Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: Zadie Smith Knows You're a Fraud
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emily Bazelon talks with author Zadie Smith about her new book, The Fraud. They discuss what happens when justice comes through an unjust symbol, how much Zadie does and doesn’t know about her characters, and more.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of September. I'm Emily Bazlan, one of the hosts of Slate's political GabFest. |
| 0:14.6 | Zadie Smith is the author of some novels I love, including White Teeth and On Beauty and NW. She is also a dazzling essayist. |
| 0:23.1 | Zadie is here to talk about her far-ranging new historical novel, The Fraud. The fraud begins in |
| 0:29.1 | 1873 and ranges back and forth to the 1830s. It's told mostly from the perspective of |
| 0:35.1 | Eliza Touchet, a cousin by marriage and former lover of the |
| 0:39.0 | very bad English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. He was a real person who at one point |
| 0:45.3 | outsold Charles Dickens, which he does not want anyone to forget. Eliza Tuchet is keeping house for |
| 0:50.8 | Ainsworth, his three unmarried daughters, and his young new wife, who used to be |
| 0:55.0 | the family servant. That's the backdrop for what's really the centerpiece of the story, which is |
| 1:00.1 | the Titchbourne trial. This is also an event pulled from real life. Sir Roger Titchborn was the heir to a |
| 1:06.2 | wealthy family in England who was apparently lost at sea. But wait, a man who claims to be Titchbourne, |
| 1:12.6 | who probably was really a butcher named Arthur Orton, appears in England, claims to be Sir Roger |
| 1:19.2 | Titchborn rescued. And very interestingly, the former valet of the real Sir Roger Titchborn, |
| 1:26.3 | a former slave named Andrew Bogle, shows up in court |
| 1:29.6 | to vouch for this claimant, this Titchbourne claimant. So this is a novel about truth and fiction, |
| 1:36.5 | and the central question in, I think, is who in the book is not a fraud and maybe who among all |
| 1:41.7 | of us is not a fraud. I am really pleased to be here with the novelist |
| 1:45.9 | and essayist Zaddy Smith. Zadie, welcome to GabFest Reeds. Hi. Zadie, you have said that when you |
| 1:52.6 | learned about the Titchborn trial, it felt like a gift you had to unwrap, even though you really |
| 1:57.1 | didn't want to write historical novel. Why did you feel that way? I think when I first heard the story, something about the reversal, the kind of irrational reversal |
| 2:06.5 | in the logic, that millions of poor people would support the right of a poor man to claim to be |
| 2:12.0 | a rich man, though they knew, they must have known at some level. He wasn't who he said he was. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.