I arrive early to meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian-American writer, feminist, author of Americanah. Her home, just outside Baltimore, looks Scandinavian somehow amid the snow crust and woodland. Adichie is mid-photoshoot, but the stylist shows me through to the kitchen, telling me to help myself to roast chicken and rice. At a desk in the corner, Adichie’s nine-year-old daughter is wearing headphones and absorbed in what looks like homework. In the middle of the room, watched over by a nanny, are two smiling, 10-month-old boys, one sitting in an activity centre, shrieking with joy, the other gnawing a toy. I’d read a lot about Adichie’s life in the last few years: the sudden death of her father, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, in 2020, the second shock of her mother’s death months later in 2021. I’d heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2023 discussing how motherhood is a glorious gift that comes at a cost: “I could probably have written two novels had I not had my child.” Nowhere had I heard that she’d had twins.

“You’ve met my babies,” Adichie laughs when she appears in a vibrant orange dress. She sits to remove the hair extensions she has worn for the shoot. “I want to protect my children. I’m OK with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them.” Later, she tells me that for a long time people didn’t know she had a husband, either – she married Ivara Esege, a hospital physician, in 2009. “So, here’s the thing, Nigerians are … ” Nosy? “They want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it.”

There is no reason we should know everything about the lives of our public intellectuals, but I’m mildly surprised that someone as famous as Adichie has managed to keep two whole children quiet. It’s no mean feat that while navigating the bombshell that babies bring to any life, she is publishing her fourth novel, Dream Count – “at the grand old age of 47” (she checks this on her phone because, “I always forget how old I am. I’m not even joking”) – after a fiction hiatus of more than 10 years.

Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, published when she was 26 and now a school set text, won her the best first book Commonwealth writers’ prize in 2005. A year later, she published Half of a Yellow Sun, set in the Biafran war, which won numerous awards including the Orange prize (now known as the Women’s prize for fiction). It was her passionate advocacy for women that brought her to the mainstream: We Should All be Feminists, her 2012 Tedx Talk, was sampled by Beyoncé in Flawless, and the words stamped on a T-shirt by Dior.

A writer friend of hers tells me that after the publication of Americanah in 2013, he visited her in Lagos and asked his driver how known she was in her country. The driver thought for a minute, then replied: “Number seven.” As in: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the seventh most famous person in Nigeria. She laughs when I relay this. “I wonder what he would say now, that driver. I’m actually quite pleased that I got up to seven, not being a musician.”

Dream Count features the interwoven stories of four women, written in Adichie’s vivid, bracing, highly entertaining style. Like Americanah, it is set in the US and Nigeria, and covers the immigrant experience, the sometimes tense dialogue between Africans and African Americans, the Americanisation of language and thought; as well as mother-daughter relationships, friendship, the pressure on women to marry and have children, and – aptly – late motherhood.

“I didn’t want to leave such a long gap between novels,” she says, as we settle in a quieter room. “When I got pregnant [with her daughter], something just happened. I had a number of years in which I was almost existentially frightened that I wouldn’t write again. It was unbearable.

“There are expressions like ‘writer’s block’ I don’t like to use because I’m superstitious. But I had many years in which I felt cast out from my creative self, cast out from the part of me that imagines and creates; I just could not reach it. I could write nonfiction, that was fine. But that’s not what my heart wanted.”

When her father died of kidney failure, she was in her fiction-not-being-available-to-me phase, but as she struggled for the language to write Notes on Grief (2021), she noticed that something had loosened. There was a willingness to let go, she says, to surrender control; a feeling similar to the way she’d felt writing fiction. She wasn’t doing anything different – not physically, at least. She was still “scrunched up” with her laptop on her ottoman in the corner of her bedroom. If anything was different, it was how much wiser she felt; how “hyper-aware of how fleeting life is. It makes you think about your own mortality, but also, ‘What do I care about? What matters?’”

Initially, she thought she didn’t possess the words to write about her mother. When she tried it head-on, “there was nothing”. So she started Dream Count, “and only when I was almost done did I realise, my God, it’s about my mother. It wasn’t intentional. I’m happy that it’s not a sad book. She wouldn’t want a sad book dedicated to her.”

Adichie speaks with a swinging, almost tidal rhythm to her sentences. Her disapproval, she registers with a vibrating “hmm”. Elsewhere, her voice surrenders wholly to emotion: deepening and broadening when sombre; silky in persuasion; erupting when amused. For instance, spying the photographer and his assistant tiptoeing out of her house, she breaks off to demand: “What? You did not have anything to eat? Come back. As an African, I am offended.” Then she dips into cajoling: “You’ll have to come back, no? Have some chicken. Go on. Please.” Obedient, they retrace their steps to the kitchen.

The book is set partly in lockdown, which Adichie saw as a time of accounting and nostalgia for lost selves. Her primary character is Chiamaka (Chia), a travel writer and dreamer, reflecting on her dead-end relationships. Chia is scolded by an aunt for leaving it dangerously late to have children: “Your only option now is IVF,” the aunt tells her. “I know somebody that just had twins at 45. But you have to hurry up if you want to use your own eggs.” Although Chia’s friends tease her about the “body count” of exes who have wasted her time – and years of peak fertility – the “dream count” of the title refers to all missed opportunities, Adichie says. “It’s that idea of a woman wanting a life on her own terms, and the things that get in the way of that.”

Incubating for some time at the back of her mind was the idea that she should write more about the “gritty reality” of women’s bodies and the obstacles to women’s lives caused by gynaecology. She saw it as demystifying the experience of, say, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Or fibroids. Or the violence of the birthing experience. “There’s a lot that has to do with having a female body that isn’t much talked about,” she says, “and it’s consequential for women’s lives.” For a long time, she was reluctant to discuss these, fearing she – a renowned feminist – would fuel a tendency to treat things such as PMS as a joke. “Code for a woman being unreasonably irritable,” she says, darkly. But in addition to the “remarkably unpleasant experience” of having surgery for “a very big fibroid”, hormonal issues have plagued her entire life.

“If one is writing honestly about women’s lives, it seems self-evident that we have to talk about these issues in a very open way, because they affect everything. They affect how well a woman does. They affect your emotional wellbeing. They get in the way of your dreams. If you’re a woman whose dream is to have a family, for example, fibroids can get in the way.” She laughs that she is not trying to raise awareness in an NHS public service announcement sort of way, but because “I was trying to write about women’s lives in a way that feels truthful and wholesome and full for me”.

In a different way, arguments that raged around identity and women’s biology put Adichie in the headlines in 2017. In an interview with Channel 4 News to highlight the treatment of women, she was asked whether a transgender woman was “any less of a real woman”. She replied, “a trans woman is a trans woman”. She went on: “I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences. It’s not about how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis. It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”

In the consequent backlash, Adichie wrote a blogpost expressing horror at the accusations of transphobia and reiterating her support for trans rights. But her desire for openness and frank debate (including with Zoe Williams of this paper, who interviewed her after her Reith Lecture on freedom of speech in 2022) put her at odds with those whose bottom line is: no debate.

There is no doubt her career was damaged. Interviews, prizes and talks were cancelled. And she cancelled interviews, too – those that suggested she might want to take the opportunity to apologise. It seemed for a while as if there were only two headlines available: “Chimamanda apologises” or “Chimamanda refuses to apologise”. “It’s a cannibalistic ethos,” she told her friend the writer Dave Eggers about sections of the progressive left at the time. “It swiftly, gleefully, brutally eats its own. There is such a quick assumption of ill will and an increasing sanctimony and humourlessness that can often seem inhumane.”

Time concertinaed, the circus refused to move on. I suggest the emotional toll must have been enormous. Adichie will not talk about it. Did it hamper her creatively? She refuses to say. The closest she comes to the subject is later: “What do I want to say about cancel culture? Cancel culture is bad. We should stop it. End of story.”

I ask instead about Donald Trump, about whom she has spoken and written before. She has said that Trump was as much America as Barack Obama, and that given the history of America, it was not surprising that he was popular: people felt threatened by diversity, by women having more power. Will she talk me through the highs and lows she felt during the election campaign? She opens her mouth to speak, but words quite literally fail her. She tries to rally. “In some ways, I feel the necessity of bearing witness, so … ” She pauses, then emits a sigh of defeat. “I can’t. Part of the reason I don’t want to talk about Trump is that he takes up too much space. This is what being a megalomaniac is about: taking up all the space. Sometimes, the best form of resistance is ignoring someone. More ignoring should have happened during the first term. Because even the mean girl teenager knows the best thing is not actually to say mean things to the other girl; it’s to ignore her.”

I ask if she thinks democracy is in danger. From the age of about 10, she says, she had a “dark fascination” with the Nazis – “I don’t know what that says about my mental wellbeing” – and that for years she would watch films and read books and wonder in disbelief, how people could have been so swept up in such obvious hate. “Now, I see why. Sometimes it takes very little. So, do I think democracy is dead? No. Do I think it’s in serious trouble? Yes. Am I surprised? Yes. I’m surprised at how willing people are to discard integrity in the name of some kind of cult. And I think it is a cult. Cult-like loyalty.” She points to the numbers who “know better” but nonetheless stand there nodding as Trump promotes his unqualified lieutenants into positions of immense power and responsibility. “They are saying things that you know they don’t believe. It’s incredible.

“If I ever became president of a country – it sounds crazy – I think it’s possible to work slowly towards a place that is more like a utopia. It’s possible with good leadership. I’m not even like a rabid anti-capitalist, because I’m an Igbo woman. My people are traders. But the kind of capitalism we have now, we don’t need to have. What if we actually employed people, paid them well, thought about their healthcare? Gave people four-day weeks, because we know that human beings thrive better when they’re well rested?”

One thing she struggles with in her daily life is finding balance amid the rapid-fire breaking news (her phone pings on cue). She remembers Trump’s first term, how they lurched from day to day, aghast: “Oh, my God, what’s happened now?” How destructive it was to creative thought. There has to be a happy medium, she says, between blanking it completely and the necessary outrage over situations such as, “They’re sending immigration officers to public schools in Virginia. In America! It’s madness.” She adds: “America has to survive. I mean, it’d better.”

* * *

Adichie is eating grapes, cheese and crackers. Her daughter comes in to nuzzle her and pinch some food. I ask what her average day looks like, and Adichie says she gets up at 6am, goes for a two-mile run, then comes back and does 30 minutes of yoga. She throws me a teasing grin. But seriously, does she go to the gym? “Gym? That’s not for me, darling.” But as she can’t just sit and watch TV without, say, reading at the same time, what she will do is run on the treadmill while viewing a French or Scandi crime thriller with subtitles. She doesn’t like American TV. “People wake up with a full face of makeup.” Also, the sex is unrealistic. “People sweeping plates off across the table dramatically or hanging off the wall in a way that you think, ‘That looks very uncomfortable.’”

Her writing does not follow a fixed routine. When it’s going well, it is – aside from being with the kids – all she wants to do. “There’s not a lot of patience for ordinary life. I cannot wait to get back to writing. Sometimes I don’t want to sleep because I’m terrified that if I wake up, I will have lost the flow.” So she writes in her room, her husband tiptoeing around her, in the public library and large chunks at her house in Lagos, where the family spend the school holidays. She is lucky to have help, she adds, especially in Lagos where staff leave her food outside her door, “because, God forbid, they’d knock and disturb my flow”.

Writing fiction is when she is happiest. “You should talk to my husband: he would say, ‘She becomes a different person.’ It’s like a high. I don’t do drugs, but I imagine that it is that absolute high. I’m struck by how much time passes and I don’t realise. Then when I am done – whatever it is, a character that I’ve finally got – the rest of the day is joyful floating. I’m so much fun to be around. And that is not always the case.”

She hears her husband in the kitchen and calls him in – “Dr Esege!” – and then introduces me. “This is the unfortunate man I married. He’s a doctor, so he has a proper job.” She asks him if he has napped this afternoon and he replies, “I had to. Your son.” “What did my son do?” she replies. In an aside to me she explains that her husband is doing nights with the boys while she deals with the carnival of book publicity. “At 3.30am, he started babbling on and on,” Esege says. “Next thing, he pulled my shirt up to bang my belly. He wouldn’t stop. He was – ” he makes a blowing noise with his lips – “I gave him milk and after about an hour he decided to go back to sleep.” Adichie laughs. “This child will not sleep through the night,” she says. I tell her my son didn’t sleep until he was 10. She waves her palm at me. “I don’t want to hear that, Charlotte, thank you.”

* * *

Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977, the fifth of six children. Her father James was a mathematician, her mother Grace a sociology graduate who was the first female registrar of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Adichie was an outdoorsy kid, playing football and badminton with her two siblings who are closest in age, as well as bookish. She read “whatever I saw”: ­Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Camara Laye, Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa. “I read books that I had no business reading. Histories of the Catholic church, because my father had those. I would have read my father’s statistics books but I didn’t know what the hell they meant.”

She says hers was a life “deeply shaped” by her parents, that their deaths have left her truly changed. In this way, Dream Count is a “departure”: “The person who wrote Purple Hibiscus was young, but still the person who wrote Half of a Yellow Sun. And in some ways also the person who wrote Americanah. But today I am alone. I’m a person who looks at the world differently.” She spoke to her mother the night before she died. “She was fine; she went to mass. The next morning – my father’s birthday – she was gone. If somebody wrote that in a fiction class I was teaching, I’d be like, ‘No, this is too much.’”

The time since has involved much self-reflection. There are “things I regret; positions I took”. Can she name any? She clicks her tongue. “Not even so much the position as the how.” She says she didn’t want to talk about this because she knew she would cry. “My mother and I were very close. But there are many times when I was short with her when I didn’t need to be. There’s a tendency for girls to do that with mothers. I wish we would stop. I want to tell all the girls in the world. I’m not saying, ‘Don’t express frustration.’ I’m just saying, take a step back and think, ‘Am I doing this with grace?’ Was this in her teenage years? “No, older. When I was a teenager, I was equal opportunities horrible: I felt I knew everything, that my parents knew nothing. Sometimes, I would not be patient with her. I would be patient with my father. She saw the world a lot more clearly, as women often do.

“Women go through a lot. I wish I could have done better.” She finds a tissue. “Lord, why did I start saying this?” She smiles. “My mother would not read everything I wrote, but she would tell everybody that it was wonderful.”

She was surprised by what a physical thing grief was, how she reacted in ways she could never have imagined – beating the ground; jumping on the spot. “If you had told me before that I would ever throw myself on the ground for anything, I would have rolled my eyes. I’m still thinking about how little I knew myself. That, I think, is really a big part of the novel: the question of, ‘Do we know ourselves? Do we know other people? Can we?’ I think for me, reasonably, the answer is ‘no’.”

One night in the weeks after her mother’s death, she took to her laptop at 3am and wrote a furious essay entitled It Is Obscene. It condemned “sanctimony” on social media, and saying some young people are “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow”. She cited, but did not name, two writers she had mentored, who later spread “falsehoods”. Traffic jammed the page and her website crashed.

“I was full of rage,” she says now. I ask, given the timing, whether the piece was fuelled by grief. She stalls. “I would never have made this connection. Clearly. We buried my mother in May, I wrote this thing in June. I hate that word ‘triggered’ – but my nephew had just told me that people were saying online, ‘Oh, it’s a good thing [Adichie’s] parents died because she’s transphobic.’”

Adichie says in the utopia of her dreams there will be no social media, no cancel culture. In addition to “every woman being happy and fulfilled” she’d want African Americans and Africans to have a closer connection. “I’m interested in intra-black dialogues and differences. There’s a lot of tension. And it seems to me that it’s often from not knowing enough of one another.”

Many of these ideas are fleshed out in her novel, a manifesto of sorts. One character creates “Robyn Hood grants” [sic] for women to start small businesses by funnelling funds from her financially corrupt Nigerian employer. I ask if this is a fantasy and she says yes. “I’m hoping somebody will be inspired.” Elsewhere, her character writes hilarious “Dear Men, I am on your side” letters on a For Men Only advice site. Adichie says she has been known to take men to one side for a quiet word. When friends confide about their relationships, often she’ll think, “‘Do you know what? I’m going to call that man. We need to set him straight.’ No, really. And I’m not going to lie, I’ve done it a few times. Sometimes my friends are like, ‘Please don’t, because you will make things worse.’”

The section of the book she describes as “very precious” is where she fictionalises the story of Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid from Guinea who alleged in 2011 that former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn had attempted to rape her. The case collapsed at trial after it emerged that Diallo had lied to the authorities and a grand jury about her background. Adichie wrote at the time: “I know women like Nafissatou Diallo. Women who, like me, are West African but, unlike me, do not have the privilege of education or a middle-class upbringing. On television, she was familiar: the skin tone that suggested cheap bleaching creams, the ambitious hair weave, the melodrama … Diallo comes from a place where melodrama is not unusual, and often suggests truth as much as lies.”

The case, she says, never left her imagination. “I was so upset by it. I just felt that it was wrong, not just morally, but in what it said about America. The message it was sending to women claiming they have been sexually abused is: you’d better be perfect. You’d better be utterly sinless. You’d better be an angel if you expect to get justice. It’s not just about that character. It’s also about all the women who, because of the circumstances of their lives, are powerless.” She did not meet Diallo to write her character Kadiatou, but “I did a lot of research.”

I ask how she feels on the cusp of publication, and she says she was glad of a warm email from Zadie Smith, who has read the book. “It was just what I needed. Zadie is a clear thinker, an honest person.” Adichie wrote back, “You made my day.” “But it made more than my day,” she says now.

She continues: “I’m so grateful that I’m back to what I love most – which is writing fiction. But there’s also anxiety. It’s my book, and I’m sending this thing out into the world. I already had sleeping issues. But the night is also when my mind roams. Invariably, it roams to terror. That terror has to be part of the creative process. I’ve always had it. But this time it just feels more finely milled.”

• Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published on 4 March by Fourth Estate at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.