2 Girls 1 Book: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

four women, and many terrible men

Welcome to the second edition of 2 Girls 1 Book, a monthly cross-post where literary concubines Ochuko and Pandora chat about a new book via Google docs. (Our first was on The Coin, by Yasmin Zaher.) This month we read Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We’ve avoided spoilers as much as possible—whilst remaining mindful that we want this to be a full and frank discussion! As ever, we’d love to hear from you in the Comments.

---

Dream Count is about the lives of four women, set during the recent pandemic: Chiamaka (Chia), a wealthy, Nigerian travel writer living in America; Zikora, her best friend, a Nigerian lawyer living in America, who is raising her infant son alone after her partner abandoned them; Omelegor, Chiamaka’s cousin, who lives in Lagos and works in finance; and Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s Guinean housekeeper, a single mother of a teenage daughter who has navigated a life of hardship, only to face her biggest challenge yet, in America.

So, we finished this one a few days ago but we’ve been pretty good about not sharing our thoughts till now. I’ll be honest, I’m nervous. Any opening thoughts, Pandora?

I wish you could have seen my face when you read that, because I did a big sigh… I liked Dream Count. I found it by turns insightful, revelatory and moving. But I thought it was her weakest novel. I am curious to know your opening thoughts, Ochuko. Because I know that Adichie was one of the most, if not the most, important authors you grew up with in Nigeria. That Adichie was bigger than the sun.

Oh, I love Chimamanda. I love her and I love her work. It’s not an exaggeration to say that she put our stories on the map. Reading Purple Hibiscus about ten years ago was the first time I saw a Nigerian teenage girl represented in contemporary literature. With Half of a Yellow Sun, the Civil War isn’t really spoken about in Nigeria—I barely knew what Biafra was until reading that book. So even back home, the cultural impact was enormous. Americanah, I will always say, is the book of my life. It’s the one book that feels truest to my existence. I first read it the summer before leaving Lagos for college in the U.S., again in my sophomore year, and most recently in January. Pandora, no piece of literature has ever felt truer to my experience. All to say, I can’t underestimate what Chimamanda means to me as a Nigerian woman.

I love the way you put that: she put our stories on the map. I also knew nothing of the Biafran war before Half of a Yellow Sun. And Americanah is also one of my favourite books, although it’s been a long time since I read it. Before we get into the knotty, I want to know: where did Dream Count rank for you out of Adichie’s novels? It’s actually kind of insane that she is as famous a she is and has only written four novels. (She’s obviously also famous for her non-fiction and Beyoncé sampling her TED talk, but still.)

Oh Pandora, dead last. I did not enjoy this book. And believe me when I say, with all my heart I really wanted to.

I know what you mean. I really wanted this to be her magnum opus. Before we get into dissecting the book—what worked, what didn’t, because plenty did work—I wanted to ask you how you felt about the controversy around her/ the book. I’ve seen some Notes on Substack saying, if you read this book, you are transphobic. Which to me is… I don’t know if it’s context collapse or just binaristic thinking, but I strongly feel that I do not have to agree with an author to read their work. (Just like I don’t have to agree with an author in order to interview them. I’ve interviewed plenty of people whose personal beliefs do not align with mine.) I think that is a very limiting way to approach literature and art. Did you read that Vulture review? It was very well written but it was a review of Adichie the person, as much as it was of Adichie the writer.

I did read that Vulture review and didn't think much of it. So, I’m Nigerian and grew up in Lagos. I moved to Canada on my own at 16 and then to the U.S. two years later. My entire adult life has been in the West, but my family is still in Lagos. My algorithm, unlike yours, is pretty bifurcated. The whole "you're transphobic if you read Chimamanda" discourse is very much the American side of my algorithm. Most of these people can’t name five female African authors.

Most don’t understand what it means to see yourself—your mom, your sisters, your friends, your love interests—come to life on paper. Chimamanda is probably the one literary reference I can use to tell someone like you: This is what life is like in Lagos. This is what my mom sounds like. This is what love looks like. I’m sorry, but until there are 10 more authors like that, I won’t stop reading her. And by the way, I’m saying only this much because you asked. As a rule, I do not enjoy justifying my actions.

I cannot name five female African authors. I got to four. That’s shameful.

I didn't do too good either. Makes me sad as hell.

I went to see Adichie live in London a few weeks ago, interviewed by Elizabeth Day (huge audience, very much a Major Event) and she said she wished everyone would drink “a cool glass of nuance” for breakfast. So this is definitely a woman who is aware of the heat around her work and her views. So let’s get into what worked. And then… we can look at what didn’t.

Pandora, can I be honest? Almost nothing worked for me here. I enjoyed her writing, it was rare and wonderful to read about women that felt like versions of people I knew from home. But that was about it.

I need you to rally for me, lady, or this will be a short ass convo.

Haha okay! You go first, tell me what worked for you.

The thing that worked the most for me is the exact thing that stuns in Americanah: it is the lost in translation element. This is most effective re: Chia and her American boyfriend of three years, Darnell. Darnell is awful; my god, this woman’s taste in men! (Chia’s part of the book is like a ‘man count’, so she spends lockdown reflecting on all of her boyfriends, an eclectic and mostly excruciating bunch). Anyway, Chia is a very rich woman, due to her parents wealth. She observes that this makes Darnell’s American friends uncomfortable. Charlotte, a white American woman, treats Chia with ‘contempt’, when she mentions her family’s second home (Charlotte says it is a “violence” for wealthy people to own another home), even though Chia knows Charlotte’s family own a summerhouse, which the socialist Darnell (who is totally fine for Chia to pay for everything btw) has stayed at.

“I wondered if [Charlotte’s] house, too, was a “violence,” or maybe violence was done only when people who were unlike her owned second homes. I would never say this, of course, because I was not brave like Omelegor. Instead I smiled my hopeless-hapless smile. Later I told Omelegor, “Charlotte doesn’t like me, but if I were a poor African, she would dislike me less.”

To which Omelegor replies:

“They can’t stand rich people from poor countries because it means they can’t feel sorry for you.”

Another sidenote: Darnell really reminds me of the Marxist professor in Meena Kandasamy’s work of auto-fiction When I Hit You. (I reference this book quite often, I think it is incredible.) He uses his intellectualism as permission to treat women like shit. Anyway, this paragraph, this dialogue, this is absolutely what Adichie does best. Very simple, very effective. And I like ‘hapless-hopeless’ as a single word. This is me most days.

Darnell! We all know a Darnell, don’t we? So let’s stick on Chia’s section for a moment and what you loved about it. I read Americanah only a few months before this, so it was still fresh in my mind. In Americanah, Ifemelu dates an African American professor with a similarly insufferable cast of friends—insufferable in the same way as Darnell’s cast of friends, I might add. That proximity made Chia’s section less effective for me, simply because I’d already seen a similar dynamic play out before—and done better, too.

This is not to say the story Chimamanda was telling here didn’t need to be told, but it just felt less effective this time. I wish she had explored the African–American relationship in a fresh, more nuanced way and with a different dynamic. I think I would have enjoyed it more if one of the friends had been African American and that relationship had been the one interrogated. Darnell felt like a caricature of a character—one I’d already read before.

That is so interesting. I had totally forgotten this. I wanted to re-read it after reading Dream Count but I couldn't find my copy (story of my life). So what you found—reading the books in close proximity—is a kind of literary self-cannibalism. I think plenty of authors do that. But that does feel specific. Especially because it’s the thing she does best.

Yes, and speaking from personal experience, navigating that cultural divide is very much a thing—and it’s definitely worth exploring! People in the West, I find, really struggle not to see Black people as a monolith. Chimamanda is Igbo Nigerian. I’m Urhobo Nigerian. Even between us, there are significant cultural differences. In my group chat with Nigerian friends, we concluded that the fact that this exact dynamic appears in two of her most recent books likely reflects her own experiences as a Nigerian moving to the U.S. And you know what? All of us in that chat have been in similar situations—explaining what a houseboy is, why our English is “so good,” or that not being poor doesn’t make us any less African. Crucially, Chimamanda is the only author I know of who’s exploring this.

There’s that great bit at the beginning when Chia and Zikora are speaking in Igbo so that other people in the queue in the supermarket don’t understand what Zikora is saying. But Igbo is usually supplemented by English phrases and without those English phrases, what Zikora ends up saying, in order to convey:

“This White man in in front of me is suspect; he came in a massive truck and he’s wearing a red hat”

Comes out as:

“A man riding a big land boat and wearing a hat the colour of blood.”

Adichie read that out at her talk incidentally and the audience roared with laughter.

Gosh, it's those little moments in her books that mean the most. It's like for once, it's my people who are in on the joke!

Not to bring it back to terrible Darnell again, but that joke he is always making about Chia’s people selling his people (“all that Igbo money going back centuries”) also reminded me of the commentary on colourism and tribalism in Americanah.

I think every African in the U.S. has probably gotten that one. Omelegor had a great response (“That is such a lazy thing to say,” she replies coldly); I certainly did not. Something people often forget is that when you grow up in Nigeria, Black is not a defining part of your identity because everyone is Black. You are Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Urhobo, or one of more than three hundred different ethnic groups.

She’s definitely where I first learned about tribes in Nigeria, and the linguistic diversity, what like 500 languages in Nigeria alone?

Yes, it's really cool! And as a result, Blackness means something quite different to me than what others might imagine. Whiteness too, actually. Chimamanda explores this so well—the way selfhood shifts depending on context. Living in the U.S., people always wanted to talk about what it felt like to be “Black,” but frankly, being Nigerian, Urhobo, a first daughter, Christian—these parts of my identity have always felt more real to me. Simply because, for most of my life, they were the ones that mattered. I think that’s what a lot of Chimamanda’s characters struggle with—Chimamanda herself too, I imagine—and there’s a comfort in reading that.

That is absolutely core to Adichie’s writing. These kind of observations—wry, witty, meticulously observed—are what she does best. I want to read more of that. And less of all the pandemic reflections, the endless hand washing and news bulletins. I don’t like reading pandemic fiction. It is too recent. It needs time to embed into history, to breathe, before I can find literature about it interesting. Also, I just lived it. It was both terrifying and dull. I don’t need to read a book about it yet.

I’m right here with you on this one. It’s too recent for me to be interested in reading about it. But as I read this book, I almost forgot it was pandemic fiction. It mostly felt like a tool to frame a moment in time that begged reflection. Very much: We have nothing to do, so I guess we’ll reminisce on all the awful relationships we’ve ever had. In Chia’s case, anyway.

So, you did, in fact, against the odds, manage to find some things you liked about Dream Count. Staying in this spirit of positivity, whose section did you think was the best? Whose would you have lost? Did you think they all would have worked as stand-alone books? I can’t even remember why it’s called Dream Count, but Adichie did say that she originally called it For Men Only in homage to Omelegor’s parody blog where she writes letters to men on the internet. Kind of like We Should All Be Feminists! But then she said For Men Only wouldn’t really work as a title. I agree. But I’m not sure Dream Count worked either.

I also do not know why it's called Dream Count. So, I could have done without Zikora’s part entirely. I barely had a sense of who she was as a person, and her section left me with more questions than answers—none of which were ever answered. My favourite section was Omelegor’s actually. She was the most vividly Nigerian to me and so that was really fun. I like Chimamanda best when she’s writing about Nigerians in Nigeria.

Yes, me too. But I was really moved by Zikora’s story— her boyfriend leaving her as soon as he realised she was pregnant, and refusing to ever speak to her again. My god, my heart. (Like I said, the men in this book are almost parodically awful.) And the bitterness that stayed with her, that she could not shake—I like that this was one of the key reasons Omelegor didn’t really like Zikora, because Zikora was so cynical, now she’d been abandoned. And Omelegor hates that Zikora has allowed a man to take away all her joy and curiosity in the world. I think that’s something quite powerful.

I think part of the issue for me was that we didn’t really get a sense of who Zikora was before Kwame—or who she was beyond a woman who really wanted to get married and start a family. I think this would have been more effective if we had seen the before and after, allowing us to appreciate just how much this experience changed her. Chia’s part read a bit weird too. I had to remind myself a few times that she was supposed to be a middle aged woman. She read like a 20-something-year-old, and that kept throwing me off.

I think it’s because she is very cosseted by her family. It kind of stunted her. But she also isn’t a particularly discerning person. I mean she’s observant—another one of my favourite parts is the things she notices about these terrible men she dates, their little insecurities and idiosyncrasies, which somehow makes her think tender things about them instead of to GET THE FUCK OUT—but she’s not a particularly vivid person. Aside from the fact that we know her to be very, very beautiful. Maybe another reason why she hasn’t really grown up? Her beauty has frozen her in amber.

But that's a bit tired though! She's wealthy and beautiful and therefore emotionally stunted? I’m not sure I like that.

Yeah I agree. I found her travel writing ideas a bit boring too. (That part where an editor tells her to go to The Congo, though, because that’s what an African travel writer should be writing about, rather than about luxury travel—damn! That felt like something that could happen in publishing.)

Her career came off as a bit indulgent. That’s one thing Darnell and I can agree on. Like you said, her sections were reflections on her past relationships. Unfortunately, I didn't find any of them particularly compelling. My friends and I kept throwing out theories on what exactly she wanted in a relationship. Why did she leave Chuka? Why did Kwame leave Zikora?!

Kwame leaving Zikora did not make sense. He was a good man the whole time they were together and then had a total personality transplant the moment she became pregnant. I got why Chia left Chuka. She didn’t love him the way he deserved to be loved.

Can we talk about Kadiatou? When I first learned that Adichie had written a character’s story inspired by Nafissatou Diallo—a Guinean woman working as a housekeeper in a hotel in New York, when was raped by Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011–I was glad she was writing this. It felt interesting and important. And Kadiatou’s parts were interesting. But the interesting parts, for me, was her life and family in Guinea, her experience of poverty and the patriarchy and FGM. The many terrible men she met. Oh, these unremittingly terrible men! That should have been the title of the book. Many Terrible Men.

Many terrible men indeed! Before I get to Kadi’s part, one criticism I’ve heard a lot about this book is that it centres too much on men—not love, just horrible men. And I agree; I would have appreciated it if the relationships between the women had been explored more. I’ll admit that I knew nothing about the Nafissatou Diallo case while reading this book. In hindsight, it makes complete sense, though, because her section was quite tonally different. I enjoyed reading it because Kadi was coming from a completely different place than the other characters. In some ways, she acted as a foil, highlighting the different dynamics within African countries and cultures, as well as the ways race played out.

Yes! Great observation.

I also found it interesting how different people reacted to Chia having help—Darnell, as an American; Zikora, as an Americanised Nigerian; and Omelegor, as the most culturally Nigerian.

Also agree. Kadi’s storyline was harrowing. It also jarred with the obvious synergy between the other 3 women. What review was that, btw, about there being too many terrible men? I haven’t seen that. I’ve seen a Times one where Johanna Thomas-Corr said it was like War & Peace (I haven’t read War & Peace but I will say as someone reading Anna Karenina right now that it doesn’t feel remotely Tolstoyian to me, it’s a small cast of characters, for one) and then that Vulture one and one in The Guardian.

That last review for The Guardian by Anthony Cummins is probably the one I agree with most. The parts about the female experience—Chia’s premenstrual dysmorphic disorder, Zikora’s perineal tear, the death of Kadi’s baby, FGM told from the perspective of the women who want this for their children, to make sure they are accepted, they are ‘marriageable’—really moved me. Even when the book feels “reverse-engineered” to fit in lots of Important Topics, as Cummins put it, I really appreciate Adichie writing about these things. They don’t ever get old for me.

These were just Goodread reviews, and thoughts from friends. I agree with the reverse-engineered thing. Unlike her other books, this one felt like I was reading Chimamanda’s thoughts rather than the characters’. It was almost as if she left too much of herself in these women, who were airing grievances on her behalf in a way that, for once, was not seamless.

You are definitely reading Adichie’s thoughts. For instance, Chia pitching a book of essays on luxury travel as an African woman, and being told to write about the Congo? During the talk in London, Adichie said:

“You want to write about love and rage and humour, but because of your identity as an African, you are seen as a person who should be writing about what is happening in Sudan.”

Which must be both reductive and annoying, to be fair, I am not surprised she wants to write about that novelistically.

I’m jealous that you got to see her speak, by the way. Super jealous! I plan to watch some interviews to gain more insight into what she was trying to do with this novel.

She is an astonishingly compelling orator. 3,000 people were rapt. She was also wearing a silver dress with a ruff so high she could not see over it, which tickled me. Very fash. Hence why she is co-chairing the Met Gala.

I saw clips of the event! I remember her dress was from a Ghanaian designer. I thought that was cool.

Yes she was funny about that—she said: “The Ghanaians may have tonight, but we all know that the Nigerians make the best jollof”. Cue: enormous cheer.

They do!

I kind of love that she is unashamed about loving fashion. Again, probably a Western thing (!) but there is the sense that women who love fashion can’t also be literary. I always appreciate that Zadie Smith talks about style; I recently read that she once bought a cape from Gucci. There is a prevailing idea that serious writers should look like Sally Rooney: sensible cardi, no make-up, brogues. (A cool look! Just not everyone’s look.)

Anyway, I think I have a sense of what you did and didn’t like. I will now say the bit I didn’t like which is in addition to the pandemic stuff, I felt like sometimes it was overly simplistic. I actually like how simple Adichie’s writing is. What I have always loved her for is her observations. But on this occasion it felt a little too basic. Is that unfair?

I don’t think it’s unfair. The proof is in the fact that, unlike with her previous work, I didn’t leave this reading experience with any new knowledge. I don’t feel like I learned anything I didn’t already know about women or the human experience, and that was a letdown. Thoughts on how the book concluded? Or rather, how did you feel about the lack of resolution?

I did learn things. About language, about Nigeria, about the breadth of narcissistic men, about the many harrowing experiences that can wreak a woman’s body, mind and spirit. But it didn’t feel cohesive, these four women’s stories; and the ending felt a bit pat. My brain actually likes things being tied up with a neat little bow, but in literary terms, it feels a bit weak. Without giving anything away—you?

I also felt like the characters didn’t fit together very well. There really should have been more exploration of their relationships. Omelegor and Zikora, for example—I wanted to see more of that tension!

I found that tension quite boring. I felt like it was feeding into quite hackneyed tropes about bitchy women. I think the characters would have had more compassion for one another, in real life.

I was okay with the lack of resolution as well. I’m really not sure how she would have concluded it, really. I spent most of the book waiting for that moment of catharsis to bring it all together, and that simply did not happen.