The Thing Around Your Neck

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.

riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry ruled are killing one another.

Speaking of death in English has always had, for me, a disquieting finality.

do not go to church; I stopped going after Ebere first visited, because I was no longer uncertain. It is our diffidence about the afterlife that leads us to religion.

American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one’s child were the exception rather than the rule.

You did not know that people could simply choose not to go to school, that people could dictate to life. You were used to accepting what life gave, writing down what life dictated.

“Have faith” was like saying be tall and shapely. She wanted to be tall and shapely but of course she was not;