The world according to Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith was already a star in her twenties and the voice of multicultural London. More than a decade on, she splits her life between NW6 and NYC, balancing writing and teaching with motherhood. In a rare interview, she talks to Richard Godwin about marrying her best friend and what every writer can learn from Game of Thrones
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28 June 2013

An indolent summer’s day in North West London: Zadie Smith is having her photograph taken in Kilburn Park, while, all around her, the locals loll under the pale English sun. You can tell this is her manor. Her voice has a low drawl particular to NW postcodes. (‘Hey, Richard, are you bored out your tree?’ she calls between poses.) Her walk, too, is surprisingly badass. ‘It’s a Kilburn thing,’ she explains. ‘I’m not interested in looking “feminine”. I want to look “Don’t mess with me”.’

However, now that she lives in semi-exile in New York, where she teaches creative writing at NYU, the urban idyll seems to strike her afresh. ‘I do love coming back,’ she says. ‘When you’re in New York, you have this sense of apocalypse about London — and then you come back and realise that it’s not so bad. All the news we’re getting at the moment paints Britain as some kind of paedophile island.’ When she was growing up on the Athelstan Gardens estate around the corner, Smith says, ‘The only people who used this park were heroin addicts.’

A few minutes later, we are sitting in The Black Lion pub. Her jet-lagged two-month-old son Harvey is dozing in a pushchair, having been up until 5am the night before. Smith, too, proves amenable. She is supposed not to like interviews (let alone photo shoots), but ranges freely, from hip-hop to drone strikes, providing me with a long list of new writers I must read and TV I must watch. ‘Are you watching Game of Thrones?’ she says. ‘That is a masterpiece. The last episode, after it finished, we just sat in the dark for half an hour... Literary novelists would do well to learn to plot from these people.’ Every writer she knows in New York is writing a TV series, apparently.

Smith and Harvey are in town for the Women’s Prize for Fiction ceremony, while her husband, the poet and novelist Nick Laird, looks after their three-year-old daughter Kit back in New York. In the event, Smith’s latest novel, NW, misses out on the award to AM Homes’ May We Be Forgiven, but she’s happy to make the trip all the same. To share the stage with her fellow nominees, she says, was a ‘big deal’. Five out of six of them are mothers. ‘I was tormented when I was a kid because I couldn’t think of a woman writer who had a kid, with the exception of AS Byatt. It seemed like an impossibility. If there are 15-year-old girls out there who look at the Women’s Prize and realise it’s totally possible, I don’t see what’s wrong with that.’

She warms to the theme a few days after we meet, commenting on an article on The Atlantic website, which had stated that female writers should have only one child. ‘I have two children. Dickens had ten — I think Tolstoy did, too. Did anyone for one moment worry that those men were becoming too father-ish to be writer-esque?’ If this marks the second phase of her career — Zadie Smith, 37, teacher, mother, senior woman of letters — then it suits her well.

Ever since her debut novel, White Teeth, appeared in 2000, she has had to carry a lot of expectations. As if bearing responsibility for the future of the realist novel weren’t enough, her Jamaican-English heritage and council-estate-to-Cambridge-University trajectory also made her a poster girl for multicultural Britain. Even though she has been teaching at NYU since 2010, this aspect of her celebrity seems to endure. ‘My sister tells me I’m in the Evening Standard every other week. My fame seems not to require my presence,’ she notes drily.

With such high hopes (not to mention a rumoured £250,000 advance), there was an inevitable backlash. While The Autograph Man (2002) and On Beauty (2005) were successful, Smith’s own responses to them suggested that she was half-persuaded by some of her harsher critics. She was still in an undergraduate mindset, expecting to be ‘marked’, after all. ‘Next time I’m going to write something slightly more to my taste,’ she said after On Beauty — although the novel won the Orange Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. Now, she maintains this is more of a ‘personality trait’ than a rejection of her earlier work. ‘It’s total self-disgust every time. I don’t keep any copies of my books in the house — they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.’

NW was her attempt to write an ‘existential novel’, to channel her reading of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre into a modern, black, female setting. ‘Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we’re also dark people with dark thoughts. I wanted to have that on the page, as horrible as it might seem,’ she says.

Her father Harvey died in 2006, prompting what she describes as a long bout of reflection. ‘My family’s very noisy but my father was the quiet part of it. I miss that quietness.’ Then, in 2009, she became a mother for the first time, which informed the book’s ‘subconscious’ theme of fertility as well as its more overt concern with mortality. ‘There’s suddenly no one between you and death. My father’s dead, so there’s a direct route now. A few days ago, my three-year-old was messing around, saying, “One day I’ll be six and one day I’ll be seven and one day I’ll be 28.” I realised I would be 65. Me and Nick were like, “Oh my God.” This child is eating your life.’

However, despite its darker shades, NW’s warmth makes it a pleasure, much like an afternoon in a London park. The four central characters, Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan, are all supposed to have grown up close to where we meet: Leah does similar social work to Smith’s mother Yvonne; Natalie goes to a good university, just like Smith. ‘We always felt very fortunate,’ she says of her own upbringing. ‘Rich, lucky. It was only when I grew up that I realised we weren’t rich, but it was fine. We were on a nice estate, not much trouble. My school was nice. My friends were nice. My parents separated, but they managed it well.’

Now, Smith says she has all she could want as a writer and as a mother. She lives on campus in SoHo, where her fellow parents tend to be astrophysicists and economists. ‘My playground conversations are mind-blowing. I walk in and see the neuroscientist mum and think, “Oh, how embarrassing, I don’t know anything.” ’ Above all, she has the ‘higher headspace’ she needs, and an academic routine reminiscent of her time at Cambridge.

She has an enjoyable sideline in journalism, too, notably her recent interview with Jay-Z for The New York Times — an opportunity to ‘nerd out’ about hip-hop. ‘It was like talking to Chaucer — he knew everybody.’ When she filed her copy, her editor told her off because she hadn’t asked any questions about Beyoncé. ‘I literally forgot! We were so deep into the lyrics.’

Most dear to her is the community of writers in her life, which begins with her husband. She met Laird at Cambridge but only married him eight years later, at their college chapel. ‘It’s an incredible friendship,’ she says. ‘We never expected to get married but it’s very useful to be married to your friend.’ They edit one another’s work, a habit that goes back to university days. Does this never cause tensions? ‘As I’ve got older I’ve maybe got a little more sensitive,’ she concedes. ‘I’m trying to write a short story while feeding this kid, so my attention is maybe not so focused. I give him the first draft and I do get a little touchy when I get it back with yellow highlighter pen all over it.’ Still, she does the same for him. ‘We both have the attitude: “Do you want to make a fool of yourself in front of me, or in front of x amount of people?” ’

As idyllic as her New York life sounds, she hopes to return to London soon — if she doesn’t give in to a temptation to move to Istanbul (she has her eye on an academic position there). Her daughter misses her cousins; she misses her mother. Then there is her brother Ben, who has recently found fame as Doc Brown, the rapping comedian. ‘It’s amazing. I’ve just come back and my brother is a TV star.’

When she does return, she hopes it will be ‘someone else’s turn’ to represent the future of English literature. Her youthful fame was a distraction as much as anything. ‘The peace I find in New York comes because there’s less focus on me. There are 30,000 writers in Manhattan. You walk past Jonathan Franzen every other day,’ she says. Quite aside from the invitations to take part in Celebrity Big Brother and Dancing on Ice were the fashion magazines who wanted her face on the cover. ‘I did not feel beautiful. Maybe by comparison with, say, John Banville... but certainly not in normal-world terms. All I can say is that I will continue writing until I am Doris Lessing-old, and then we will see. I don’t write with my face, I write with my brain.’

At university, she says she was a ‘bluestocking... skirt down to the floor, Amish hat, massive glasses’, but she learned to appreciate pretty things when she spent a year in Rome in 2007. So, for what it’s worth, her trousers are from French Connection, her shoes from Topshop and her top a $10 vintage-store find. ‘But obviously I deeply resent you asking a lady novelist about her clothes!’ she teases. ‘I like the high street, because it looks good on me for some reason, but after this extraordinary episode in Bangladesh, I think all of us who shop on the high street need to think again. It’s just obscene,’ she adds.

She counts herself lucky to have grown up when she did. ‘Maybe I’m misremembering, but it was a good time to be a teenage girl. You weren’t hovering around in five-inch heels covered in make-up — it was big baggy jeans, T-shirts down to your knees, that was seen as hot. You felt like the equal of the boys.’ She feels that gender relations have regressed in the past five years, but prolonged exposure to students has cautioned her against being too critical of the younger generation. ‘I’m always aware of the Philip Larkin condition: England always seems to be going to the dogs when, really, you’re just probably completely out of touch. I’m in love with the England of my childhood, but who isn’t?’

Still, she was greatly troubled by the recent Woolwich killing. ‘With this Lee Rigby thing recently...’ she pauses. ‘I read the story and cried, not only for the horror of the events — which were beyond horror — but for the immediate division, the thing you feel it does to the country. It’s so painful, this asymmetrical warfare. You know the majority of people in the country are reasonable people but reasonable people don’t get heard because the maniacs are too busy screaming.’

In the past, Smith has defended her right to be called a comic novelist. ‘I have an instinct to please people, so it’s hard to do something that might cause displeasure,’ she says. I wonder if she now feels the call to engage more directly with larger issues? ‘I guess my engagement, such as it is, is that I stick with the contemporary, no?’ she says after a pause.

Certainly, she would run a mile from politics. When I ask about Barack Obama, she shudders and expresses her horror at his drone strikes, and the ‘inhuman’ decisions that anyone who enters politics must make. ‘Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error,’ she asserts, ‘because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. Individual humans are being killed by anonymous planes in the air, and artists should be interested in individual humans. I would no more give support to Obama than I would to David Cameron — the decisions they have to make are not conceivable to me.’

As for her own next move, she says it will be a total departure: a science-fiction romp. She has been reading a lot of Ursula K Le Guin. ‘It’s a concept novel. It’s the only novel I’ve ever written that has a plot, which is thrilling. I don’t know if I can do it. Those books are incredibly hard to write.’

There is that inconsistency again. ‘Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don’t, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It’s not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that. When I was young I felt I had to please everybody all the time, which is impossible as a writer. You shouldn’t even attempt it.’ ES

NW is out now in paperback (Penguin, £7.99). Zadie Smith will be in conversation at Swiss Cottage Library on 18 July at 7pm. Tickets £3 (swisscottagelibrary.eventbrite.co.uk)

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