The Transformations of Novelist Zadie Smith

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2023

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Novelist Zadie Smith is one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of her generation. Editor David Remnick has called her “a blessing not merely to The New Yorker but to language itself.” Author George Saunders has praised Smith’s work for its “heart and moral ambition.” I, too, think she’s quite good.

And so today we’re joined by Smith to discuss her prescient historical novel The Fraud (8:20), her instinctive writing process (14:06), and the role of projection in her work (20:30). Then, Zadie reflects on her upbringing in North West London (24:12), the art that influenced her growing up (27:15), and the media circus that followed the publication of her debut novel, White Teeth (33:45).

On the back-half, we discuss her desire to frequently reinvent herself as an artist as a writer (41:55), why she prioritized pleasure after her book On Beauty (45:17), the nuanced politics of her work (49:04), her evolving relationship to humanism (48:15), a striking passage from Intimations (54:00), and what she sees in this next generation of novelists (1:04:45).

This conversation was recorded at Spotify Studios.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San Francisco, of the most beloved authors of her generation, Zady Smith.
0:48.0	She emerged seemingly fully formed at the age of 24 when she published her debut novel White Teeth.
0:55.0	That was back in 2000.
0:58.0	Since then, she's published five more novels, three essay collections,
1:01.0	and a short story collection entitled
1:03.7	Grand Union. She's also a regular contributor to both the New Yorker and the New York
1:08.8	review of books and a former professor at NYU where she worked in the Creative Writing Department for more than a decade.
1:16.8	She's now moved back to Northwest London, where she grew up in the 1970s and 80s in a mixed
1:22.3	household. Her father English, her mother,
1:25.4	Jamaican. And it's the complicated, sometimes sordid history between
1:29.9	England and Jamaica that's at the heart of her new novel, The Fraud.
1:35.0	It's set in Victorian England around the years long trial of an Australian butcher
1:40.3	who claimed to be Sir Roger Titchbourne, the missing heir to the Titchbourne estate.
1:45.4	Although he bore little resemblance to the man he claimed to be,
1:49.4	he had one witness willing to testify on his behalf, Andrew Bogel.
1:54.4	Bogel grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation in Jamaica and continued to work for the
1:59.3	Chichbourne family, even after the people on the island, were emancipated in 1834.
2:05.8	But beyond the plot points, this is a book about the fine line between fact and fiction,
2:11.7	fraudulence and authenticity.
2:14.2	It's about our rocky relationship to history and our desire,
2:17.9	especially in 2023,
2:20.2	to distance ourselves from its more unseemly chapters.
	...

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