Zadie Smith Interview: On Bad Girls, Good Guys and the Complicated Midlife

grew up in in Northwest London and you've written about it before I know you've come back to NW what is this thing about this neighborhood that you feel so strongly about I think in it certainly when you walk into it you know there's nothing probably on the surface that strikes she was particularly beautiful but maybe what's unusual about it and maybe the Danish people can relate to as they say in America I grew up effectively in a village it might not look like a village but it is very village like it was it was built as a kind of contemporary urban suburb so what would happen was you build a tube stop and then the village would kind of follow it and my part was at 1899 in the whole of that suburb was built in 1899 very quickly and it kind of stretched out along the Jubilee and metropolitan lines this way and so it's a village of people who aren't really aware of their border like context you know I really I think I put a line in the book about the map of London because when I was growing up I really thought that I lived in the centre of London and Oxford Street was somewhere in the suburbs that you went to you know for Christmas presents I was house what I thought that Street was full so it's interested me that kind of realignment in your head of a city where your part is central and important and what's meant to be central is really kind of far off on the borders for you and and then maybe it's just a matter of being in a place for long enough to think which is quite beautiful about that suburb is it's layers so if you don't look properly it just seems to you like a grubby bit of 21st century London but if you look up the buildings are from the 1890s and onwards the trade stations are from the 20s and 30s the churches are sometimes medieval going back there's a church from the 1100 in my neighborhood so in these layers of English life there despite all our attempts to tear it down and reconstruct it they continue and and it's my best chance of knowing somewhere fully now I think that is true of writers that particular English writers that they're obsessively got Hardy on one side or Nick Hornby people who have stuck to one corner one way or another but it's also a part of London which as you said was laid out but to be perhaps something else than it became yes it's it's interesting it I think it was meant to be originally kind of almost like country living though like 50 years before in like the mid-1800s you would have taken sheep and literally walked them up Kilburn high right oh you got to Bond Street I mean it's that recent really and I know when you're in it now it can seem like there's a radical break between that England and this England there's a kind of conservative mindset which makes you want to think that the change is genuinely radical and I'm retrieving and this is a New England entirely but I everywhere I look I see links sometimes very simple ones like in the language there is a thing that black teenagers say in England they say if you say will you meet me here they say I don't know it's a long traipse I got traits from here to that on a traipse all that way but that word is in fact a very old English word you know you could find it in the domesday book it's that kind of a continuity that maybe the people using the language aren't even aware of or when a young black boy says what you've been doing and his friend said nothing I'm on my Jack Jones it's another very old piece of English rhyming slang on my Jack Joan on my own so it's that kind of thing which interests me that the break isn't as radical as perhaps it looks would I be wrong if I thought when I ended reading in W that it's like a novel about novels maybe that's true one way or another I I kind of kind of person whose been built out of books and I guess I do come to a book with a very precise plan and with this one I was thinking not so much of novels really but of philosophers like trying to think what a you know there's a lot of 20th century novels which you would call existential novels one way or another and when people feel quite discontinuous with themselves or fill out of context or feel they have to invent their lives day by day a lot of French novels obviously Department but there are a lot of I guess what I want to call black existentialist novels there's always an idea that people of color are very sure about their identity because they've had to be because there were these arguments that we've had to put forward for our civil rights or to move forward but it might also be the case that people of color feel the same feelings that everybody in the twentieth century feels no disconnection I'm not saying this order boredom is a big one so I wanted to try and write about those those feelings too but with a different cost yes I'm trying to find out whether she's a likable person she's a she's a sweet person in in the way that she is so insecure about what to do and how to do but there's one thing she's extremely sure about and that is that she does not want to have a child yeah I mean oh what interested me while I was writing is I was having children and you get dragged in one way or another into the kind of culture wars around children and I began to notice something I I don't remember from my childhood and I don't remember certainly from my mother's generation of a real war about this issue if it ever comes up in an article on the Internet it'll get 700 comments of people screaming at each other about whether or not they have children or should have children and want to have children are not going to have children and it interested me that it becomes such a contested area like why why was it become such a violent matter something which had always been a private thing one way or another and and that interested me and I seem to me part of it was this sense that people had that they should intimately and profoundly desire something and of course when we talk to our mothers if you ask them did you intimately profoundly desire children they just say no I just had a child I was 20 that's what everybody did so the idea of waiting for this thing that doesn't appear and then when it doesn't appear thinking that somehow your unusual or and natural law but in fact you're asking for something which never existed before this massive passion is will I've obviously some people have always had but but there was a difference social arrangement then so things happen in an almost automatic way so that interested me and then I'm always a keen reader I work very briefly when I was young on just seventeen which is a teen magazine in England I won a competition to work on it was about 15 and it stopped me for the rest of my life reading ladies magazines but if there's a there's a section in that magazine that used to be which was about you know the personal life letters or personal stories and I was under the impression when I was a kid reading it that they were genuine personal stories but of course anyone who works magazine knows it's nonsense like the Horace yes complete monsters and the editorial team gets together and thinks for what is a good story for today that will engage the various lady readers of the magazine and I saw in a story while I was writing this book in Grazia which I'm sure is here too is in England and American all over the big personal story was about a girl who's married you know five six years and has everything is Beverly happy but she's secretly taking a pill to stop taking the pill to stop being pregnant hasn't told her husband and what interests me about it is that the editorial team knew I read it with great interest and that they had a great instinct for understanding that a million women in England would would open this story and really want to read it I'm really wanting to read it that interested me too why is that story interesting now why would anybody want to read such a peculiar tale of a woman who's pretending she wants to have children by actually not having children and the more I talk to female friends of mine I I found I think a very common experience of my generation of women who at one in the same time absolutely want children absolutely don't want them in the same breath in the same moment and they're completely sincere that it's the same feeling split in two and so I just thought that was an interesting thing really I wanted to try and document it you know when I'm writing am always trying to find some echo of the times that I'm in and and that seem to be a peculiar thing about the times that we're in this kind of schizophrenia on what used to be an easier issue but one thing is that she doesn't want to have children another thing is she has a very sweet husband who not only washes her hair but also makes love to her and yeah in general a good-looking nice man doesn't do anything wrong yeah and she cheats on him I mean not not by going out with other men but by taking he lies him and he has a great desire to have children for him it's like his his fate yes is his idea of what is the future the future is that I'm going to have children well this is something else I noticed like the culture is very the popular culture is always a little behind and always cliched noise has an agenda so if you understood the popular culture you would believe that women are running around the world desperately trying to have children pinning young men down it's not true it's the opposite is true women are running a million miles in the opposite direction trying to work and in fact when you meet men you meet a lot of very sentimental young men who want to have children you want a wife a proper wife who does things for him and so it part of a proper did yeah probably what if yeah what do they want so I think partly when you're writing it part of the job is always looking at the common sense or the received wisdom and asking yourself well is it really true and I don't think it is really true I think it's a lot more complicated than that and when you talk to people about their marriages it would be much easier if as it is in the soap operas and tele dramas everybody was being cheated on by wicked men with long moustaches but that's more accurate that's not what's happening to people's marriages other things are happening boredom and contempt and just a tedium that goes over everything it's not it's it's not that way that one person is always to blame though it's a little more complicated than that if we move over to another female character in the NW she's the friend of Lea Keisha who becomes Natalie because she changes her name and and also gets quite a nice husband wealthy one who takes her up to a different social level and she's the opposite of Lea because she really knows what she wants she wants to become a lawyer and and takes it's not easy but she does it and then some cheating on her husband as well yeah the bad girls these girls yes nasty girls boy that you know that's also kind of tyranny of novels that women always very sympathetic in them generally know well as most are most beers are that's true most readers are women and I think most women just as I do want to feel good about themselves most of a time and there's there's a whole genre of novel which is there to make you feel how what a wonderful empathetic lovely lady you are and I also like feeling that way but I don't think it's accurate all the time you know that's the problem so I just wanted to try and write something about people who is kind of the opposite of that Jane Austin's thing I love Austin and I love the idea that that women and people in general are kind of rationale operators who are always trying to reach the good and do good and bring good into their lives but looking at the evidence of human existence that isn't the overriding feeling people also try and bring darkness into their own lives and screw up their lives and create perversity everywhere and so trying to cover that as well it's important but it you know it different books have different moods when I was writing on Beauty I really wanted to write about joy you know about the experience of joy but when I was writing this I wanted to write about midlife and and how things become complicated you know because they do yeah they did but perhaps we could also talk about then the way that you described Natalie is completely different from the way you describe Leah yeah I know that the chapter on Leah has been placed as joyous as Ulysses like because it's kind of stream of consciousness and I know you've said I did not think of Ulysses for one moment while I was writing this in and saying I disagree and the fantasies yes I don't do that and I copy this room and though I can understand that but but how how did in writing this how do you change from one mood to another and it was interesting I mean the one reason for me for writing the book was to do that so it's it's hard to describe I think sometimes the readers the impetus behind writing novels like it's not really accurate to say you write on beauty because you're really interested in what happens to Howard Belle see I know what happens to how it bill see that's not that's of no interest to me that's something which is a kind of second work so for me writing the book is about in that case and on beauty's case and getting a certain kind of color to it know a certain tone and in that case it was a tone of I suppose kind of 19th century novels that I've loved that kind of all seeing author the question is can I do that that's always my question to myself and then in this book I thought can I write a book of four completely different modes and but with a story that's interlinked and so that was that's what interests me as I sit there and it's much more fun I mean it was a difficult book to write but it was nice to know at the end of Leah's section well now I'm going to go to Felix's section which is a kind of you know third-person piece of kind of classic storytelling then I'm going to do this strange thing with Natalie where it's written in numbered sections and it's when you're writing for seven years it's nice to know that you're going to leave one room and enter another know sort of just being stuck in the same room all day long but if we if we turn to Felix who's a very sweet by me actually all the men almost all young men and Isis terrible they're really nice and of all the nice men I realized Felix is perhaps the nicest even though he hasn't been given the easiest cards to play from yak Brown well you see this is very nice he he was based quite directly on me there's a flow bear story called a simple heart which is about a nice girl called felicity who then dies basically and I just the thing about flow Barre which is so striking is that he can take very fantastically ordinary people know I mean Madame Bovary is so ordinary she's almost but now all she does is cheap she's just there's nothing interesting about her as a person and yet you're so engaged and so obsessed with what's to happen to her but if I told you the story of Madame bovary's a piece of gossip you know which one housewife tells to another it lost about 35 seconds so with flow Barre I think it for him also is a kind of dare like what can I do with this material which couldn't be more suburban couldn't be more banal and he worked this wonder out of it so that's something I always love like when people ask me what my books are by I sometimes take a lot of pleasure in explaining what they're about which is basically nothing nothing happens to these books nobody does anything it's just some people they're just alive they have friends say it Mary there's nothing nothing's going to happen of any great consequence and so with Felix I just wanted to see if I could make somebody and then I guess kill them and and have you care about it there's quite a difficult thing to do in it's not a real persons with the no 30 pages that you really have to put some work into to make anybody feel that someone's been lost and you feel it you you did it I really sorry it's my to see him go I was really sorry and it was really one of my favorite bits of the book to write because it was really that there isn't a lot that's interesting about Felix really but he's so generously so kind he hasn't got any of the usual novelistic values which are more exciting you know that you have to be dramatic or clever or witty or Felix isn't really any of those things he's just a good guy and it's hard it's hard to write good guys good writes why as I say anything yeah I thought a lot about what made me so sad about losing Felix and I think it's it's because the way you write it he is he has his hopes up high yeah he really AM this is like signing off a period of his life and he has found the girl he wants to be with who makes him feel that life is worth living and he handles a difficult father and he says goodbye to a difficult mistress or girlfriend or what we should call her and then he does a beautiful thing for a pregnant woman here in the subway or the tube yeah and gets killed for it well I thought also like while I was writing this book there's an epidemic of stabbings basically in London usually of young black boys by young black boys and when you read the headlines which is usually not very big you can get the idea that's just a youth who was killed by Mother youth and it's not really your problem because you live in another part of town but if you in my case my brother's a young black men and there's so many my family my friends so every time you open the paper your heart is in your throat and also the person who's been killed is not a youth into human being with a history with family with sisters brothers friends so just trying to make that person live in somebody's imagination I really wanted to try and do that because England is a small country but a lot of the variety and it is kind of condensed I guess in London and some of the other big cities Bradford Manchester Birmingham etc but there are lot of people in the country who live in quite still quite homogenous communities who it's just a black boy who got killed in the street you know it just doesn't compute to them as a as something that's really happening or a crime or that human being is dead it's just a social incident so trying to animate that person give them a backstory given my life make them a human being but also not not save them absurdly because the boys who do get stabbed in England are often in the middle of their lives you know they're just beginning about something's about to happen they're doing their a levels they're just moving on to the next stage and they're cut down and it's it is a tragedy that was a reason to be said yeah a larger reason than then in the novel perhaps but also in the book time is different I mean you move with with time what does how to use you say that when you start out you know what you're going to write more or less but what what is time for you in a novel and well I think it's everything it's the kind of morality of the thing and it's a style of the thing the way that a writer thinks about time the time of their lives is kind of what novel writing is more or less how you pass action and behavior across time so you know maybe the novels were most familiar with a fond of that kind of mighty Satori form believe that time parcels out an equal measure to each stage of your life and kind of moves towards and ending though ending which is filled with meaning and make sense and my experience of being alive is it begins that way and then it starts to speed up intolerably particularly in your kind of mid-30s these summers as everyone knows which seemed endless I'm sure particularly Danish summers when you're nine years old by the water start to flick by in an island you don't even have time to see the your friends in one year you see them twice and you start speeding towards the grave I mean there's no other way to put it just look at racing in that direction and I hear that it gets worse and worse but I mean when I would see my father they had not long to live and I did that thing I wrote about it one point of trying to record him to tell me I don't know what I thought he was gonna tell me but one things he did say I said well what how does it feel to be 83 and he said well I don't know I blinked of 16 and I blinked and that is a really dark thought but I think when you are particularly in your teens and your 20s it doesn't feel that way now it feels like this infinite stretch so I want to try and record that experience that thing about time where it feels - it feels like it's beating up and also that feeling for whatever reason it's best left to the sociologist that my generation have of Perpetual adolescence of not being willing to move on or ready to move on not for being surprised when time has moved on and that's something I also wanted to put in a novel because I have so many friends who are literally in shock about the before I see them they cannot yeah they can't get over this is going to happen so that's interesting - that what has been I don't say it's natural or unnatural because nature changes when society changes but it's certainly the case that we had a situation where we had childhood then recently invented adolescence then you would have your children reasonably early a period of childcare and grandparents and then maybe your parents died later and things were parted out in a certain way now it happens that you are young till you're 38 you have children your parents died on the same day and then if you're lucky you get another 10-15 years its life it feels very cramped though the major part of life into a small area and I'm sure that fiction will catch up with a change now the novels will look different they'll be shaped differently cos life is shaped differently but also time is the age of the persons that you describe you have to move in in the characters time don't you yeah I I think people experience time differently I I try to make a case in this book that women experience it differently the men in various ways partly because of this biological time which no matter what happens on the kind of phenotype of society no matter how much you change laws or change circumstance we have a different biology it moves in a different way and that's the bottom line it's just the bottom line it doesn't mean things need be set up an inferior way for women but that biological timepiece within us is real and that is different than it is for men it also seems to me that for women this the existence of a thing called the menopause which is like an enormous lighted sign saying you know things are ending never happens to men which i think is a great advantage for women and a disaster for men because they don't notice and they're they're 65 and their girl is 22 and it's all a shock to them it's good to have some warning when you write about Northwest London it's of course it's a very specific place for you but it also becomes a character in itself in this book it's a lot of streets and street names and and signs and boutiques and and yeah things shops to look at and so on and sometimes it's I have when I was reading it it was almost like it was a three-dimensional novel yeah there's a lot local in it you know you can make a decision there is a kind of writing that goes on now which I for me it's not for me where because we're aware that novels are published globally and are translated globally there is a way you can kind of flatten out the pros first of all it's comprehensible everywhere in every zone you can do that you can also kind of flatten out place no so your basic international global reader traveler person and recognize you know the basic cities there's Paris there's New York they get my dear like those late Woody Allen movies here's the Eiffel Tower have you seen the Bilbao that kind of thing but but basically I like things which are really genuinely local and I think you have to have a little faith that a reader will will come to that locality and try to have it in their brain and try to comprehend it in that case Joyce is a great example because nothing could be more precise or obsessive than his Dublin but people all over the world have taken that Dublin into their hearts and their minds and it almost sounds like double double it yes doubly yeah yeah yeah that's that you need that kind of precision I think that's what I look for in fiction anyway I don't want to this kind of blank international novel I I'm not concerned with that thank you so much for coming you

Channel: Louisiana Channel

Views: 168,697

Rating: 4.8972101 out of 5

Keywords: Zadie Smith (Author), women, time, literature, novel, NW, age

Id: SIh3swyGYX4

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2013