CELEBRITY
Zadie Smith’s lust for life.
ZADIE SMITH has an almost unsettling lack of pretense. As she sits down across from me at Lafayette in Manhattan’s NoHo (her choice; she lives nearby), there’s no attempt at small talk, no forced laughter just to fill space. She’s reserved—blunt, even. We’re here to talk about her new essay collection, Feel Free, but as for doing press interviews, she says, “No offence; I don’t think anyone relishes it.”
What’s disconcerting about this is that to read Smith’s writing is to feel not only that you know her but also that she knows you. It’s easy to confuse her with the best friend you haven’t yet met. She doesn’t use social media, yet Instagram abounds with more than 21,000 posts hashtagged #zadiesmith by her ardent fans: reposts of glamorous photo shoots, shots of her novels nestled beside mugs of coffee. Mention Smith’s name in a group conversation and at least one person—often young, usually female—will reverently breathe a variation of “I love her.”
Smith has been busy since she first burst onto the literary scene in 2000 at the age of 24 with her debut novel, White Teeth. Set in the racially diverse North London neighbourhood in which she grew up, it earned her titles like “the face of multicultural Britain.” Then came The Autograph Man in 2002, On Beauty in 2005, NW in 2012 and Swing Time in 2016.
For the past 10 years, Smith has been living in New York as a self-described “immigrant with a green card,” and while her fiction remains primarily concerned with London life, in her essays—originally published in the likes of The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker— she has become an essential recorder and investigator of American life and culture. In particular, “a lot of my subjects are black artists,” she says. “It’s about inserting myself and feeling this commonality in the black artistic community in America.” The day before our meeting, she was awarded the City College of New York’s Langston Hughes h
Medal, joining such luminaries as Maya Angelou and James Baldwin.
As suggested by the new collection’s title, the essays of Feel Free are deliciously unhampered and far-reaching. A profile of comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (“Brother From Another Mother”) abuts musings on Joni Mitchell and questions of taste (“Some Notes on Attunement”), and there is the “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons” and a piece called “On Optimism and Despair.” “Meet Justin Bieber!” turns out to be about identity, Socrates, a German-Jewish philosopher and, yes, the Biebs himself, as he’s never been considered before. Blending the so-called high and low, Smith renders lofty subjects accessible and elevates pop culture to the divine. She is equally comfortable employing personal narrative, literary and artistic criticism, thoughtful interrogations on race and class and, often, chucklealoud humour: She writes of skim-reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “leaping over paragraphs in search of genitals.”
When we meet, Smith is wearing a long grey Acne Studios coat and a grey turtleneck. Her hair is swathed in a signature head wrap (red, like her lipstick), and she drops a pair of sunglasses on the table (red too). She knows that her straightforward nature can be jarring: It got her into trouble during the first writing workshop she taught at New York University, she says, back in 2010. She’d never taken a workshop herself, so when she was told that students would submit work and she would critique it, she figured it would be most informative to do so in front of the entire class. One student cried.
And yet, as we talk, she cracks droll jokes and makes offhand, unnervingly-spot-on observations about my own psyche. Her reticent demeanour doesn’t inhibit her from being engaged and engaging—she simply hasn’t the bandwidth to put on an act. She’s busy. She’s on a year-long sabbatical from her teaching job at NYU, but she still has books to read and write—not to mention a seven-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son (who, this week, gave her a case of pink eye), friends (among them Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Lena Dunham) and family (who are still based in London). “I really am such a greedy person for life,” she says. “I don’t have time to waste pretending to be alive.” And as far as being an object of worship goes, “I can’t take seriously any relationship apart from the personal,” she says. “All love of strangers is not real to me.”
Born Sadie Smith in 1975 (she switched to Zadie at the age of 14), she grew up on a public-housing estate in northwest London with her Jamaican-born mother, Yvonne Bailey, her British father, Harvey Smith, and her two younger brothers, Luke and Ben. The local library provided an escape from her parents’ arguing (they divorced when Smith was a teen), as did her primary school, a cultural melting pot that Smith describes as “a third black, a third South Asian” plus the offspring of middle-class “socialist white people.” In
“I REALLY AM SUCH A GREEDY PERSON FOR LIFE. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO WASTE PRETENDING TO BE ALIVE.”
Feel Free, Smith includes an appeal for the apparently bygone era of embracing difference in “Fences: A Brexit Diary.”
Smith studied literature at King’s College, Cambridge—in those days, attendance was free. While there, she wrote a few music reviews and a little short fiction, but it wasn’t until the end of her final year that she began writing what would become White Teeth. When she graduated, a publisher and Cambridge alum called, asking what she was working on. Smith handed over the unfinished manuscript and landed a two-book deal for a rumoured $450,000.
It was also at Cambridge that Smith met her now husband, Northern Irish poet Nick Laird. Close readers might catch a sweet nod to him in White Teeth, when one character describes to another “all the good-lookin’ men, all the rides like your man Nicky Laird.” Smith says they were just “best friends” at the time and wouldn’t start dating for another few years, but, she adds, “I guess I was trying to flirt with him, even then.” Now the pair are working on adapting Swing Time for television. Her dream cast includes Ruth Negga and Gugu MbathaRaw, but “every novelist in New York has a TV show,” she says. “I’m not going to get excited.”
In an era pervaded by hot takes and Twitter wars, Smith rarely toes the line when it comes to the outrage du jour. She is not irritated, for example, by questions about her children or marriage, though she was at one time. “I internalized all things female as being in some way passive or lesser. You only have to have children to realize that that really is the biggest con the world has ever projected.”
What does outrage her is “the structural economic inequality of black lives.” But even in discussions of race and appropriation, her positions can be surprising. In her essay “Getting In and Out,” Smith argues against a viral open letter calling for the removal and destruction of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, which depicts the famous 1955 funeral photograph of 14- year- old Emmett Till and was shown at the Whitney Biennial—a contemporary-American-art exhibition—in 2017. In an examination that touches on arguments both personal and rational, Smith writes, “I realized I resent the implication that black pain is so raw and so unprocessed— and black art practice so vulnerable and invisible—that a single painting by a white woman can radically influence it one way or another.”
For Smith, writing essays is a way of working through big questions, but writing fiction is a kind of creative voyeurism. “I get to be a young, handsome black man, climb into his skin and walk around,” she says. “It’s very freeing.” She has also been a Jewish-Chinese Londoner ( The Autograph Man), a biracial British assistant to a white Australian pop star ( Swing Time) and an adulterous white American father ( White Teeth, On Beauty). Now, she’s working on a novel about a real-life British highwayman in the late 1800s.
Smith has said before that she doesn’t particularly like the process of writing, that she is often disappointed by the result. And yet she persists. Before I can ask her why, Smith answers the question herself with the same circuitous eloquence she employs in her essays: “There is a feeling in many people of transcendence,” she says. Before meeting me, for example, she went for a run by the Hudson River, the sun in her eyes and Kanye West’s gospel song “Ultralight Beam” in her ears. That, she says, is one kind of transcendence. There’s also organized religion: Islam, Christianity, Judaism. Smith has read the texts of all three faiths and thinks of them as compelling philosophies of life. “I suppose if I thought of a metaphysical element,” she says, “the ‘good’ to me is basically what people mean by God: the existence of, the idea of, good. I think of these philosophies as an enormous lake feeding into this thing called the Good. Literature is also a tributary, a smaller one, in this lake. To participate in it is to be close to God.” n Zadie Smith’s latest collection of essays is out now.