A few months into the year my friend O. texts me: “2025 has been hard for men and love,” after we’d both been rejected by men who wanted little more than to sleep with us. Had our temporary male lovers been characters in Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest book, they would have been cast as “thieves of time,” a phrase that Zikora, a Nigerian American lawyer and one of the four protagonists in the novel, invents for her past lovers. One guy secretly married someone else while still sleeping with her. Another man—in a jaw-dropping move of male immaturity—loved her until she became pregnant. He never called back, not even when she sent him a photo of their newborn. While reading Dream Count, I texted my close female friends—some were single, a handful were in love, but each of them carried emotional baggage that made them relate to Zikora’s sense of betrayal. But often, in the midst of heartbreak, we forget to ask: Who is betraying whom? Are we not betraying ourselves by wasting time with someone whose desires do not match ours?

 The women in Dream Count ask each other the same question after every breakup: What do you really want? It’s a question that has been entertaining popular culture and theory for so long—from Sex and the City to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism—that it might be time for us to reconsider the premise of the question, rather than attempt to answer it. Two challenges face us at the outset. First, can we talk about a generalizable “we” of female desire (insofar as women, like all gender categories, is a socially constructed group whose socialization has nonetheless had material consequences)? A key sensation of reading Adichie’s work is the ability to recognize oneself in it. Her stories emerge from particular experiences and yet they are filled with humorous observations that speak to a near universality. It is this capacity of hers that made Half of a Yellow Sun not only a novel about women’s suffering during the Biafra war, but also a broader story about how we behave and relate to one another. Like her previous novels, Dream Count offers insight that most cisgender straight women may relate to through their own suffering. Yet others may feel excluded from the narrative, or from Adichie herself, who has been accused of expressing transphobic sentiments.

The second challenge that emerges from Dream Count is that, even if we can come closer to knowing what “we” want, can we be sure that our desire won’t hurt us? As the critic Gillian Rose once asked in her book Love Work: “Is feminism able to credit that it may be better, sometimes, not to get what you want?” Dream Count addresses this question indirectly by demonstrating how women sometimes act in bad faith towards themselves and each other in the pursuit of a heteronormative script of happiness. “Chia, this man is a catch,” a friend tells Chiamaka, a travel writer who, in the first part of Dream Count, dumps the one “good guy” she finds. “There isn’t anything better out there,” the friend assures her. He is stable and generous in his love for her, but they have little to talk about outside the bedroom. After the breakup, the friend scolds Chiamaka and accuses her of lacking gratitude. She promotes an idea that love is scarce, and that time even scarcer, which conditions us to be happy for what we’ve got. Chiamaka challenges this idea by dreaming of more. 

We meet Chiamaka at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, alone in her too-big house in Maryland. She is used to traveling lavishly around the globe and writing about her observations. Forced into stillness and reflection, she begins to write a “dream count,” as she calls it, listing her past loves. This game structures the novel’s plot and allows Adichie to construct some memorable portrayals of contemporary masculinity. For example, Chiamaka describes Luuk, a white Dutch man she dated, as “a talker who didn’t need a listener.” His self-centered chatter bored her, yet despite his shortcomings (his family was racist), she stayed with him for a year. She “happily” faked orgasms with him because at least he tried. This is in contrast to her previous lover, an Black American academic, whose ego pushes her own needs to the very margins of their relationship. Just leave him already! I scream at the pages. The professor-boyfriend eventually breaks up with her after she orders a mimosa in Paris, a drink he finds beneath his cultural tastes. Afterwards, she wonders how she wasted years of her life being belittled by this man.

After Beyoncé sampled Adichie’s TED Talk on “Flawless,” the author responded to her newfound stardom with a clarification. She did not claim Beyoncé’s type of feminism because “it is the kind  that gives quite a lot of space to the necessity of men … did he hurt me, do I forgive him, did he put a ring on my finger?” But in Dream Count, Adichie leaves these questions of “ideology” aside to give space for, as she describes in her author’s note, “human complexity.” Yet men have little to say in this novel. Their complexity is delivered through the perspective of women who are smarter, prettier, more caring, and often wealthier than them. Despite their status, these women put up with a lot of hurt from those men and taking revenge on men’s emotional and physical violence drives the story. When women do talk back to the men, whether by mocking male sexuality on blogs or suing rapists in court, it is mostly motivated by what the man did and speculates about why he did it (“was he cursed?” they wonder about Zikora’s runaway; “was it a trauma-response?” Adichie suggests in her own reading). These women continue to brood over what “he” really wants, and what he will do next to get it.

As she lists her failed relationships, it becomes clear that Chiamaka yearns to be “truly known.” It is not enough to be loved by someone—that person must also understand her inner thoughts and desires. That this might be an impossible task is one of the key lessons of Adichie’s novel.

“If you live your life and die without one person fully knowing you, then have you ever lived?” ponders Chia.

“Well, I know you fully,” Omelogor, Chiamaka’s tough-mouthed cousin, replies.

“It has to be romantic.”

“Why?”

“It just has to be.”

“Your thesis is falling apart,” Omelogor concludes, triumphantly; “you’re not looking to be known on principle.”

Omelogor does not fall for the romanticism of a dream count, nor does she have a desire to be known. She castrates men in bed and in business. “You want somebody to study you and cram you like a textbook?” she asks her cousin. Omelogor’s approach to dating is seemingly driven by lust rather than longing—at least on the surface of things. As we read on, we begin to speculate that her “two weeks” affairs are her coping mechanism for a deeper lack.

As a banker who secretly steals from rich men to give to struggling women, Omelogor is the novel’s only expressed feminist. She is also its only queer character. Omelogor is taken with Hauwa, a married but bisexually adventurous woman whom she befriends in Abuja. Hauwa makes Omelogor blush with a shame that she did not know to inhabit, in stark contrast to the series of Big Men whom she humiliates in bed and who leave nothing unsaid. A suggestive plot unfolds between the two women, but is never explored, leaving us to wonder what could have been. Is Omelogor not betraying herself by refusing to explore her desire for this woman? It is unclear whether Adichie chooses to keep Omelogor in the closet to emphasize how limited we are in knowing and achieving our desires, or whether it demonstrates, rather, Adichie’s own limitations in advancing a queer plot.

Not that queer desire saves us from the riddle of love. A woman can fall in love with another woman and still not want the same thing. “But the key difference between straight culture and queer culture in this regard,” writes Jane Ward in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, “is that the latter does not attribute these destructive behaviors to a romantic story about a natural and inescapable gender binary.” Whereas queer relations leave a certain power dynamic up to play and do not attribute destructive behaviors to already-given gender positions, straight people are scripted into these structural positions, relationally and in bed, where male ejaculation often signals an inevitable end to the party. Not exploring this difference is perhaps where Adichie’s straight-sex gaze becomes a narrative obstacle.

Omelogor worries about straight people, and especially about straight men. She leaves her corrupt banking job to pursue a master’s thesis about pornography, which she considers the root of the problem of toxic masculinity. On her blog, “For Men Only,” Omelogor tells straight men that their relationship to sex is twisted because they learned sex from pornography and transferred it ready-made to their intimate relations. It is a male gay friend who first introduces her to porn, which she has (to his and our surprise) never watched on her own. She watches now with disgust and detachment as women moan from being choked and slapped.

Omelogor is right to question the representation of female desire in straight porn, directed as it is for the male gaze. But the problem with her thesis is that women watch porn too. When women watch straight porn, and assuming we have done so for as long as men have, do we not learn just as much about sex from it as men do? Are women somehow better equipped to distinguish between fantasy and desire, such that we can be aroused by a porn scene but know not to imitate it in our own sex lives? After all, “love and hate converge in erotic desire,” as Anne Carson has observed. Sometimes, we want what hurts, but do we ever desire what consistently hurts us?

While we continue to wonder about what the women in Dream Count really want, their aunts prescribe desires onto them. “I am praying for you,” an aunt tells Chiamaka. As she ages, her family lowers their expectations of whom she should marry. By her mid-thirties, “a Christian was fine, of any denomination; a Nigerian of any ethnicity; or an African; or just a Black man; or, well, a man.” When Chiamaka enters her forties, the edges of their demand dissolve further; “marriage had become secondary. Have a child, by whatever means.”

In the same vein, Omelogor receives a call from a distant aunt, demanding her to adopt a child. She politely rejects the request, but her words are lost on this aunt who pushes on with a hurtful claim that Omelogor’s life is empty. Her judgment lingers and soon enough, Omelogor begins to browse on adoption sites for something that she did not want or need, had not even considered, prior to this unsolicited phone call. I recognize this patriarchal manipulation of female desire in my own family dynamic, where being in a relationship—any relationship at all, even if unhappy—seems preferable to being single and childless.

Adichie wrote Dream Count after her mother died in 2021, and much like the aunt figure, the dominant mother looms over every daughter in the novel. She shapes the daughter’s desires and the daughter either mimics her maternal affection or yearns for it. When Zikora gives birth, her mother sits like a statue by her hospital bed, observing her daughter scream in pain without reaching out to offer consoling touch or words of care. It is tempting in this scene to draw a straight line between Zikora’s acute insecurity in her relationships and her seemingly abject mother. Yet Adichie is wiser than that and twists the perspective, making Zikora, and us, recognize her mother in the weeks that follow her childbirth as the only consistent presence in her life. “I’m not going anywhere,” her mother assures her at one point.

In Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, the writer Jacqueline Rose argues that we blame the mother for conflicts in our lives, large and small, and at the same time burden our mothers with the responsibility to solve this conflict. But in another mother-daughter relationship, between Binta and Kadiatou, it is the daughter who seems burdened by the mother and has little space to develop her own character. Their relationship appears underexplored compared to the other characters; perhaps because it unfolds from a story we already know, rather than from Adichie’s imagination. Kadiatou is Chiamaka’s beloved house maid and Adichie’s fictionalized version of the hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo, whom the French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn raped in New York in 2011. Diallo was slut-shamed by the media and during the criminal investigations, which never delivered her justice. In writing this story, Adichie declares in her opening note, the novelist is “righting the wrongs of the past” and performing “a gesture of returned dignity.” How does this address the central thesis about women’s desires?

Whereas Omelogor, Zikora, and Chiamaka all contradict themselves and make dubious decisions, Kadiatou is presented as an angel whose desires are pure and simple. As a result, her character is less known to us than the other women. Adichie considers Kadiatou’s character a “symbol” of women facing injustice, and of course she is that, but a novel needs complex anti-heroes, not symbols to hang on the wall.

If Adichie’s mother had been alive to read Kadiatou’s story, Adichie reckons that she would have recognized “a fellow woman” in it, just as we as readers recognize ourselves across the different characters. Yet Kadiatou is marked out from this female chorus of mutual dreaming. Her chapter serves a narrative purpose in gluing together the other women around her cause, but in so doing it marks a contrast to their stories—hers is not part of the dream count. Why is that? Is Adichie suggesting that class conditions allow us to dream in certain ways and not in others?

“You must dream of something,” Zikora challenges Kadiatou, who then allows herself to dream a little, yet her dreams remain rational and material. She wants to start a small business and see her daughter thrive. Her achievable dreams are so unlike Chiamaka’s repeated yearning to be “fully known” through a closeness that never seems to materialize. This distinction also suggests that Chiamuka can’t have what she wants, because she doesn’t know herself. But then again, who does?