admin 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?
