Story Preparation

Introduction

“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize.”
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Nigeria, the fifth of six children, to Igbo parents. She left for the United States at the age of 19, and by the time she was 21, she had published a play, For Love of Biafra, and a collection of poems, Decisions. She eventually earned master’s degrees in creative writing, from Johns Hopkins University, and in African studies, from Yale University.

Adichie writes on her website, “I didn’t ever consciously decide to pursue writing. I’ve been writing since I was old enough to spell, and just sitting down and writing made me feel incredibly fulfilled.”

Adichie writes about ethnicity and its importance, both in Africa and in the United States; her stories and novels also detail the hardships endured by first-generation immigrants. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, treats themes of family, religion, politics and tolerance. Her second book, Half of a Yellow Sun, takes place before and during the Biafran war and deals with questions of gender, race and class.

Her work has won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. It has been translated into thirty-one languages. Adichie writes, “I just write. I have to write. I like to say that I didn’t choose writing, writing chose me. This may sound slightly mythical, but I sometimes feel as if my writing is something bigger than I am.”

In “The Thing Around Your Neck,” the title piece of Adichie’s short story collection published in 2009, a young woman emigrates from Nigeria to the United States, where she confronts ethnic and class stereotypes (others’ and her own) and struggles to find room for both her family/cultural ties and the new relationships and