Whenever she encounters a new piece of writing or art or film, author Zadie Smith asks herself: "Does this thing make me feel alive?"
"It sounds like a very childish question, but ... that's really what it's about for me," Smith says. "Does it create some kind of flourishing within me?"
Smith was 25 in 2000 when she published White Teeth, her critically acclaimed first novel. Now 50, her latest collection of essays, Dead and Alive, reflects on middle age, climate change and generation gaps, particularly between millennials and her own Generation X.
Smith admits to being "obsessed with time" — perhaps because of the age gap that existed between her parents. (Smith's mother, a Black woman from Jamaica, was 30 years younger than Smith's father, a white English man.)
"I'm the product of a completely inappropriate relationship for sure," she says. Her mother was someone "who was only 20 years older than me, who'd come from a completely different world, a different island," while her father was someone "who went to see Casablanca in the cinema, who saw Ella Fitzgerald sing live."
Smith says she lives with melancholy — "that's a permanent part of my way of being" — but she doesn't have the overwhelming fear of death that she felt when she was younger: "When I was in my 20s ... I was so terrified of death and all I wanted to do was live, live, live, live. Now given all my luck and the pleasure of the work that I've done, I'm less terrified and I feel like I've been given just about as much as I deserve. So everything else at this point is gravy."
Interview highlights
On the intensity of today's generational discourse
When I think of myself as a child and my mother's generation and my father's, obviously there are things in both that as a teenager you find absurd or you roll your eyes at, but ... I did not think of them as eating up my resources, ending the planet or making my future impossible. So that made it possible to look on their foibles — whether it was free love in the '60s or a certain kind of patriotism or whatever — with a gentle eye, because it wasn't existential.
So, to me, it makes complete sense that the discussions feel more angry or violent now, because they should [be]. If you are young and feel like you cannot rent an apartment, you cannot make your life, you cannot buy a house, you cannot start an apprenticeship, you cannot get a job — why would you not look above you and say "F- you"? That makes complete sense to me.
On the trouble with the binary of young and old
If you are young, you are absolutely going to become old. So it would seem to me not really worth making an absolutely vicious discourse out of something that you are about to enter literally before you know it, right? That's the one thing that I know now that I didn't know at 20 is that you become 50 in the blink of an eye. … There's no reason for anyone who's 20 to know that — I didn't know it. But it is true. And so that means, to me, that a certain amount of care around the issue of age should be practiced on both sides because it's one of those deep delusions that you don't realize you're in until it's too late.
On watching hours of TV every day as a child
I was, I guess, a bit of a latchkey kid 'cause my parents were working ... I watched a tremendous amount. ... I just loved it. … When you're in a household of two such peculiarly different individuals out of two alien histories, and then thirdly you're in a country which you know is your home, but many people in it don't seem to think it's your home, you're kind of looking for clues. ... I think for me TV, it was like a clue. ... I used to play, like a lot of people of my generation, spot the Black person. I was watching TV to try and find us anywhere and [was] always completely thrilled to find anybody. So that also involved a lot of old movies, a lot of American television. It was just a way of situating myself in the world.
I just don't believe in that kind of neoliberal idea of progress builds on progress. I think each group of people has to figure it out themselves and your job, if you've already been through it, is to offer supportZadie Smith
On the tensions between waves of feminism
My daughter would say I'm very judgmental. I know I am. I come from a judgmental school of feminism, passed down from my mother. Like, I still have never written the word "Mrs." on any document in my life. "Ms." is burned into my brain since I was about 5 years old. With all these things, I try to say to myself, "I am the way I am because of the way I was raised, because of the ideas I was raised around." Once I know that, then I know it's relational.
I just don't believe in that kind of neoliberal idea of progress builds on progress. I think each group of people has to figure it out themselves and your job, if you've already been through it, is to offer support. … But enforcement, as you learn as a parent pretty quickly, doesn't work. People will just go in the other direction.
On how she thinks about aging now that she's 50
I mean there's decrepitude. ... I'm speaking to you with an eye patch on because I've got macular degeneration, so I had an operation on my right eye. So there's that feeling of vulnerability. I've been so lucky, again, I'm rarely ill, rarely having any physical difficulties. So there's that shock of like, oh yeah, here it comes, this reminder of your human weakness. So there's that. Trying to work out what kind of a sick person you're gonna be. Are you gonna be the kind who talks about it endlessly on the radio? Or are you gonna be the kind who just soldiers on bravely and barely mentions it? I don't know. You find out. I always love that line of Salman Rushdie who says, "Our lives teach us who we are." That's how it is. Like you can have all kinds of ideas about who you are, but your life shows you.
Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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