Lifestyle
Uzo Aduba thanks her mom: 'I didn't know how many prayers she sent up to heaven for me'
Aduba dedicates her new memoir to her mother, Nonyem Aduba. “My self-talk, the way that I motivate myself into pursuing this business … is built out of language that my mother had given me,” Aduba says.
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
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Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Roughly translated, actor Uzo Aduba’s first name — Uzoamaka — means “the road is good” in Igbo. But the Emmy Award-winning Orange Is the New Black actor says the essence of her name runs deeper: “It really means the journey was worth it.”
Aduba explains: Imagine planning to meet up at a friend’s house at 3:00 p.m., but it’s raining and you have a flat tire, and then there’s traffic and you run out of gas. So you wind up getting there almost two hours late. But as you arrive, the sun comes out. When the host asks how the trip was, you respond: “It was hard, but it’s worth it because I’m here now with you,” Aduba says. “Uzoamaka, the journey was worth it.’”
In her new memoir, The Road Is Good, Aduba recounts the winding path of her own life story. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Aduba grew up in the predominantly white suburb of Medfield, Mass.
“My mom used to do green, white, green beads for my sister and I in representation of the Nigerian flag,” Aduba says. “I thought those beads were great, and there would always be someone at school who had something to say about the beads in the hair.”
Whether it was comments about her hair or, in one case, being called the n-word, Aduba didn’t tell her parents what she faced at school because she didn’t want to trouble them. “I remember all of the stuff [my parents] had fought through and fought for,” she says. “And I didn’t want them to have to start fighting again.”
Aduba dedicates the memoir to her mother, Nonyem Aduba, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2020. “I knew that I was going to include her story [in the memoir] because so many of the tenets with which I live and motivators that display themselves in me come directly from her,” Aduba says. “She poured so heavily into my cup. My cup is ultimately filled with her.”
Aduba currently stars in the coming-of-age film, The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat.
Interview highlights
The Road is Good
Penguin Random House
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Penguin Random House
On the lessons she picked up from her mother
My self-talk, the way that I motivate myself into pursuing this business and going to audition after audition, the way I prepare for it, is built out of language that my mother had given me and my siblings since we were children. It’s her saying constantly to us, “I’ve never heard of nothing coming from hard work.” … And when we were kids, you hear that you’re like, “OK, She keeps saying that.” But then you grow up and you start to see life and you realize, No. 1, she’s living that. You see her through her own conduct, working hard and breeding results. Whether that’s keeping a roof over the head of five kids and bellies full, whether that’s having moved to this country and achieving not one but two masters in social work. Whether that is showing up and shuttling us to whichever activity that we needed to be at and then coming home after a long day’s work and cooking and getting everything ready to check homework, she worked hard and saw the impacts of that hard work. And I know that’s how I talk to myself. I say that expression even still.
On the journals her mother left behind
I was just looking at one yesterday I’ve not read, because I haven’t read them all. And I just opened a page and one of them was like, page 252. I’ve seen another one that’s, like, 400 [pages]. And she writes small. And then sometimes if she’s running out of pages, she takes a ruler and adds, splits the lines and then writes in there, so they’re really, really, really, really, really dense. And if she didn’t have her journal with her because she was traveling, there’s a paper clip held to the page of the entry because she wrote on a piece of paper that day’s event and then paper clipped it, so it’s sequential.
I’m still on the first one, which is like 500, 400 and something pages long. … It took me a minute to start. When I read the first page, I could feel her breath come back into her lungs and she was alive again, which felt very woo-woo intense.
On learning how much her mother prayed for her
Before I started working in film and television, I didn’t know how many prayers she sent up to heaven for me to have my dreams come true. She was just praying for, like, peace of mind. She was praying for my stability. … I didn’t know how much she worried for me, you know, always just that I would be OK.
And that’s true for my other siblings. She loved us so much. … I did not have a good mother. I did not have a great mother. I had an excellent mother. She took that pact, that initiation into that sacred circle so seriously, and it was everything to her to be our mother. And I am just so proud to be the daughter of Nonyem Aduba.
On when she realized she was different from the other kids in her town
I think it first started with my hair. My first real core memory is being in the third grade. And we had a neighbor who had really long brown hair, this girl down the street. And I can remember one day we were all playing in front of our house and I don’t know if we braided her hair, and then she decided to braid mine. I don’t know. But I just know she somehow was now getting ready to braid my hair. And she went to put her hands in my hair and she said, “Ewww, your hair is so greasy.” And there was grease in it because we’re laying down the front [for a ponytail] … And it had never occurred to me. To even attach the word “ewww” to it. … And from that I was also aware that it was different and I had never even thought of it as being different.
On her mom working at McDonalds when money was tight
We were in this community that they were scraping to keep us in and give us everything that they could and the American dream. … She was there because she’s trying to pay the bills. She wasn’t there for laughs, she was there to support her family. But me as a kid, I would love when we would go to the McDonald’s … right up the road, and we would go through the drive-thru and she would come and meet us there. And I thought it was the coolest thing.
And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with working at McDonald’s. It’s a job you can be proud of and take pride in. My mom was working there and she would come and we’d get Happy Meals. And because she was getting a discount, we would get so many more things than we would ever get [before]. …
I have a fond spot in my heart for McDonald’s because that helped carry our family through some tough times. … [My mom] was so fiercely protective of her family and would do anything — and I do mean anything — for us. … [She] was not ever too proud to do any job, and didn’t think she was above anything — despite knowing she had graduated with distinction with two masters degrees. She was not too proud to do what she needed to do.
Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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