Don’t Call It a Comeback

In the 12 years since releasing her best-selling novel Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published prolifically but not primarily as a writer of literary fiction. Instead, she has ventured into other forms: memoir, children’s literature, feminist manifesto, a public lecture on free speech. When Beyoncé sampled Adichie’s TedX Talk “We Should All Be Feminists” Adichie transformed from an acclaimed postcolonial novelist into a pop-public intellectual. Few artists’ work can survive such notoriety—see F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few famous writers whose later work suffered; celebrity is good for sales and frequently bad for art.