RaveThe Tribune India (IND)This is a lyrical, moving journal in 30 entries ... Adichie’s poignant lyricism flows probably from her view of grief as something that can also be ‘a celebration of love’. The love for her father gives her the courage to see her own pain without blinkers. She is not a Hamlet seeking solace in metaphysical speculation. Tears do not dim her sight. When emotion threatens her sanity, she turns to writing, as Hamlet does to acting. It is a performance and affords distance to survive grief’s onslaught. At one level then, the book is a set of variations on mourning performed in language to keep madness at bay. At another, it is a baptism of grief that draws the writer so far out into the wilderness of language that she senses a self-birthing: she hears ‘a new voice pushing itself out of my writing’. The voice has the urgency of death’s summons. It dawns on her that she too is mortal and may die, like her father did, any moment. And so she ‘must write everything now’. With this realisation, she has won the writer’s last freedom.
