Zadie Smith on writing, family and her addiction to reading
Eleanor Wachtel spoke to the acclaimed British writer in 2010 about her essay collection Changing My Mind
This summer, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, Eleanor Wachtel presents 10 of her favourite episodes chosen from the show's archive.
*This episode originally aired on Feb. 28, 2010.
Many years after bursting onto the literary scene with her debut novel, White Teeth, Zadie Smith continues to be one of the most popular and critically acclaimed authors of her generation. A vibrant story of families living in multicultural London, White Teeth became an international bestseller and was published when Smith was just 24. She followed this success with her 2005 novel On Beauty, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction.
Since then, Smith has published many other books — novels, essays, short stories and, in 2021, her first play, The Wife of Willesden. Her new title, The Fraud, is based on real events and takes place in Victorian England. It's been called Smith's funniest novel to date, a story "both splendidly modern and authentically old."
Eleanor Wachtel has spoken to Smith many times over the years, including in 2010 about her first non-fiction collection, Changing My Mind. It features essays about writers such as Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov and George Eliot, touching on everything from the craft of writing to Smith's love of films, as well as personal reflections about her family.
Writing about authors
"A great deal of my initial response [to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God] was personal, because the character, not that she was like me — in practical terms, we're from different universes in a certain way, but I guess her genetic inheritance and mine, her hair and my hair, her eyes and my eyes, and her skin and my skin — these things were reading experiences I didn't normally have. I didn't realize how relieved or how much I wanted to have that experience."
"I don't think it really dawned on me what it was like to be a Black woman. And Black as my mother is, not mixed as I am, in a white culture.
"I think if you're a kid, and you want to do something, and you don't see many people who seem like you doing the thing you want to do, it's a great joy to find out that it has been done, not just competently but brilliantly, so that meant a lot to me at the time.
"[George Eliot's novel Middlemarch] was trying to show you, to force you into empathy with people unlike yourself, people of great diversity, unlike each other. Once you understood them, you'd be capable of loving them as God would have loved them, you'd be able to appreciate them and to live the good life.
"When I write about [George Eliot], it's not that I wish that people wrote novels like Eliot anymore. I don't think it's possible. But I'm saying that this path that she walked down is incredibly engaging and works incredibly well. And how can we find paths, as contemporary writers, that strike off in a different direction, but move towards the same need to engage people in that way?
"For all of us who work in the arts, who are interested in engaging the empathic soul of somebody, you need different routes to the same thing. You can't keep on going down the same road because it gets worn down, it becomes familiar, and it stops having its effect.
"If I don't read everyday, I am just completely doomed. I'm just completely addicted to it. It's just something that allows me not to be myself. I think it allows me to be other places amongst other people, and I just get a great joy out of good sentence making. Nothing makes me happier."
On the craft of writing
"To me, a style is something you can't help but have. It's like your skin. It's not something that you can go out and buy, it's just the way you express yourself. It's so implicit to everything you do.
"When I was starting and I began to meet writers for the first time, it just struck me very forcibly that they were like their books. And I thought that this was something that I hadn't been allowed to even consider as a university student, where we really divorced the author from the work, in order to take the work to ourselves more intimately. We just weren't interested in authors. We never saw them. They were certainly never invited to the university. I'd never met one. I didn't even consider them. I just considered the text.
"When I met authors, the similarity between what you would call their personality and the sensibility of their work on the page amused me.
"I'd forgotten that there is a relation, an intimate relation, between the human being and the book. It doesn't mean that the book is autobiographical — in fact, almost entirely the opposite. But something in the voice of the person, something in their sensibility, is inextricably tied to the way that they write.
"It was such a liberation to be able to write about books I love in a way that I love writing. And to say, look, there's a relation here, the author and the text, they go together, and the relation between them really matters."
Learning to understand her father and mother
"I don't know that much about [my father], which is kind of the reason I'm always writing about him, trying to work it out a little bit. He was an unusual father, in the sense that he was much older than he should have been to have a daughter my age. He was fifty when I was born.
"I suppose I was always very concerned about him dying. That kind of thought when you're a kid is, on the one hand, I suppose a negative thing. But also, it's just an interesting idea to have in your mind as a very young child. The idea of him disappearing or aging or him being part of this distant generation was very preoccupying to me. And it also gifted me a lot of my slightly anachronistic tastes.
"I wanted him to be a different kind of man. And then asking questions late in his life about his own experiences, and finding out all this amazing stuff, I realized I actually have been living with a very interesting man all my life. I just have been too stupid to realize that.
"[After becoming a parent],I do have more sympathy for my mother, which I guess I've recently been lacking. Me and my mother have a pretty fiery relationship, and my mother and her mother have a pretty fiery relationship, and now I have a daughter. And you know, it does occur to you that I'm almost 35 and it's not so easy having a kid, and my mother was twenty — so young, and so innocent and married to a man thirty years older. You start to appreciate what somebody else went through. It makes you more empathetic."
Finding role models in films
"When I was a kid, I was, and I suppose I still am, what people call a tomboyish girl. I just really wasn't that interested at all, to tell you the truth, in feminine things. I was just looking for women who were interesting to me, just a way of being alive which didn't involve princesses or pink or any of that.
"And Katharine Hepburn seemed to be one of those women. She was, to me, very attractive, bold, intelligent. She was womanly, is the word I would use. I didn't really want to be a girl, ever, if I was going to have to be female — that's how I conceived of it when I was younger. I wanted to be a woman. And Katharine Hepburn was definitely a woman in that sense, an adult person of her own mind. And I loved her movies for that reason."
Zadie Smith's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
