Zadie SmithEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

Which multi-generational novels inspired White Teeth ? Where does Zadie Smith turn for her next great read? And our Penguin team is back to solve your reading dilemmas - whether you're after fascinating memoirs, this year's pick of prize-winning books, or stories perfect for Autumn. Discover all the books mentioned on this episode: Click here Zadie Smtih is one of the most distinctive, exciting and widely loved writers of her generation: she’s the twice shortlisted, once winner of the Women's Prize, also shortlisted for the Booker and has been twice named among Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Her debut, White Teeth , blazed onto the best-seller lists, and established her as a defining generational voice. Her follow-up work includes the critically and commercially acclaimed NW, On Beauty, and Swing Time. Zadie Smith’s latest work is Dead and Alive: the keenly awaited new collection of essays, in which she brings her unique skills and observations to bear across a dazzling range of subjects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About Zadie Smith: Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives. About Dead and Alive: A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays. In the past two decades, few writers have been able to master the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her discerning eye and singularly intimate perspective emblazon Smith as a preeminent critic of our generation, society, and culture. In her inimitable honesty and poignant voice, Smith studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds within them grounds for solidarity and compassion. This eagerly awaited new collection brings Zadie Smith’s unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools personal dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk when researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to look at the young Michael Jackson and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times. A master of perception always in search of a lesser-known reality, Smith continually assesses, and reassesses, what it means to identify with the contemporary world, and how we choose to remember the history that brought us here.

“[Writing] is a psychological quirk developed in response to personal failings.” — Zadie Smith Read Part One. Read Part Two. Do I even have original ideas? Why do I write? Why do you? Haven’t all the stories already been told? If there are 1,000 types of bananas can we make infinite kinds of banana bread? In the essay, “Something To Do,” Zadie Smith explores the question: Why do we write? Her favorite answer: “It’s something to do.” Writing fills the time of the writer, like baking banana bread could be the whole morning for your mother (or father). “Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area— that nobody asked you to carve—and you do “something.” [You write.] – Zadie Smith. Some believe consciousness is only a byproduct of the brain, like the peel of the banana, no different from sweat. Thinking: it’s just something the human-animal does , has adapted for its environment, to survive. But what is writing then? The detritus of a certain brain? The peel wrapped around tools used for survival: belonging, sex, the family, power? Just another stick for us monkey-over-achievers to find food with? An opposable thumb? Or is it a disposable one? Will words and writing eventually be shed, (in favor of telepathy?) like an extra toe or excessive body hair? Woah Chile… Telepathy ? But if dinosaurs can grow from the earth, why not people who beam words? Isn’t the internet just that? We may one day write with hormonal smells. Would that be more efficient? How many hundreds of years will it take to get there? Playing in/with Pens [The realm of artists and writers is a] “charming, but basically useless playpen where adults get to behave like children—making up stories and drawing pictures.” — Zadie Smith Gel pens, playpens, ballpoint pens, pig pens, there are writer jokes to be made here. And again, we are back to the monkey doodling its cage — all pages/pens/sticky notes lead here. In Smith’s cage she carved out meaning, but during the pandemic, her whole family was suddenly in the playpen (err cage) with her, and all at once, her artificially-imposed writing and reading schedule became ridiculous. Wasn’t there anything else to do? Will this too pass? And onto what? “There are essential workers and there are those of us with time on our hands [artists and writers].”— Zadie Smith Few at home demand books of a woman, almost everyone demands breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks… Free time is free because we aren’t being paid. Writing is a perfectly cheap thing to fill this time; it costs almost nothing — nothing but our free (available, wageless) time. “Art stands in dubious relation to necessity—and to time itself.” — Zadie Smith. When people are hungry, they would smell and taste and enjoy the banana bread, but what do they hunger for when they crave reading? Information? Education? Entertainment? Status? Do writers long to provide all three? Or are we just releasing something from inside us and hoping that someone else will eat it? Are we the bananas? Are writers like flowers looking for bees? We could also be termites and time is our tree. An editor recently informed me that bananas do not grow on trees. Bananas are in fact, herbs because they lack woody stems. I’d written: Dim outlines of green banana trees whizzed by. And she highlighted this and wrote: “Technically, bananas are herbs rather than trees, given that they lack woody stems.” However, when I researched this fu

Listen to part one here. I don’t know what Zadie Smith looks like. I’ve never googled her, and I don’t want to know the truth. Instead, I see my own stereotype of the “Black Woman Writer,” one equally composed of the visuals Smith’s writing generates and my own preconceived notions of intellectual women of color in New York City. She is a grown-up Amanda Gorman with a colorful headwrap and tortoiseshell glasses. She is Lupita N’yongo from the movie 12 Years a Slave but dressed in designer clothes. She is a Kara Walker, the Black artist who paints cut-out silhouettes of southern landscapes and African children on white walls, elegant and tall, aloof, but soft-haired, holding a long-stemmed glass of Bordeaux at the art show. Zadie Smith (in these above forms) is inside my imagination inside her apartment with two brown children under six and she’s locked down and looking at memes of Mel Gibson conversing with a bloody white body of Jesus Christ. In the image, Mel Gibson is mansplaining his movie production woes to the thorn-crowned Christian prophet. To anyone else, the meme looks like a metaphor for douchebags, but to Zadie Smith it’s a commentary on privilege and class during a pandemic. Some are upset about no room service, others grieve their dead. This is the power of Zadie Smith— to take the specific and comical and overlay it on the global, the inner, the human, the total experience. She writes in “The American Exception” that we are in a hellscape, a disaster, and thinking is the only way out. America is so great, so great at everything, even at death— which we view as a series of random personal problems instead of a national collective reality. “Ethical life depends on meaningfulness,” she says. But in America, meaningfulness is chained to the money tree and whipped with its branch. Death is rarely random and suffering has a hierarchy— that hierarchy is privilege. This is often only seen on the zoom-out, by the other, in the meme; we can’t always identify it when it happens to us internally or externally. Have you ever recognized your own privilege? When? How? I remember a moment from my own life. I was leaving a big party at a house in Kampala, Uganda. The house was rented by a few people, including a Ugandan pop singer, a young woman who was something like “Kelly Rowland,” in Destiny’s Child, a star, but not the star . As I was leaving, a mere 23-year-old American, working an entry-level job, but paid in dollars, and not taking care of anyone else, I took a half-drunk glass bottle of beer to finish in the car. The pop star came running after me up the road, in her heels and cocktail dress. As I got into my wealthy American friend’s SUV, she yelled, “Hey, give me back my empty.” You see, empty bottles were worth something in Uganda, about a 1/3 of the price of the drink, but it was nothing to me. So, I said no, and rode off, laughing, into the night, onto the next party, the next club, all my friends laughing, already drunk. “No,” she screamed, “My empty! My empty!” But the next day I felt guilty. The money from the bottle had meant something to her, but not to me, at least not until it was too late. Smith offers an example of her own recognition of privilege. Riding the subway, she overhears two working women complaining about a mom giving an iPad to a baby. “Who would give a baby something that costs $900?” They ask, shaking their heads. Smith probably gives her kids iPads all the time. Or this is what I imagine along with the perfect interior I’ve created for her Manhattan apartment, a world where nothing is sticky and no one ever gets sick. Don’t we all create these fake realities for the people we follow, for the stars we watch? Then again, isn’t that like my own house

*All quotes are from the essay “Peonies” from Intimations , by Zadie Smith, unless otherwise noted. All views are my own and do not reflect the views of Zadie Smith unless quoted directly. “Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.” - Zadie Smith In this piece, I’ll share my takeaways from Zadie Smith’s first essay in the book, Intimations , entitled “Peonies.” Readers and writers hail Jamaican British author Zadie Smith as contemporary fiction’s most groundbreaking voice , and her new short collection of essays, Intimations , has won the Pen/Audible service award, an award previously given to Toni Morrison. Written during Covid-19 lockdown, Intimations tackles “ideas, feelings and questions, prompted by an unprecedented situation.” In the intro before “Peonies,” Smith offers a quote from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.” — Marcus Aurelius. Peonies: “Real life has no chapter headings, paragraphs, periods, or ellipses in which you might catch your breath. It just keeps coming at you.” — Zadie Smith We are reading and imagining Zadie Smith writing as we read. Perhaps she is alone in a New York City apartment gazing at a sunless sky through cold glass. She plans her days in 45-minute increments. She wants a cashless world of machines and no human interactions while shopping. Chit chat usurps her time. (We might also infer that cashless shopping is germless shopping, that small talk spreads disease.) With extra minutes, Smith used to buy herself lattes at the coffee shop, now she looks through windows with bars at spring flowers alongside other middle-aged women. Upon seeing some tulips, she wishes they were peonies, so decides to make them peonies in her essay. This gives rise to a series of thoughts on the efforts writers make to control reality. “Writers take shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising.” — Zadie Smith. The first drawing by a monkey, after being forced to draw by scientists, was of the bars of its own cage. This is an anecdote in Nabokov’s novel, Lolita, one that Smith loves, but maybe doesn’t believe. The scientists imprisoning the monkey wish the monkey would scrawl forth something profound with its stick of charcoal, but instead they receive only rudimentary documentation of current conditions. Is writing like this? Most of the time, though we wish it weren’t. The human is caged by its instincts, by nature, and by circumstance. In her youth, Zadie Smith felt caged by her gender and her biological nature. She resented her menstrual and hormonal cycles and the fact that men didn’t experience them. She equally resented the socially constructed possibilities for women, which she saw as: * Spinster * Crone * MILF * Childless * Or a patronizable, benign, sweet old lady—a grandma. In rebellion against these archetypes, Smith refused to track her menstrual cycle, which she resented equally deeply. By doing so, she attempted to reject internalized misogyny. She wanted to ignore her own womanish biology and body. This ignoring was an attempt to gain control and power over nature. Obsession and a strong desire for control are common among writers. “Writing is control.” — Zadie Smith She elaborates that we should rename creative writing MFA departments as “Controlling Experience Departments,” because writing is less about creating and more about controlling experiences. Each novel you read or write provides a wide swath of attitudes you might adopt for yourself, but “sometimes it is right to submit to love and wrong to resist affection. Sometimes it