Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE's work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker and Granta. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize; Americanah, which won the NBCC Award and was a New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; and the essay We Should All Be Feminists. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

‘Take note world. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells you to listen, you listen’ Stylist‘Dear Ijeawele reminds us that, in the history of feminist writing, it is often the personal and epistolary voice that carries the political story most powerfully – For me, the most powerful sentence in the book is its simplest, and comes in only the third paragraph. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie urges Ijeawele to remember to transmit to her daughter “the solid unbending belief that you start off with … Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not ‘if only’. Not ‘as long as’. I matter equally. Full stop.”..there is no doubt that if we raised all of our daughters to believe completely that they “matter equally”, to trust what they feel and think and to worry less about how they look and come across, we would soon find new ways to challenge the multiple injustices and indignities that still limit, and even wreck, so many women’s lives’ New StatesmanPraise for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:‘The book I'd press into the hands of girls and boys, as an inspiration for a future "world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves"’ Books of the Year, Independent‘A writer with a great deal to say’ The Times'Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers’ Chinua Achebe‘Adiche [has] virtuosity, boundless empathy and searing social acuity’ Dave Eggers