You are sitting there, staring at yourself on a screen, when suddenly, you’re no longer alone. Peering out from the digisphere is a true literary rockstar: the singular Zadie Smith, an author as polyphonic as her justly celebrated novels.
Taken as a collective, her essay collections, Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), Intimations (2020), and Dead & Alive—this last one, out today from Penguin Press—have charted a very complicated quarter-century. They cover an unbelievable gamut of subjects, tones, and even forms, variously examining the Golden Age of Hollywood, what the Obama Era stood for, how to live in a pandemic, and all manner of angles related to literature and art, race, the sexes, celebrity culture, and more. Central to each book is a philosophy of engagement and consideration that you see reflected in the section headings and titles themselves.
In Changing My Mind, Smith is Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering. Nearly a decade later, in Feel Free, she is In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel(ing) Free. With the ushering in of COVID-19, Intimations works differently from her other collections. It’s the work of a mournful magpie, with beautiful, unexpected moments of perception sprinkled in amid a general anxiety that seems to belong simultaneously to a different world and one not so long ago.
Dead & Alive, which arrives mere days after Smith’s 50th birthday, is marked by a thicker stripe of loss than her previous collections; there is Eyeballing, Considering, Reconsidering, Mourning, and, last but certainly not least, Confessing. In advance of release day, Smith talked to Vogue across screens, time zones, and subjects, surveying the state of the world as easily as the history of hip-hop, being at the vanguard of Chappell Roan fandom, and the allure of New York City.
Vogue: When you’re out in that world, do you consider yourself a public figure? If so, is there a responsibility associated with that?
Zadie Smith: I mean, no, but trying not to be a public figure these days is a 24/7 occupation. Even podcasts and radio, whenever I do one now, it’s actually TV and it’ll be online until the end of time. So everybody is a public figure. Ten-year-olds are public figures. Everybody is a public figure all the time and it’s so weird, the level of denial about that. I don’t want to be a public figure, but like every other citizen of the world, I find that there’s not much avoiding it these days.
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