Talk Easy with Sam FragosoNovelist Zadie Smith is one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of her generation. Editor David Remnick has called her “a blessing not merely to The New Yorker but to language itself.” Author George Saunders has praised Smith’s work for its “heart and moral ambition.” I, too, think she’s quite good.
And so today we’re joined by Smith to discuss her prescient historical novel The Fraud (8:20), her instinctive writing process (14:06), and the role of projection in her work (20:30). Then, Zadie reflects on her upbringing in North West London (24:12), the art that influenced her growing up (27:15), and the media circus that followed the publication of her debut novel, White Teeth (33:45).
On the back-half, we discuss her desire to frequently reinvent herself as an artist as a writer (41:55), why she prioritized pleasure after her book On Beauty (45:17), the nuanced politics of her work (49:04), her evolving relationship to humanism (48:15), a striking passage from Intimations (54:00), and what she sees in this next generation of novelists (1:04:45).
This conversation was recorded at Spotify Studios.
Pushkin.
This is talk Easy. I'm standing Fragoso. Welcome to the show.
Today. I'm joined by one of the most beloved authors of her generation, Zadi Smith. She emerged seemingly fully formed at the age of twenty four when she published her debut novel, White Teeth. That was back in two thousand. Since then, she's published five more novels, three essay collections, and a short story collection entitled Grand Union. She's also a regular contributor to both The New Yorker and The New York Review Books, and a former professor at NYU, where she worked in the Creative Writing department for more than a decade. She's now moved back to Northwest London, where she grew up in the nineteen seventies and eighties in a mixed household. Her father English, her mother Jamaican. And it's the complicated, sometimes sordid history between England and Jamaica that's at the heart of her new novel, The Fraud. It's set in Victorian England around the year's long trial of an Australian butcher who claimed to be Sir Roger Titchborne, the missing heir to the Titchborne estate. Although he bore little resemblance to the man he claimed to be. He had one witness willing to testify on his behalf, Andrew Bogel. Bogel grew up enslaved on the Hope plantation in Jamaica, and continued to work for the Titchborne family even after the people on the island were emancipated in eighteen thirty four. But beyond the plot points, this is a book about the fine line between fact and fiction, fraudulence and authenticity. It's about our rocky relationship to history and our desire, especially in twenty twenty three, to distance ourselves from its more unseemly chapters. In the case of the brutality of the plantation system in Jamaica, Smith argues that all that is required of readers of Us is curiosity, an interest in lives lived in obscurity, lives that endured a tremendous amount of pain under total oppression. She had this line in a recent interview I really liked. She said that as a reader, the least that you can do is want to know that history and that is not a black issue. That's not a white issue either, She said, that is a human issue, and so fittingly, what you're about to hear is a very very human conversation. It's thorny, vulnerable, silly at times, deeply imperfect at others, as both Zadie and I try to make sense of her brilliant novel and its unnerving timeliness. In twenty twenty three, we also discuss her ever changing relationship to writing, the humanism she once believed in the politics of her work, and what she sees in this next generation of young writers. That's all coming up with my guest, the one and only Zadie Smith. I hope you enjoy it.
So what is the what is sorry? What is the idea of this podcast? Exactly? Just people talking? That's it.
No, No, I mean yes, we're gonna talk.
Okay, we're gonna talk easy.
We're gonna talk easy. Right, Do you have any other questions?
There's so many podcasts that I'm just wondering, how come, Like, what is it about your podcast that makes everyone listen to it? It's just you talking to people.
Maybe we should do it. We'll see and then we'll see why one may want to listen to it.
Okay.
I love someone coming into the studio and immediately being sort of incredulous about the whole enterprise.
You remind me of my friend Alex Edelman. Do you know that guy comedian? Yes, I don't know him, but yeah, you remind me of him. You have the same voice. It's funny. He's a good comedian. Well, Zady Smith, Yes, thank you for being here. Pleasure.
You're in the throes of a book tour. Yes, you have the excitement on your face to prove it.
Yeah. No, it has actually been kind of amazing. I can't complain.
The writer Ian McEwan once said, yes, going on book tour is like being the blue collar employee of your former self.
Yeah.
I used to quote that a lot.
Is that true?
I mean like, sometimes if I'm signing a very large part of different books that I've written, I sometimes have feen like, who the oh I wrote? I wrote? This is? This is my fault. I think when you're in the tunnel of writing, the accumulation doesn't occur to you. I think that's really what I've noticed this time. I didn't realize how old I got, and I didn't realize how many books I'd written, because genuinely, when I sat down at the table and people brought one of each I couldn't believe it. Yeah, it's like a feeling of complete dissociation.
Yeah, and how did you feel being reminded of your age?
It's not that, it's just that time passes so differently when you're in a room writing books. It just doesn't occur to you that years going by. I don't know, I just I'm just struck by on this tour, like I always felt like I was just getting started, and I was kind of like, oh, what am I going to do next? In this time is like? And I had to face the fact that I am no longer getting started.
Well, I will tell you in preparation for this conversation, it definitely didn't feel like you were just getting started.
So many books to read.
I have poured through a whole lot, as you can see by my Yeah, the body of evidence here. Can we talk about a former self that wrote this new book of yours? Yes, it's called The Fraud. In the pages of The New Yorker, you wrote about your checkered history of dodging the historical novel in part because growing up in north West London with a Jamaican mother and an English father, you would spend a majority of your childhood reading quote too much Charles Dickens. I was never able to quite get out from under his embarrassing influence, as much as I've wanted to to begin. What made you stop running away from it?
I think it's better described as like a revenge on the historical novel or an explosion of it. You know, it's not really like a historical novel quite so. Once I realized what I wanted to do with that history, then I was all in. I really enjoyed it. It was a fantastic experience.
What did you want to do?
I I wanted to uncover something for my own kind of mental health and interest. I wanted to know what the relationship was between England and Jamaica, what the real relationship is between England Jamaica. And that was kind of at the heart of the book. And you know, that's a Freudian question on my part, but it's also a historical question, a political question, and it was just fascinating working on it and thinking about it to that degree.
To set it up for people who haven't read it right, that education that you were trying to attain, it's one that wasn't taught to you in school, right.
No, it wasn't taught in school, And there's a lot of things about English life you don't really learn in school. No, there was no history of that kind. And then I guess writing this book, I realized that the history, there's the obvious case that, oh, they don't talk about slavery in British school. Well that's perfectly obvious and annoying enough as it is. But what they also don't talk about is two hundred years of radical, mostly working class activism in England in opposition to not only forced labor, but all kinds of oppressive labor, both in England and in the Caribbean. So you kind of miss out on both stories, both a story of what happened and the story of the challenges to what happened.
So in Unpacking the book, where do we begin in terms of describing what happened at.
The heart of it? It begins kind of somewhere else. In this crazy court case about a rich Catholic aristocrat called Sir Roger Titchborne, who was a young man a bit younger than you, Sam went missing at sea and his mother desperately going to find him and put out a kind of advert saying I'll give you X amount of money if you can find my son and return my son. His adverts went all over the world world one went to Australia and a man there read it. He was not a tall, skinny, young Catholic aristocrat. He was three hundred pounds, He was working class. He didn't speak French. This is what sir Rogers spoke. He in no way seemed to be this man. But he turned up in London with a black man with him, a guy called Andrew Bogel, who previously enslaved and was a servant of the Titchborne family for years. And together these two men said this is he. This is Roger Titchborne. And Andrew said, I swear it is. And it started this enormous court case because the mother accepted them for whatever reason. Then the mother died. So that case is kind of what began my fascination. First, the idea that a recently enslaved man is given testimony in court for like almost three years. That was the first kind of fascinating fact to me, partially because I think I'd lived in America for so long I'd forgotten the key differences between England and America in this period, which one is that the English plantations were sure, which is key to the whole mentality of English people. But also there are no racialized laws in England. They just don't exist. So it's the difference between being legislated against or being practically invisible, you know. So there's no way a black man could sit in an American court in eighteen seventy three and give evidence against white people. That's not something that could happen. But in England it was perfectly possible. And not only did he give this evidence for three years, he became a kind of national hero. And I was just really interested in what psychologically was going on in that case and in England at that time.
Your description of him as a national hero, Yeah, not to make it all about America, but does sound unnervingly similar to a certain someone who was president for a while.
Yeah, that guy, I mean, there is that guy. But that is a case of right wing populism. And this really is a case of left wing populism, because what the people of England were interested in was the fact that the courts almost more like the OJK. So these courts are fundamentally unjust in the English case, they were constantly sending working class boys to Australia because they'd stolen a piece of bread. That was a common enough punishment. You could also get hung for stealing a sheep. You know, these crimes were small and punished brutally by an aristocratic court system. So for the first time they saw these two obviously working class guys, one black and white, trying to fuck the system basically, and it was that which really entertained the English public and they got behind it.
You said recently that England's mental picture of the past is entirely based on offshore logic. Everything we don't want to think about happen somewhere else.
But that seems to me something that we have a problem with at the moment. When I go through my normal consumer life, the labor that is involved in everything I eat, drink, where is happening out of my sight. I don't mean the point of Thevictorians to say, you guys were up to some terrible stuff. I'm kind of more interested in, Oh, that mindset is continually available to us, like, I'll take what I need. It's convenient to me in this moment, and I don't want to hear about what's going on behind the scenes.
In the spirit of how those old Victorian novels were written. Yes, you produced the fraud in installments. Yes, email in chapters to two of your close friends right each week.
Yeah.
Despite how fragmented that process sounds, the book as a whole reads is carefully mapped out. It seems almost deceptive by design, which is that initially it reads as a cozy, kind of funny Victorian novel and then suddenly it really is not.
You know, you can plan the novel very self consciously, or you can work subconsciously. That's the best way I can put it. Like I think, like when I if I'm dancing, if I'm out dancing, I'm in the club. You don't stand there thinking how am I going to dance this track for the next four and a half minutes. You kind of move the way the new moves. Though some people look like they're Yeah, some people do that, and that's it's unfortunate for them, but not you. No, I'm a pretty good dancer and I like to dance.
And when you're sing, same thing.
Yeah, And the form comes to you as you're doing it. And the older I've got, the more I've trusted in that subconscious logic, that rhythm. But absolutely before I started, I knew that I wanted to start in the drawing rooms. Like I remember, like living through the Iraq War, and it was the same, like we were always spent all our days in chairs in London and New York, frantically talking about the Iraq War, the rights and the wrongs while people were dying, you know, people putting their bodies on the line, People who had no choice about it, were putting their bodies in the line. I got very That was my first example, I guess, as a young person, of realizing that this huge gap between political conversation and reality the monstrosity. Yeah, it's kind of a monstrosity. And so I did want to start with that drawing room conversation because it wasn't that people weren't talking about Jamaica. They were talking about it all the time. But I think it's interesting to try and reconstruct their logic because it seems so impossible for us to understand. We think of slavery as an absolute evil, as we can't imagine anyone discussing it apart from purely evil people. But the problem with that logic, to me is that if you think things like this happen only because sociopaths and incredibly evil people do it, it's a comfort to you because you think, you look at yourself, you think, well, I'm not a sociopath and I'm not an incredibly evil person, so I would never. But that's not how these systems work. At the grindstone, there are certainly sociopaths and devilish folk, just as they were in the concentration couch, just as they were in the Laggers, but they're very small amount of people. They're just you know, turning the gears. What's actually needed to make the system work is lots and lots and lots and lots of well meaning people, vaguely complicit people, people who just want to make money, people who just want to get rich this year. It takes many people to build these horrific places. So I wanted to try and write a novel that took into account all these different kinds of logic. People who really considered it reasonable to say, look in Jamaica, at least they get fed and it's warm, and they have somewhere to live. In Manchester are living on the streets. That was a genuine piece of logic.
You know when people talk about past lives.
Right, I mean no, when I know, because I don't talk to people who talk about those kind of things.
But yeah, you've heard it conversationally. Yeah, Zada Smith just coming in here attacking all manners of me and my life. Yeah, but go on, Okay, well obviously no one you've spoken to Paradise Circle. Okay, but when they talk about past lives, they're always like sort of kings and queens and pharaohs, like, no, no one, no one is ever just like a sad farmer.
Yeah.
I think in some ways people have the same relationship to the past, which is that they could never be complicit, right, They are never one of the many people, like you said, that could have passively tacitly agreed to a system of slavery.
Right. And the thing of thinking of sugar the way you think about, you know, the conveniences in your life and particularly our phones. I mean it really or another example the environmental collapse right now, like we are sitting in a studio with two plastic bottles, it will be seem completely amazing. I imagine in about twenty thirty years that civilized people watching the world burn still went around buying plastic water bottles or getting in planes as I did this morning.
And I want to say to you, thank you for bringing the plastic water bottles in here.
Yes, that's on me. So when I say something like that we all got on a plane this summer, many of us, I imagine, bought a plastic water bottle, then there's this feeling of absolute culpability and guilt and defeat. Right you think, oh god, it's true, I shouldn't have got on the plane. I got on a plane. I know people who refuse to get on a plane and would never buy a plastic bottle. These people are heroes. And then there are people a further degree than that who are out in the street for XR or for just stop oil, and they're putting their bodies in the road. So I guess what I trying to think about is like an f career, where when you realize you are the person who got on a plane this summer, that doesn't mean you shut down from the political project. You're not like, Okay, well there's nothing to be done. It's awful. Everybody's awful. I'm awful. That is possible to kind of work in solidarity and also to know the distinction, like the young people who were working for x R at the moment, to me are the heroes of the age, Like they take the crown, but you cannot give up on the will and political energy of everybody else. They can also do something. And what I saw in the nineteenth century was a lot of people failing, absolutely, a lot of people making money hand over fist, many sociopaths, many dark forces, but also a lot of people doing something, trying, trying, and it does create change. But I think the more cynical view, which I think there's a complete historical case for, is that in case of something like plantation, slavery, all the sugar boycotts, all the activism, all the petitions in the world wouldn't have worked if the business wasn't failing anyway. And I think that's the dark perspective, which I think is partly true. They had exhausted the land, They had exhausted three hundred years of the people that were making less and less money all the way through the end of the nineteenth century. So reform comes, I say, when you actually can't get another dollar out of that country.
The moral trist comes when it is convenient and.
It's not an optimistic like we all suddenly decided to It came when they really didn't have anywhere else to go.
I predict that's all happen with the manewable energy energy, very little crisis.
Yeah, exactly, And that's so depressing, But this seems to be the pattern.
I still thank you for the water in the plastic water. So that's a thirty thousand foot view of the book, right, But more personally, I'm thinking about why you write what you write and the role of projection in your work.
Right, More personally, it was a joy. It really was a joy. Like it was the first novel I think I've written where every single person in it was as vivid to me as you sitting opposite me. I really, I really was fascinated by them all. I love them all, apart from the purest sociopath. Is only a few of truly evil people in the book, but they were just animated to me. And I think so much of what I'm interested in, both personally and socially or politically, it was all possible in this book. It covered all the things that concern me from like my most intimate feelings to my most general ones.
In terms of the intimate behind. Yes, that note around projection. You said before there must be a part of me that's always trying to make the future safe by imagining it on the page. And so for this book when it comes to projection, yes, what were you trying to make safe this time around?
Perhaps old age and finally death. Eliza touche is I'm forty seven, she's about in her mid sixties and onwards in this book, and that's you know, that's a scary territory. You're twenty eight, so you're still probably still have that feeling. I remember having it, thinking that when people are sat having this conversation, you think, oh, it's sad that they're gonna die. That's bad for them. And even now, like I speak about death all the time, I think I think about it all the time. It's been the kind of dominant idea of my life. Saying, by the way, but even now I think it's hypothetical. Even now I'm thinking, sure, it's not going to happen to me. So part of writing is to try and kind of drill it into my head. No, this is this is real.
Well, I want to get into aging immortality on all the really fun subjects I.
Love to talk about in la I know it's the favorite.
Round here, especially with you. I can't imagine talking about anything else. There's a great passage at the top of chapter seventeen, Volume two where you seem to be working out some of these ideas around the cycles of womanhood.
Oh yeah, that was quite a late edition. I really enjoyed writing that. In the Silence, Eliza was pricked on the sudden by an overwhelming and acute sense of loneliness. It was a severe revisionist feeling, and worked upon her cruelly, making her feel that loneliness was all she'd ever known, a consequence perhaps of what old women called the change, a special feminine form of delusion, not to be trusted, and yet apparently impossible to avoid. It marked in the mind of missus Touchet the final hurdle in the ladies steeplechase, the humiliations of girlhood, the separating of the beautiful from the plane and the ugly, the terror of maidenhood, the trials of marriage or childbirth or their absence, the loss of that same beauty around which the whole system appears to revolve the change of life, what strange lives women lead. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's a pretty crazy system.
You know. You said that death was a subject you've been preoccupied by for a long time. You even said recently that you'd rather write a four hundred page novel than sit and think about death for five minutes. Did I say that writing is a kind of absolute avoidance.
Yeah, I mean it isn't my case. I'm sure it's different things for different people, but for me when I'm writing, all I'm thinking about is what I'm writing about. So it's a wonderful distraction.
It's fascinating because wasn't it the subject of mortality, especially growing up around your father, that defined your instincts as a writer?
I think so. Yeah, my father was super old. I mean yeah, he was fifty when I was born, so, and he was in the war, and he just seemed like an ancient person. So I thought about death a law, and I do remember my earliest thoughts, like watching those old movies, was everybody in this movie is dead.
Now.
I was always preoccupied by it.
That was like the fretisteraire gender Rodraphon.
Yeah. But also, you know, without death, there's no ethics like it's an absolutely necessary thing people would behave. I mean, when I think about that Palo Alto dream of living for ever, I mean they they're awful enough with the fact of death. Can you imagine Elon musk eternally for all time?
I can't even imagine him for the end of this day.
Right, It's a nightmare. It's so I know that death is a gift and without it, this life would be a hell with that end, but I still really object to losing consciousness.
So I'm just trying to imagine you as a teenager, this was your preoccupation. You'd be walking down the street contemplating your own mortality.
No, that makes it sound very deep. What I really was percupied with was my looks, which I considered to be absolutely disastrous. Was I was a really I mean's a very old story, I guess with actors and all kinds of people. I was an ugly kid. But I really was an ugly kid, and I really was one of those really bitter ugly kids, and that I considered myself superior to all good looking kids and I in like, I just thought they were petty and shallow, And you know, it's like a bad John Hughes movie and that one day I'd have my revenge on them, you know, all that stuff. And it's actually a disgusting personality trait. It's really unpleasant because you you accuse everybody of being preoccupied with beauty and being good at sports, but you're the person who's obsessed with these things. You're the one who's thinking about it twenty four to seven. Those people are just playing football and going to prom and having a nice life. So I was really a resempful nerd, very angry and kind of certain that if I look different, my whole life would be different and all the rest of it. And then when I grew up and ended up looking okay in the end, like the teeth weren't so crazy, I got contact lenses, I learned how to do my hair, et cetera, et cetera. I remember thinking, oh, it is true, they're nicer to you, and so the world is trash being even more furious. So I was that kind of super annoying teenager. Yeah, I was the worst. I can't I can't defend myself.
You know that I did have that in the notes, Yeah, that you were the worst.
The worst, But but part of it was. I mean, of course, as you get older as a woman, you realize that to be considered unattractive, whether or not you were as a teenager the girl is a great gift because you get left alone and you get to be interested in things you're interested in, and you get to develop a kind of human personality outside of being looked at.
Well I'm trying to Yeah, I'm picturing a teenager like retreating to the library.
Yeah, that was it. I just decided, like, screw you, guys, I'm just going to read in my room.
In your room had posters of Fred Astaire and a beautiful MGM poster. Yeah, from a movie exhibition in London.
Yeah. I must have said that somewhere. Yeah, I did.
Imagine when you're not reading, you're listening to Darling Nikki by Priends.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of that, and then a lot of rappers and Hollywood stars, a strange mix of things. But I just recently discovered hip hop, and so that was the other thing that I was preoccupied with.
I guess I'm wondering do you think these obsessions that you had that you were preoccupied with, which included writing and reading honestly, do you think they offered you a sense of control in an environment where you didn't probably have a whole lot of it.
Yeah, I mean that was also I mean in my house, my parents' marriage was absolutely brutal, so you know, you went to your room to kind of get away from it and get away from the noise and shouting and screaming. And we all developed our preoccupations, you know, in our rooms. Some of them overlapped because we were all interested in language, so you could kind of get one of the siblings to help you in your crazy projects. Like Ben would force me to help him memorize comedy skits. We were always doing, like whole Monty Python skits or whatever. And I would sometimes force my brothers to like sing harmonies with me if I was trying to. So it's that kind of thing. And it's also weird that we all have fake names, which is strange, three kids with alternate names.
You changed it at fourteen. Over all.
Ben's was called Doc Brown for years when he was a rapper, and then now he's Ben Bailey Smith, which is also not his name. And Luke is Luke Sky's as a rapper. Yeah, we have these aliases. I think we just really lived in quite a fantasy land, all three of us when were kids. We just were not really engaging with reality.
Well, I was going to ask you to further describe you as a teenager, but you actually have written about it once before in an introduction for the Best American Non Required Reading Edition.
Where did you find that?
Of two thousand?
I never remember writing that.
Well, it's okay, I have a write here for it. God, really you'd like to read it.
I don't remember writing this. You want me to read? Okay, here we go.
Do you think I wrote it for it?
No, I just have no memory of this. When I was in my teens, making a few stabs at writing, I had a very low opinion of experience. It did not seem to me that trekking to the cob web corner of the world for six months and returning with a pair of ethnic trousers made anybody a more interesting fellow than when they left. Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable were all the uses of the world to me, which might, of course that I was not much good at anything and had no friends. No matter what anybody says, it is a mixture of perversity and stomach sadness that makes a young person fashion a cocoon of other people's words. If the sun was out, I stayed in. If there was a barbecue, I was in a library. While the rest of my generation embraced the sociality of ecstasy, I was encased in marijuana, the drug of the solitary. It was suggested to me by a teacher that I might write about what you know, where you love, people you see, and in response, I wrote straight pastiche Agatha Christie stories, Woodhouse vignettes, Plath poems, all signed by their putative authors and kept in a draw. I spent my last three summer before college reading, among other things, Journal of the Plague Year, Middle March, and the Old Testament. By the time I arrived at college, I'd been in no countries, had no jobs, participated in no political groups, had no lovers, and put myself in no physical danger apart from an entirely accidental incident whereupon I fell fifty feet from my bedroom window. While trying to reach for a cigarette, I dropped in the guttering. In short, I was perfectly equipped to write the kind of fiction I did write, Saturated by other books, touched by the world, but only vicariously. Welcome to the house that books built, all papered with other people's words, to which one moves like a tourist through an English country manor somewhat impressed but uncertain whether anybody really lives there. God, that's depressing. I mean that's fair. I mean since then, I've just had so much life, so it's kind of unrecognizable to me now. But yeah, that was me for sure.
Yeah, I know we spent the first thirty minutes joking and teasing and playing around, but that description kind of broke my heart. I have to tell you.
Yeah, it's bad. I mean I did have good times, and I wasn't unpopular in school. I had like a you know, gang of freaks, and we watched those John Hughes movies and we thought we were, you know, instead of going to art class, we bunk like Feris and all that kind of stuff, go to a museum and we were nerds. But you know, I made up for it in my twenties. I had a lot of fun.
That description of a saturated by books, right touched by the world but only vicarious, sayah, is that the writer that produced the pages of white teeth.
Yeah. I mean when I got out of the neighborhood and met more middle class kids who'd gone to grammar schools and private schools in the country, they thought my life was unbelievably exciting, and I thought, well, maybe it was exciting, like amazing things were happening around us all the time. How do you mean, Well, we're in North London. We you know, it was completely normal to see I don't know, you go clubbing and you'd see Goldie and Buork or the Blur Boys are always you know, these people were like around all the time, and there was loads of drugs and we went clubbing and that kind of stuff. But to me, all, I don't know, I was a bit of a refusnik. But compared to like, what is that a refusnik someone who refuses to do things.
I've felt that in this interview.
Yeah, I think I thought I was kind of boring by the standards of the kids in my neighborhood who really went for it. Like you know when you watch those documentary of nineties ravers, that those are the kids I knew. They were out in fields every weekend. They went, Yeah, they went hard, and I was more like you take an e and I'll wait to see if you die, and if you don't, then I'll take any I was that kid, So I took them, but in a kind of controlled way. It's the best way I could put it.
Yeah, you let them potentially die first.
Take the risk. So I was like, yeah, they were much wilder than me. But when I look back, we had so much fun on no money, you know, just walking the streets, talking, smoking weed. That was like the daily that was our life.
So you did put a lot of that life into that book.
Yeah, that part is there. There's a lot of conversations like that's what I remember, just talking and talking and talking all the time to all these super interesting kids. The kids in my school were unbelievably interesting.
You know.
The book was published in two thousand. Yeah, and you've made a note of my age. I think least three times by now. I was rereading the press around this book. Oh god, yeah, which was all news to me. As the book was published and received a whole lot of acclaim and attention, you said, some of that attention included terrible insane projections. I was expected to be some expert on multicultural affairs, as if multiculturalism as a genre of fiction, do you think that expectation was born out of a desire from the press at the time to present a newly multi racial Britain.
I was so out of context. You have to understand. My life seemed to me like the center of the culture. I didn't realize that we were a marginalized community. So I remember like an Evening Standard interviewer came to my mom's flat and interviewed me, and then when I opened the article, the first thing was like, I went to Grimy Wilsden, if you've any idea where that is. My mom were like, excuse me, I'm sorry. Yeah. It was just unbelievable, and a lot of it was, you know, it was straight up racist. But I was so young. I remember a Daily Mail article which was about me and Naomi Campbell, and I think it was about the idea that we were kind of uppity. That was like basically the principle of this article. And they'd gone to my mom's street and photographed my mom's flat is like the top half of a house, but they'd photographed the house and claimed that the house was worth like three million pounds and said it was my house, and the whole implication of the article was like, look at these black kids thinking that they can have houses.
I was like wow. There were a few other descriptions. Yeah, you were called literature's great black hope, the George Elliott of multiculturalism, the Lauren Hill of London literature. I don't even know what that means.
No, there was a lot of that, And I remember an interview I think it might have been with The Guardian where they asked me who my favorite writers. I said, Tony Morrison might have been a telegraph actually, and the journalist stared to laugh. It was a different universe nineteen ninety nine. Tony Morrison England was like some kind of I mean to your average English journalist was like an exotic. That would have been like saying PC gone mad. Like to mention her would be like you'd attempting to be politically correct. That was literally the mindset of these journalists, like why would you ever mention such a person unless you were trying to trying to make some point about your leftist It was. It was a different universe.
Someone's unfathomable.
Yeah, thank god, but that's what it was like. So I was naive because in my house Tony Morrison was Queen and I didn't have an idea of the rest of England. I'd never been in the rest of England. I was a Londoner, and so having suddenly this relationship with England generally, it was a lot of learning. I just had no idea that that's how England thought. What did you learn that London was really frightening to a lot of England. I think they really don't live like that. They had never heard of any like it like that, so many different people living cheek by jail with each other and going to school with each other. That was not something It was beginning. People were abandoning the state system around that point, so it was just something so far from their imagining that anybody still lived in that system. And now, of course they've abandoned it entirely, but that was still the point where they wanted to be kind of supportive of it in principle, but of course not actually participating themselves.
At the time, as you're trying to make sense of all this, did all of that affect your sense of self? Like did it make you want to retreat or not write, or to just go away for a while.
Yeah, I mean that's what they did. I just left. I went to Italy, and I don't think I ever seriously thought about not writing. But I mean from the very beginning, like before White Teeth was published, I had asked. My instincts were in that direction anyway. So originally I didn't want my name on the book because I was full of these like pinch and esque dreams, you know, as a nineties kid. Then I wanted to be zed a Smith and they wouldn't allow that. Then I wanted no photograph. They wouldn't allow that. So I had these dreams that I was going to be able to publish and not be At the other end of it.
The photograph win in the opposite direction. Yeah, it was, Yeah, your photograph was everywhere.
Yeah, I know, and used, you know, if they wanted to write ans about anything, that was always my photo in it. It was all very discombobulating, also because I had always thought of myself as a strange looking kid, so then to them find it turned around and people literally saying to me, oh, you would never have been published if you didn't look like But it's also classic to the meritocracy, so you jump through all these hoops and I'd already had it in college. And then you get there and then someone says to you, well, you're only here because you're black, and you're like, oh, you've got to be kidding. You've got to be kidding me. I can't have done all this. And then I get here and you tell me it's because I'm black. So that was a classic English So at the losing game, yeah, you can't win. So it's that talk to is just a trap in every direction.
Were bright back with author Zadi Smith, whoever that person was that wrote White Teeth, and then the autograph man. You said they died with the publication of On Beauty, which was inspired a lot by Iam Forster. You said, all things that were my childhood interests and obsession, I'm kind of done with. I wonder when you reflect back, do you think these ideas of transformation and transition were heightened at the time, given that arm Beuty did coincide with the passing of your father.
Yeah, for sure. But I also think it's a nineties logic that you know, we grew up on Madonna and Prince and Jack, this idea of every time you do something, you appear in a different persona that's very deep in nineties cultural logic and even our short story collections and our albums. The point was variety. It's just a weird, asthetic tick. I notice it in other people and my cohort, and I think that's how I always thought of novels. It that each one had.
To be the shed your pastelf.
Yeah. Yeah, that's it.
Easier said than done.
Yeah, No, I mean, obviously, the longer you go on, the more the bits of you you can't get rid of are evident. What do you mean, I think writing books is so embarrassing because you know, your ticks and your habits of thought become clearer and clearer the longer you go on. But I just try and keep thinking, challenging myself one way or another.
I guess I have pinpoint this one moment time because we started at the beginning of this conversation talking about your preoccupation with death, which very much comes from I think having an older father.
Right, and also the fact that everybody dies. I mean, I don't want to. It's not like an unusual idea.
I was going to save that. Thank you for getting out in front of it. Yeah, but you've written so beautifully about that time when he passed and having those conversations with him where he expressed a sense of regret of not living a life that he wanted to lead. And I wonder if you were starting to ask yourself a different set of questions after having written these three books and letting go of that younger past self, And if so, what were those questions?
I think you stop writing out of revenge, Like George Orwell said that most people are writing novels to revenge themselves on the kids that were at school with. That is literally the reason that people write novels. At a certain point, you get over it, or you should get over it, I think, And I just my interest kind of expanded, and I thought more kind of structurally, like I'm just more interested in not just the individuals that I've known in my life and in my community, but how that all came to parts like why are our lives this way? Why are our schools this way? Even now, like my kids are in the same schools. You feel this kind of fury sometimes, like why are we so underfunded? Why are these streets like this? Why can't this change? And so I just became more and more interested in the systems that create that permanent poverty. It's just more interesting to me. I'm still completely interested in the individuals in those worlds, but I maybe less sentimental about it.
I'm thinking about that great quote from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zor O'Neil Hurston. She wrote, there are years that ask questions and years that answer. It's beautiful that period of moving to Rome than Boston, than New York City. I wonder if if you were starting to discover some answers for yourself.
It was just great to get out of this parochial context to learn a different language. That's an incredible thing for a writer like you. Just it's like you see around the edges of what you do into a whole different universe. I don't speak Italian world, but just to have it is it made me understand translation and it was just huge. And in Italy, I just decided to I don't fere allowed to say this, but just like devote myself to pleasure, like I worked so hard my whole youth when other people are like having fun, I was writing books and then I was just like I just want to live and it was fantastic. You know, it's a fantastic place to do very little.
Why would you not be allowed to say that?
I don't know, I'm such I come from such a Protestant culture and it was such a privilege, Like who the hell gets to just sit in Rome and not do very much? But I didn't do very much. I didn't I ate and drank and talk to people and had fun and it was kind of great. And I just learned a lot about beauty. And like my husband's a you know, Northern Irish Protestant, which is the most Protestanty Protestant you can get apart from perhaps Scottish.
Yeah, top Protestant.
Yeah, And is he okay, he's good, but he also in itally learned like some of the lessons of Italian life, which is like, you know, enjoy yourself. Things are beautiful, like don't rush everywhere, sit, have a coffee, chill the fuck out, And that's what we did. It was good.
You did eventually find yourself back to the page, so like you not like you ran away entirely.
No, But I remember the moment I was sitting in Tuscany at this lady's house and she runs the writer's to treat but I wasn't doing any writing now. I was just sitting around and the phone rang and it was Bob silversmrom a New York Review. He wasn't really talked to me. It's ring to talk to this woman. Be a treacher, right, sorry? But I answered the phone and he was like who is that? And I was like, oh, I'm Sadie and he was like Smith. I was like, yeah, oh, are you interested in Kafka? I was like what I had never like all the time in England, if anybody asked me to review something, they would only ever ask me to review books about multicultural London, like over and over again. It was that kind of not that I have anything against them, of course I wrote them, but the idea that I had no other concerns in the world was so English to me. And that for the first time, as American was saying to me, are you interested in something else? And as it happened, I really was interested in Cavca. So he said, well, why don't you write so see what you can do? How about four thousand words? And so for the first time in Italy, I thought, oh, maybe I should do some work, and I wrote that essay and that kind of just changed everything.
It was for the New York Review Books that you wrote that piece on Forrester. Yeah, that was in two thousand and eight. Yeah, and I I have a passage from it here where I think it seems like you've started to develop that idea of good writing requiring good being puke.
Yeah, I don't believe any of that anymore. So I'm not going to defend that for one second. That's a young person's feelishness. Okay, Well, it's moralistic and it's just exhausting.
Well, let's let's interrogate what okare go on?
What do they say? Uh?
Is what Forster said? Oh God, do we in these terrible times? This is not you? Don't worry? Do we? I do have courtes from you. We can do that too, Right, do we in these terrible times want to be humanists or fanatics? I have no doubt as to my own wish. I would rather be a humanist with all his faults than a fanatic with all his virtues.
Well, look, that is a good quote. But the argument is what what does humanism mean? And at the moment it means to a lot of young people just some kind of neo liberal cover story some willly bullshit about how we're all the same blah blah blah. So you can think that that's humanism, and there is certainly a version of that. That's the version sold to you by particular corporations right in their adverts, and in there that's the general human they're trying to sell to. But there is another humanism, which to me is radical and socialist and is interested in finding a collective category in which you can perform acts of political solidarity.
Can you unpack your definition or one that actually matters to you?
Look, I would say it's about having a kind of Angela Davis talks about it a little bit. You need to have a bracketed sense of yourself as a political citizen. So it's absolutely the case, particularly in America, because of the way your politics are structured, that you need to gather in identity groups in order to pressure government for rights. That's how America works and that's not going to change. But it is important, I think, to know that that is not the only way that politics can function. At moments where you are I'm sticking particularly about like the wave of AI that's about to come at us, or also the literal wave that is coming at us through climate change. If you don't have a radical collective idea of the human flintered in the face of the wave, that is my problem. Can you explain that you're going to have to find a way just as they did in the nineteenth century in the battle against slavery, to say, I am a Manchester cotton worker. You are a sugar worker and forced laborer, an enslaved person in the Caribbean. We are not in the same situation exactly, but we are working under the same system, which is a system of capital. Can we work together even though our situations are not perfectly analogous. To do that, you need some conception of your human situation under this power structure. And if you say no, we can't work together because you can't exactly comprehend my situation that you comprehend yours. The only person who wins from that is capital itself.
This seems like you're hinting at the You kind of reminded me of Chappelle's line the imperfect allies.
Yeah, it's okay to have in perfect allies. It's not a compromise, it's it is a way of making politics work.
You did just accidentally kick me? Was that because I'm twenty nine and then I represent a younger generation?
No? No, And that's the even that's the most of all the stupid binary dialectics, Like if you're young, you are going to become old, So that dialectic is literal insanity. There is no point screaming about how awful the old are. It is coming at you so soon, so we might as well find some That's a classic example. Some way of communicating that isn't a war.
I think we've done a good job. So, yeah, you said recently, I can't emphasize how quickly people much younger than you are going to find you utterly absurd.
I know you never believe it. No one believes it. Everybody thinks. But I'm young in a new way that will never age and I will never but it just always happens, so you might as well get ready for it.
Yeah, good writing requires good being. This is something you said for many years, and you think it's absolute nonsense.
Now yeah, I think it's absolute nonsense. Nonsense nonsense.
Does writing make you a better person or okay, are you a better person because of writing? No?
Sorry, I just I don't that's not my experience.
Okay, because these were all feelings you had and sentiments you had before.
Yeah, because I was when you're in the world. Part of the kind of simplicity when I was young. At least, I can't speak to other young people when I was young. The ethical area that you're dealing with is really small. So if you wake up in the morning, like if I'm twenty four and I'm writing novels, all I have to do to be a good person is get up in the morning, have my breakfast, write my book. Maybe it is to hang out with my friends and go to bed. Right, The ethical area is really small, so you can really do it the moment you add more people, partners, kids.
Dogs, you have two kids, right, Yeah.
The ethical area immediately what's that thing they sometimes say online like, just be good? It's not complicated. It's so complicated.
That's quite hard.
Yeah, it's so hard. And the more people involved, being good to one person of course means perhaps not being good to another. Rights and duties are in constant tension. So it's just something you maybe don't know when you're twenty four, but it becomes radiantly clearly older you get. But the eth glary is so complicated that the hope of being perfectly good is you know, of course you can hope it, but it really is deeply delusional. Parenting is just so humbling and destructive of your sense of yourself as some great person. It just it destroys that.
Unfortunately, she says, staring at me, knowing I'm twenty nine with no kids.
No, but I don't know. I never felt I was a particularly great person. So that's not something. It's not like I'm falling from a great height. But the only thing what I do is not giving. I write, which is for me. People who actually are outward facing and are constantly giving of themselves, like actually doing that are to me the admirable people.
You know. In fact, beyond the personal reasons of making art, you've written pretty extensively about the perceived political power and the quote necessity of storytelling. Yeah, because throughout the pandemic and through lockdown many people, we're making the case for arts nobility, its capacity to change us, to enlighten. And yet, in an essay from your book Intimations, which was written I think in the throes of the pandemic, you seem to have a very different view, at least when it comes to the work you've been making for the past twenty six years, Can we take a look at that? Sure, don't sound so excited.
You go have a look? Okay, oh boy, here to here? Okay. The more utilitarian minded defenders of art justify its existence by insisting upon its potential political efficacy, which is usually overstated. Artists themselves are especially fond of overstating it. But even if you believe in the potential political efficacy of art, as I do, few artists would dare count on its timeliness. It's a delusional pain to finishes a canvas at two o'clock and expects radical societal transformation by four. Even when artists right manifestos, they are hopefully aware that their exigent tone is finally borrowed, only echoing and mimicking the urgency of the guerrilla's demands or the activists protests, rather than truly enacting it. The people sometimes demand change, they almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity and to time itself. It is something to do, yes, but when it is done, and whether it is done at all, is generally considered a question for artists alone. An attempt to connect the artist's labor with the work of truly laboring people is frequently made, but always strikes me as tenuous, with the fundamental dividing line being this question of the clock. Labor is work done by the clock and paid by it too. Art takes time and devis it up as arts these fit. It is something to do. Do you know what I want to say something. It's occurred to me on this tour recently that I think what it is when I listen to other artists talk like they use the words radical every other word. They're constantly stating these apparently progressive arguments, but then I know about them, like I know their kids are in private school. I know that. It just really blows my mind that people haven't literally no shame about this rhetoric that has no relation to their lives, particularly in America, they continue to live these like hat bourgeois lives. And then so I've never said I never speak like that, because embarrassing, I realize my life is actually in the commons, like I have a case.
What do you mean by that?
I mean, I try and live like some of the things that I really believe a society should be arranged. I don't know. I mean, my parents had their kind of moments of activism when I was a kid, and so I connect that activism with actually going out and doing it, Like they went out and marched and they were involved at a kind of grassroots level. So that's the thing I take seriously. I just cannot take seriously people speaking as if their very existence is just radical. They're just radical because they are alive and willing to give you their art. I can't. I find that really hard to take seriously.
It sounds like the part that's rubbing you the wrong way is that you have contemporary writers that are acting like politicians or speaking in public like that's what I say.
I realized that in the age of the algorithm, politics is something that has to be legible. So because I haven't said I am this and this is what I believe, I think I've allowed people to assume politics that I really do not engage with. But I always assume that. I mean, I don't know, I just does that bother you, No, it doesn't really, Because I want The lesson I took from my parents is do you want to label yourself, you know, endlessly in your armchair, or do you want to get on the streets and actually change people's minds. So to me, the arguments in my books are they're open enough that people can enter. Hopefully they enter and something happens.
It's funny. The very thing that I probably love most about your work is that it does feel inviting and that it's not not particularly dogmatic, and perhaps in the absence of clear definition, others, especially on the Internet, have maybe trying to define you and your work for you.
Yeah, and I've realized that they have no idea where I come from with the people I come from, because I never said but that's because I believe in privacy. I just don't understand this kind of public facing person who's a series of statements. I can't engage with it. But it just surprises me that people think making radical work is saying my work is radical. That's not what I think radical work is. I think radical work is radical work. It does something radical to you as you're reading it, to the way you think, and to the formation of your ideas.
As we believe we're trying to sift through a whole lot, yes, very big ideas right, And the truth is, as you were talking, I couldn't help but shake that headline that came about from a recent Vulture review. I think it was how Zady Smith lost her teeth, which did take issue with your politics, or at least how you think of politics in relation to your work. What did you make of that?
I mean, I do slightly take issue of being judged the level of my black radicalism by someone who isn't in that tradition. And also, yeah, I don't know how to put it.
I just what.
I think, What do I think? Oh God, it's about the principle of hospitality. I think that's like even like that kind of ancient Greek idea that the door of pros is open. Like I so remember when I was a kid, like we used to hand out the socialist work all that kind of stuff, and there was always this idea when you're dealing with like upper middle class intellectuals, they have this idealized proletariat figure in their mind, and of course that was we. We're the people. We were there waiting for their And I remember, particularly my father, like watching the way they would talk to my father that there's this disappointment that the proletariat when you meet them, isn't using the same language that you're using, right, doesn't fully embrace the Marxist discourse. In his language, is worried about his rent and his food. Maybe doesn't have the same aesthetics as you, and and I was always struck by that, And even when I got to college, it was more intense right, that there's this kind of leftist movement. And the inconvenient thing is that the people they speak to they don't really like or understand. So I come from somewhere else, and I do think I both like and understand the people I grew up amongst. And I'm not ever willing to just shut the door in them because their language isn't correct, or they're not thinking in quite the way that I would wish they would think. I'm trying to find common ground. And to me, common ground is not a middling space. It's like a radical space. It's a space you can share in common. The commons is the thing that concerns me.
Back in two thousand, Yes, you went on Charlie Rose.
God, yeah, that's the only time to be on television twice on Charlie Rose.
Yes, yeah, I've seen them both.
Yeah, that's it, and after that it's like, I never want to do this again in my life.
Well you did just fine. You had a quote in that first one that I wonder if it's still true for you. You said, empathy and voyeurism are kind of two sides of the same thing. You have to like looking and then once you finished looking, you have to make an effort to understand. Does that still ring true to you?
Yeah, that's my kink for sure. I like to watch. I like to watch people. I like to watch their lives.
I wasn't gonna say kink, but no, but it's fine.
I don't mind. That's truth. I am really voyeuristic. It's deep in my nature and I know it is. And yeah, I guess the problem people have the idea that in understanding people, you forgive them. It's all very Christian, that kind of idea.
And your husband says, you have to do everything in your power to not be a Christian.
He said, but you know, when I was writing this book, looking at these radical socialist Christians who were some of the greatest anti slavery campaigners, Thomas Spence, Robert Wedderburn, who turned from christ but then spoke of correctly that when you get into the social gospel, what you're being asked to do there is beyond any Marxist fantasy. It's like you're being asked to give every single thing that you have to the weakest and poorest in front of you. So there is certainly a radical gospel, but now I'm nowhere near anything like that. But understanding doesn't have to mean approving. But I think that the really hard thing, the difference between me and perhaps younger writers, is that whether I approve or disapprove of the people in my novels is not the point to me.
This was your point around tar. That's interesting.
Yeah, it's just it's a serious difference. Of course, I have my personal views, and but that's not the beginning and end of when I'm critiquing something. I just, you know, like I'm reading Virginia Wolf's stories now, and I love Wolf, and sometimes she's an asshole, and I can just know that, do you know what I mean? I just know that sometimes she's a fucking asshole. Yes, So that's that. It's not I'm not condoning it. I'm just it's just the fact it's okay to contain more than one idea like you can just have have it and know it.
And you think my generation is not capable of holding them.
No, I think they absolutely are. I know they are, because you.
Think they do the beginning and ending thing that it begins ends with their own personal politics.
No, I don't think that either. I think that dumb people are like that. But I keep reading really brilliant novels by people younger than me all the time, and brilliant criticism, and so it's not I don't believe in like it's some kind of generational trait. It's always that instinct is in every generation of like shutting down at a certain point. Or No, I don't believe that. I'm just talking about my particular interest which just don't stop. They just keep going. I can't help that.
You know. Eighteen years ago, Yes, you interviewed author Ian McEwan in the Believer magazine. Yeah, he was about fifty seven at the time.
Is this the meaning of deep dive? Is this what happening here? Sam? Is that what you like to do? I really understand it now.
You were skeptical in the beginning.
Yeah, I know, but now I'm like, who It's intense, It's amazing the things you've managed to find go on.
He was about fifty seven at the time. Yes, And toward the end of your interview, you asked him what it feels like to look at your own bookshelves and this nice little backlog of work, this little stack. I don't know what that would feel like. Amazing, I would think, does it give you any pleasure?
Though? What did he say?
I'm a little more interested in what you would say now, because you know, when we started this conversation is that I've been on book tour and people keep bringing all these books to me, and I don't know how time has moved so fast, And I've never imagined having all these things written that you have spent your time on, in your life, invested in.
I just it's weird, Like I you know, when you're young, you come to destroy the generation above. I came to destroy Ian. I love Ian, but I came to destroy him, just as he came to destroy the generation above him, just as young novelists come to destroy me. That's like the natural ecosystem of lisure, and if it doesn't happen, it's not healthy. So I'm so used to coming to be the destroyer and now I'm here to be the destroyed, and it's just a weird feeling. I don't know, it's weird. I did these books, I'll probably do some more. And what I do notice about the writers I came to destroy is that you feel a kind of new fondness for them. You see new things in them and which I like. And I hope I feel that way about my work as I get older, that I come around to it again. But the moment, I'm still like full of beans. Man, I'm kind of excited to do something new.
Have they given you pleasure?
This one gave me a lot of pleasure, satisfaction And yeah, like I didn't know if I could do it, and I did it to my own satisfaction. That's the best way I can put it. And then last night when I was signing, people came up talking to me about White Teeth have so moved like a book I barely remember, and it was so nice, like kids coming up and talking about reading it. And I still felt quite disassociated, like it's not I couldn't remember writing it. But I thought, God, that's so nice that it's just out in the world being with people. What an incredible thing.
Do you want to know? His answer? Oh yeah, go on, he said, to your question, does it give you pleasure? It's like a family album, the consciousness of your own past. People say what you were doing in such and such years, And I know exactly what I was doing. I know I was publishing a particular book or halfway through another one. These books are the spoonfuls with which I've measured my existence.
Yeah, that's exactly it. And I don't know if that's a normal thing to do with your life book. That's what I've done. It's okay, is it okay? Yeah, it's actually it's good. Yeah, I mean I I personally feel that relations with human beings are more important, and I treasure my friendships and my loves and my children and all of that. But it's not a bad way to spend the day, not at all.
When I asked a peer of yours for a question, yes, I asked George Saunders.
Oh yeah, he didn't.
Really have one for me, but he did say, the thing I love most about Sayti's work is her interest, her ability, maybe her obsession with trying something new. And I was thinking about that young kid obsessed with Prince right, focused on transformation. Yeah, I guess my question for you the last one after this book at forty seven? Are you still interested in seeing who you'll become next? God? I am?
Is that really childish? That's such a childish thing. But yeah, I'm always curious. Yeah, I don't feel like my life is over. Maybe I should, But I don't.
You sound almost disappointed by that.
I feel like maybe I should be more grown up by now. That's what I think, that I should be a bit more staid or something. I just think like I'm not, like, am I grown up? Like Jennifer Egan? No, she seems like a grown up person.
I've talked to her.
Yeah, she seems like an adult. Do I seem like an adult like that?
No? No at all.
No, that's the problem. That's what I'm talking about the problems. So I don't know how long that situation is going to continue, you know.
I guess we'll find out. Yeah, next time you come on.
Okay, good. I desperately want to be a real boy. As Pinocchio said, we're grown up. I really would like to adult soon. So I hope it will happen soon.
I'll be here when it does.
Okay, great, Thank you so, Zadie Smith, thank you an absolute pleasure. Thanks, and that's our show.
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