The Dream of Being Known
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf, 2025; 399 pp., $32.00 (Hardcover)
A review of Dream Count
This past March, I was thrilled to see new fiction from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, I have taught to high school students for several years. Hailed by The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar as “one of the most vital and original novelists of her generation,” Adichie’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and her lecture “The Danger of a Single Story” is one of the top twenty-five most-viewed TED talks of all time. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003, followed by Half of a Yellow Sun in 2006, and finally Americanah in 2013, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Although she has written nonfiction since that time, it has been twelve years since Adichie’s last novel.
In Dream Count, the engrossing storytelling, finely crafted language, and complex characters I have come to expect from Adichie are intact, but this novel is more meditative than some of her previous works. In part, this is because the COVID-19 pandemic is a background component of the story’s setting, serving as the impetus for the main character, Chiamaka, to examine her life and “name things long unnamed.” The story alternates between four narrators—four women who are connected to each other through Chiamaka—and surveys their dreams with the scrutiny of an archaeologist. The book charts their uniquely female desires for love, their longings to be known, and how time has changed both the women and their dreams.
In her author’s note, Adichie cites several personal inspirations for the book, including the deaths of her parents, which prompted in her “an unmoored sense of nakedness,” a longing to take back time, fears of finality, and feelings of anger and sadness. Adichie says she was motivated to write with “clear-eyed realism but touched by tenderness.” She adds that “the point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it … Only then can we reach reflection, illumination, and finally, hopefully, epiphany.” Her storytelling in Dream Count causes readers to reflect on what, ultimately, people really want from their lives, especially when it comes to love and marriage in the modern world.
Chiamaka’s opening chapter begins: “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.” This is the central “dream” of the book, and therefore contains its central questions: Is it possible for a person to know another person fully? What does it mean to be fully known? “The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry,” says Simone Weil. Chiamaka reflects in this opening chapter that the pandemic made her realize we live with yearnings we cannot name. She’s right. The soul knows it is hungry, but that doesn’t mean it knows what will satisfy that hunger.
All four of the women in Dream Count are trying to determine what will satisfy the hunger of their hearts and how the dreams they have for their lives ebb with time. Chiamaka considers that she “didn’t think of marriage as shaped by time—how could the merging of two souls be shaped by time?” With one of her love interests, she “dreamed not of marriage but of how we might become truly intertwined, how the fear might disappear.” Intertwined is an apt word here, since the sacrament of marriage is a covenant that joins together without the individual person losing a unique identity. Indeed, marriage, as the USCCB explains, is a “holy … mystery that symbolizes the marriage of Christ and his Church.” Christ and the Church are one and have a permanent union through God, but do not lose their distinct identities in this union. Perhaps this is what Chiamaka longs for—one of the yearnings she cannot quite name. She desires to be fully herself, to remain herself, yet to be united with another. Perhaps if Chiamaka had a fuller vision of marriage, one that understood—as the Church explains—that in this intertwining one remains herself and is united with another—her fears would be mitigated.
In a drily funny part of this first section, Chiamaka recalls how “the stipulations from my mother and my aunts” regarding marriage “had started in my mid-twenties, firm and fine-edged, and repeated often: He must be Catholic and Igbo, have a university degree, and be able to maintain you.” However, by her “mid-thirties, the conditions began to wilt at the edges … A Christian was fine, of any denomination; a Nigerian of any ethnicity; or an African; or just a Black man; or, well, a man.” Finally, “in my mid-forties, with my female eggs in an unforgiving rush to uselessness, marriage had become secondary. Have a child, by whatever means.” She wryly observes “how slippery moralities are, how they circle and thin and change with circumstance.” To satisfy her mother and her aunts, she tells them, “I am praying for a husband.”
Chiamaka’s friend Zikora, another of the novel’s narrators, also navigates expectations for marriage—both her own and those of others. She felt that:
A wedding at twenty-seven or twenty-eight was ideal, but twenty-nine was fine too, and by her thirtieth birthday she felt cast out in the wilderness of her mind … As her thirty-first birthday approached, she felt more sanguine, because she had begun saying novenas, to St. Joseph, husband of the Blessed Virgin; to Raphael the Archangel, who had helped a couple in the Book of Tobit; and most often to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Praying the novenas repeatedly provides her calm and assurance that hers—her husband, her happiness, her peace—would come. Zikora recognizes that “if she wanted a nice necklace, or a holiday, or a condo, she could swipe her credit card and it would be hers, but her truest longing, for marriage, depended on someone else.” Adichie comes back to this idea in various ways throughout the book, reminding readers—with “clear-eyed realism”—to look at the world and see how even our dreams for ourselves as individuals are connected to and dependent on others and on God. We have free will, but we do not have absolute power even over our own lives.
Later on in the story, navigating certain tragedies, Zikora goes to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in D.C. and is overwhelmed by its magnificence, “the sweeping majestic place built for God, all the people who built it for God, who worshipped and witnessed God here,” and feels that “God could surely not now forsake her.” Here, she finds a sense of being part of a “cloud of witnesses,” part of a universal Church of believers bringing its dreams to God, not just in that particular church building but in the Church throughout time and history.
The third of the story’s narrators, Chiamaka’s cousin Omelogor, considers how money can provide a level of power to make dreams real, yet ultimately cannot fulfill all dreams. Omelogor becomes prosperous through her career (not necessarily through the most honest means) and returns to Nigeria to enjoy this success. She describes how:
I stared at the figures in my personal account, telling myself it really was mine and not a client’s, thrilled and dizzy, thinking of what I could now do for the people I loved, how I could reach out and touch dreams that just yesterday were too impossible to be dreamed. Yet money deceives in how much it cannot prevent, and in what it cannot protect you from.
Chiamaka and Omelogor poke each other about their different approaches to finding love and happiness. Chiamaka thinks that if she had “passion attacks” as Omelogor does rather than long-term relationships, she would feel as though she were eternally thirsty in a desert. Yet, Omelogor counters, “Chiamaka, stop looking for a partner in your madness. And what does it actually mean to be known? You want somebody to study you and cram you like a textbook?”
Dream Count is really an accounting of Chiamaka’s dreams, the different lives she could have lived and all the ways she could have been known by different people. Just as Zikora, Omelogor, and her housekeeper Kadiatou reflect on the ways their own dreams have changed, Chiamaka takes stock of her various lovers—and questions her former belief that contentment in a relationship means being resigned. Now she questions this and ponders whether contentment with another person is what she should seek, wondering still whether it’s possible to be fully known. What the characters seem to miss, though, is that true love requires a gift of the self. It requires vulnerability. Only when we take the risk of giving ourselves to another—of giving ourselves away as Christ did on the Cross—can we be fully known.
Adichie’s conclusion ends with this exact reminder. Knowing another person is intimate. Being known is the core dream, the hunger, with which all of us live. And if we pay attention, if we look closely at the actual circumstances of our lives, we will see that we are offered many opportunities to love others, many opportunities to be fully known. Adichie’s novel reminds us, through characters who remain unsure of what it means to be fully known, that we hunger for a love that will never not choose us. That’s the dream.
