You are sitting there, staring at yourself on a screen, when suddenly, you’re no longer alone. Peering out from the digisphere is a true literary rock star: the singular Zadie Smith, an author as polyphonic as her justly celebrated novels.
Taken as a collective, her essay collections, Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), Intimations (2020), and Dead Alive—this last one out today from Penguin Press—have charted a very complicated quarter century. They cover an unbelievable gamut of subjects, tones, and even forms, variously examining the golden age of Hollywood, what the Obama era stood for, how to live in a pandemic, and all manner of angles related to literature and art, race, the sexes, celebrity culture, and more. Central to each book is a philosophy of engagement and consideration that you see reflected in the section headings and titles themselves.
In Changing My Mind, Smith is Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering. Nearly a decade later, in Feel Free, she is In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel(ing) Free. With the ushering in of COVID-19, Intimations works differently from her other collections. It’s the work of a mournful magpie, with beautiful, unexpected moments of perception sprinkled in amid a general anxiety that seems to belong simultaneously to a different world and to one not so long ago.
Dead Alive, which arrives mere days after Smith’s 50th birthday, is marked by a thicker stripe of loss than her previous collections; there is Eyeballing, Considering, Reconsidering, Mourning, and, last but certainly not least, Confessing. In advance of release day, Smith talked to Vogue across screens, time zones, and subjects, surveying the state of the world as easily as the history of hip-hop, being at the vanguard of Chappell Roan fandom, and the allure of New York City.
Vogue: When you’re out in that world, do you consider yourself a public figure? If so, is there a responsibility associated with that?
Zadie Smith: I mean, no, but trying not to be a public figure these days is a 24/7 occupation. Even podcasts and radio, whenever I do one now, it’s actually TV and it’ll be online until the end of time. So everybody is a public figure. Ten-year-olds are public figures. Everybody is a public figure all the time, and it’s so weird, the level of denial about that. I don’t want to be a public figure, but like every other citizen of the world, I find that there’s not much avoiding it these days.
Speaking of being out there or putting yourself out there, you write that nonfiction is easier because it’s putting your thoughts down on paper and not creating something. Can you tease out that distinction?
To me, fiction is more vulnerable. If I were very online, I would find nonfiction more frightening. But for me, it’s just a kind of organization of thought. Quite often, no matter the argument [online], there is a lot of muddled thinking. And I think, Oh, well, maybe I could make this clearer.
That’s how I start thinking about it. Not only are the views, of course, often repulsive, but the actual form of argument is not argument. That’s what interests me. That even the most basic principles that people have worked on for 2,000 years to establish what a fact means—gone.
It’s just people talking.
You’re just talking! And then people get triggered. But to me, beyond even the content is the fact that this does not make sense. So maybe go back a few steps. First, let’s make sense, and then maybe you could make whatever argument it is you’re trying to make.
To that end, let’s turn to your essay “Shibboleth,” which initially engendered controversy when it ran in The New Yorker last spring. It seems like there’s a daily push to stake a position and be on the side of something, but in this essay, you’re saying, “Wait a second.”
I genuinely think that 10 or 12 years ago, the idea that you couldn’t pursue justice while recognizing the pain of your adversary would be a very strange idea. That’s a new concept in human history, that it’s binary. It’s like thinking like a machine, whereas that piece is me trying to think like a human. We’ve seen so many people fall into this trap. They find themselves misunderstood, then they become reactionary, then it’s like a wildness.
And it keeps going, on and on.
I understand that the idea is that when something so dreadful happens, the only correct response is for your own rhetoric to be at the same pitch. But for me, what you have to offer at that moment is the possibility of solidarity, to try and use the knowledge of that hurt to understand this other hurt. That is one way you get to people.
Taking a hard left, what is your cultural diet like these days?
I’m trying to make my study clean and reading many novels. So much new music. My son is now into hip-hop, and a whole universe of grime is in my ears, day and night. Then us arguing, and me trying to explain the history of hip-hop, and him telling me to shut up, and that kind of thing. A lot of Chappell Roan, too, a lot of Chappell Roan. She’s amazing. It must be so boring for suddenly the whole world to think you’re amazing, but I did think she was amazing quite early, and I’m not usually early, so I was quite proud for once. And Doechii was early [for me], too, so there’s some life in the old girl yet.
My actual cultural diet is listening to Las Culturistas and then kind of voyeuristically believing that I’m still in downtown New York and I could go see Oh, Mary! tomorrow. It’s like living in New York but not living in New York. It’s kind of melancholy, but that’s what I do a lot.
That is New York in a nutshell. I’m going to throw a couple curveballs now. Who’s the best-dressed character in literature?
With the characters in contemporary works, like Katie Kitamura’s novels, you get the feeling those women are always pretty well dressed, like Katie. But maybe Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, just in her dungarees. I’m wearing them right now, but I bet she would make them look better.
Would you be up for a lightning round of word association?
Sure.
Joni Mitchell.
Oh, sublime.
Madonna.
Queen. The queen. The only one.
Virginia Woolf.
Hero.
Joan Didion.
Austere.
Kara Walker.
Wild.
Prince.
Prince is both. He’s always both.
Kendrick Lamar.
Oh, boy. It’s very hard not to say genius to all of these people. I really do think he’s a genius, so we might just have to leave with genius. Yep.
Finally, what is your feeling about posterity in your work?
It’s hard to answer it honestly, and I don’t think people do. When I look at my compulsion to write—why would you do that if you didn’t want to be read for a while? The most honest way I can put it is to finish the books that are in front of me. There is a certain series of books in front of me, and it’s just my job to write them down. That’s how I feel. I completely understand that it is a self-created delusion, but it’s very strong.
Do you want to stop at some point?
I want to be freed from this compulsion. I would really like that. I would really like to know what it’s like just to be in the world without being attached to turning it into language. That would be great, and I would consider it as if I had grown up. If that ever happened.
You wouldn’t see it as a diminution of your powers?
No, no. I’d be relieved if it ever happened. But I don’t think it will.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.