Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "In the 70s and 80s, literature was more annoying; today there's too much caution."

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Enugu, Nigeria, 1977) looks off-screen—her eyes enormous, her red scarf on, her expression grave—and says: “If one of my students were to write about what happened to me, I would tell them it’s unbelievable.” She speaks of the death of her parents. He died suddenly first, and she died a few months later, on his birthday: sometimes things happen like that, as if grief were calling misfortune to a final supper.

The writer closes her intimacy at this point, although she adds: "For a long time I thought I'd never write a novel again. The impulse was gone, I had a horrible feeling of blockage: I tried again and again, I persevered, but I couldn't. After the loss of my mother, however, I felt the impulse again, as if she were somehow helping me. It sounds strange, but it was like that." The result is 'A Few Dreams' (Random House), her return to fiction after more than a decade.

—This isn't the first time you've gone years without writing. More than five years passed between your second novel, 'Half of a Yellow Sun' (2006), and your third, 'Americanah' (2013).

—The fear of losing the ability to write is a recurring fear in my life. After losing my loved ones, it's my greatest fear. And I don't think it's an unfounded fear; there's something mysterious about creation; you never know where it comes from. So that fear… that fear is perhaps inherent to the act of writing.

'A Few Dreams' is a novel of intertwined stories. And what's a story? A woman with a desire, for example. Or better yet: four women with their respective desires. Here's a writer searching for love, a new mother ("this is the first thing I've written as a mother"), a businesswoman who leaves everything behind to fight injustice, and a rape victim. And there are her usual obsessions, like her foreignness. The main character, Chiamaka, a Nigerian woman from a wealthy family with literary aspirations, meets a Korean man at university and says: "He wasn't American; we had that similarity, and so his days, like mine, must have been dominated by loneliness." "There's a loneliness that has to do with immigration, with foreignness, with being far from home. I don't know if it's always negative, but it's something that's there. I belong to two worlds, Nigeria and the United States, but in a way, I don't belong." In both worlds, I feel—and this is also due to my status as a writer—as if I'm always one step behind, observing reality from a distance," she explains.

At one point in the novel, Chiamaka tells a New York editor she wants to write a book about anecdotes in African restaurants. She replies that she should focus on something more interesting, like rape in the Congo. Recalling the scene, the author smiles. Has that happened to her? "I once said I wanted to write a novel about Hitler, and someone told me something similar... But African women writers are also interested in the Second World War. I'm very interested in it [a pause]. The publishing world is very conservative," she concludes, with the same smile. She later says that publishers only give readers what they assume will interest them: stories of violence in Latin America, stories of African racism... "Now I'm successful and I don't have that pressure, or I handle it better, but I think about young people and..."

Do you think they're taking fewer and fewer risks? "Indeed, we're living too cautiously, and I don't think that's good for us. I feel practically in a state of mourning for the stories that aren't being told and won't be told, for the knowledge we won't have because people are so cautious: it's very sad. When I read novels published in the 70s or 80s, I find more complexity, more things that can bother or unsettle you. Because life, life is a mess: it's contradictory, incoherent, ambiguous, imperfect. And we have to be adult enough to accept that complexity."

—Success gives freedom, but doesn't fame give pressure?

—I'm always surprised by these questions, because I don't consider myself a celebrity. But I don't read news about myself. I'm not going to read this interview. I haven't Googled myself for years. I've created a distance between my private and public self.

In the epilogue, recalling the case of Nafissatou Diallo, who in 2011 accused IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault, she again defends complexity: “Being human day to day is not, nor should it be, an endless procession of virtue. A victim doesn't have to be perfect to deserve justice.” “In that sense, we've gotten worse, at least in the United States. To think that #MeToo happened a few years ago and that we're now in the situation we're in... It was a very promising and important movement, but it didn't manage to achieve what it could have. Today, we're seeing the triumph of retrograde ideas about what a woman's place should be, the place a woman should occupy in her home or in society. It's an interesting outcome, but not in a positive sense, of course.”