be publishing under a pen name after using your own professionally for so long?

Actually, I like it. There’s something quite nice about this idea of having multiple identities, I think. But what I like about it mostly is just that it’s about my parents; I just really love that I can honor them in this way. I’m hoping that I will write many more children’s books, and so all of my children’s books will be done under this name. I really love the idea of celebrating their memory; the idea of writing this book as the child of my parents is very meaningful to me.

Are there favorite children’s books that you and your daughter have enjoyed that helped to inspire this project?

I don’t think there’s any book that actually made me want to write. Really, it’s my daughter’s existence that made me want to write, but there are books that we love. For so long she loved Good Night Moon, which is very strange because I’ve actually never understood that one, but people absolutely love it. She really, really likes the Pigeon books by Mo Willems; they’re very funny, and she just absolutely loves them.

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Is there anyone you’re really hoping will read and love this book?

I’m hoping that this book will kind of bring a little light to parents. I want it to be the kind of book that you read and when you’re done, your spirit has just ever so slightly lifted. I’ve always felt that I write for anybody who likes the kinds of books that I like, and so I’m just hoping that I have a wide readership for this book. I do have to say, though, that there’s something about just imagining a little Black child, particularly a little Black African child, opening this book and seeing something so familiar to them; just the thought of it makes me happy.

Mama’s Sleeping Scarf

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