Transcript
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Zadie Smith, writes novels and essays about contemporary life and art. She says she'd been prejudiced against historical novels, but she's just written one set in Victorian England. It's called "The Fraud." At its center is the years-long trial that ended in 1873 of a butcher who claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the missing heir to the Tichborne estate and the title of baronet. A witness who testified on his behalf, Andrew Bogle, had been enslaved on a sugar plantation in Jamaica, which was then a British colony. After enslaved people on the island were emancipated in 1834, Bogle worked for a member of the Tichborne family.
Half of the book is told through the point of view of Mrs. Eliza Touchet, a widow in an era when widows had no means of supporting themselves. She became the housekeeper for her late husband's cousin, a once famous writer who remained prolific but had lost whatever talent he had formerly possessed and was forgotten. After she gets caught up in watching the trial, she asks Bogle to tell her his story. The second half of the book is about Bogle, the man formerly enslaved in Jamaica.
The novel is based on real events and real people and examines British slavery as well as class, race, gender and fraudulence during the Victorian era. Zadie Smith is British. Her mother is Black and emigrated to England from Jamaica. Her late father was British and white. Smith became a critically acclaimed bestselling author in her mid-20s with the publication of her novel "White Teeth." Her other novels include "On Beauty" and "Swing Time." She's also a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
Zadie Smith, welcome back to FRESH AIR, and congratulations on your new novel. There's several different kinds of imprisonment or potential imprisonment in your book. There's the enslavement of Andrew Bogle...
ZADIE SMITH: Right.
GROSS: ...The possible imprisonment of the man on trial and a more existential prison of Eliza Touchet. She lives within the restrictions surrounding women during the Victorian era. But she also has a more existential imprisonment, which is a combination of her religion, her sense of what is proper, her temperament and her fear of her own instincts, including her sexual instincts. So you do get to these different forms of imprisonment and self-imprisonment. Were you imagining what it would be like for you if you lived in those times as a woman?
SMITH: I'm always having that thought, but it's a double thought. The more obvious thought, I think, is what would it be like to live in times in which I had less freedom? But there's something about that argument which is very flattering to us, right? It always assumes that there is an arrow that arcs towards progress, and we are the final and most perfected result of that system. And I don't feel that. I guess I feel both things. Obviously, at a practical level, I have less civil freedoms than in 1870 or 1850. But I was also interested in the idea is - of, what was it like to live without categories?
That really interested me - slightly prior to the invention of linguistic and conceptual categories for our experience. There must also have been freedoms contained within that. You know, it's like saying, what were the 2,000 years before photographs like? What kind of freedom is involved with not knowing your own image, with not being photographed, with only ever seeing your reflection in water or perhaps in a mirror if you had money? Freedom works both ways, you know what I mean? You gain freedoms, but you also lose things that might also have been of value. So it's that double-thought process that's in my mind when I go backwards historically. I'm not only assuming that I am the perfected version of the past. I never assume that.
GROSS: What are the categories you're talking about that didn't exist then?
SMITH: I think as I'm watching Eliza go through her life, I mean, the important thing for me to try and understand is that - I think sometimes when we're young, we imagine that the sexual practices we are engaged in or our interpersonal relations have never happened before in the history of the world. Now, that's not the case, right? So a good example is, say, something like polyamory. Looking back on Victorian marriages - like, I was reading all these books about Victorian lives - I found it so hard to find a marriage that only contained two people. Like, it was really difficult. It was amazing how many Victorian marriages involve multiple players.
GROSS: Wait. No, is that because the husband took the liberties, the freedoms available to him?
SMITH: No, not only. Of course there's some of that - not only. But there are some very complicated marital relations in the Victorian period, and some of them become visible at Bloomsbury, right? Like, that wonderful book - I don't know if you've read it yet, but the Tom Crewe book "A New Life" is about exactly that moment where some of these relationships are beginning to have language around them. And so once they have language, they can also become - enter into the legal sphere, because you need language. You need to identify a relationship in order to legally allow it, you know, to give it space in our civil society.
So his book is about a later period, but mine is about, you know, a period before there's even a language, really, for these kind of relationships. There's a famous case of Queen Victoria not thinking there needed to be any legal framework around lesbian life because she didn't believe lesbians existed, for example. So that's an example of what happens prior to language. Sometimes there are strange freedoms that can happen in the place where nothing is labeled and nothing exists, so that interested me, too. Not that, I guess, most people would choose invisibility for visibility, but it doesn't mean that there isn't something in the unspoken life.
GROSS: I remember you telling me once that when you write a novel, you're often just, like, thinking ahead on what the issues in your life might be. So like, before you were really raising children or just after they were born, you wrote a novel about what it would be like to be a parent. And I think just as you were getting married, you wrote about what it would be like to be in a marriage. And, you know, she's a widow in this. She loses - her husband leaves, in part because he realizes his wife is queer. And he takes their young son and nursemaid with him.
But he and the young son die of scarlet fever, so Eliza becomes a widow. And there's no place in the world for her, you know, because women can't really earn a living, then. They're not meant to be independent. They're not really allowed to be independent. So she becomes the housekeeper for her cousin, and she feels like a third wheel. Were you, like, thinking ahead like, what happens? I mean, obviously, you're not living in the 19th century. You're not living in Victorian England. But were you wondering, like, what happens if your husband dies before you do and you're no longer part of a couple?
SMITH: I can't say that was in my mind, but I was thinking about age for sure, about what it would - like, to be old. I think that's one of the things that is the hardest for us to imagine when we're still young. You understand it in a technical sense, but you fundamentally don't understand it. You don't believe it. You believe everybody else will get old and you, through your cult of wellness or your green juice or whatever it is, will be the unique exception to the aging and death inevitability. And I don't think anybody's quite free of that delusion.
So certainly, writing about people older than myself is a way of thinking it through. And I don't know - like, when we think about that arc of progress, if there's such an enormous progress made between women aging in the 1860s and women aging now - from what I hear from older women, women older than myself, some of the same complaints of invisibility, of being cast aside, of being forgotten, of having no place seem to still stand, no? So I don't think it's a vanished problem.
GROSS: What are some of the things you found, nevertheless, most disturbing about women's lives and restrictions in the era that you write about?
SMITH: I don't know. I have a young daughter, and when I hear people speak of - you know, we've gone through so many waves of feminism, and so it should be that we're in some kind of ideal state where a 13-year-old girl is happier than she's ever been. But anyone listening to this who has a 13-year-old girl, do you find that to be true? I'm just not convinced that all liberating arcs create existential, personal happiness the way we might hope them to, and that new problems arise. So that, again, makes you question this, to me, kind of neoliberal idea of continual progress. I don't see human life like that. I think it's a continued struggle and every generation throws up new repressions, new forces of oppression, new things that are hard for women. So, again, I don't feel that I looked back on the Victorian period with a sense of superiority. I really didn't.
GROSS: There's a relevant passage in your book I'd like you to read about...
SMITH: Right.
GROSS: ...Like, the stages of a woman's life, the way Eliza Touchet, the housekeeper, sees it.
SMITH: Mrs. Touchet is thinking about what we call the menopause, what she would have called the change and what would have been, I suppose, whispered from woman to woman. She's considering that in her own mind, and this is about that.
(Reading) The change marked, in the mind of Mrs. Touchet, the final hurdle in the lady's steeplechase - the humiliations of girlhood, the separating of the beautiful from the plain and the ugly, the terror of maidenhood, the trials of marriage or childbirth, or their absence, the loss of that same beauty around which the whole system appears to revolve, the change of life. What strange lives women lead.
I mean, I think at that point, it's 1860, but I don't see a great difference between that and 2023.
GROSS: OK. To prove that point, I'm going to paraphrase something you wrote about yourself in an essay in your collection. I think this is in your collection that you wrote during COVID. And you wrote that as a young woman, you felt that you lived in a cage of your gender and you thought that being female meant you were supposed to be tied to nature, to my animal body. I had cycles; my brothers did not. I was to pay attention to clocks; they needn't. There were special words for me lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence. I might become a spinster. I might become a crone. I might become a babe or a MILF or childless. My brothers, no matter what else might befall them, would remain men. In the end of it all, if I was lucky, I would become that most piteous of things, an old lady, whom I already understood was a figure everybody felt free to patronize, even children.
So do you feel that connection between what you wrote about yourself and what you wrote about Eliza in the 1800s?
SMITH: Yes, but what I say in that essay - what I go on to say is that that kind of thinking, which I completely cop to as a young woman, to me is a form of internalized misogyny in that the situation I'm describing is absolutely correct. But part of the response to it is then to denigrate these traditional, supposedly feminine areas of motherhood, of domesticity, whatever it is - cooking. So as if these things were not arts of life and as important as any other making or doing you do in this world. So the stating of the problem is correct in my mind. But the solution my generation of women came to in response to it, I find somewhat depressing.
And, in fact, yesterday, listening to that extraordinary woman who wrote "Braiding Sweetgrass" - is that what it's called? It's a beautiful book about nature and her relationship with nature. She expressed exactly what I wish I could say, though I don't have a good relationship with nature. But she absolutely defended the realm of the female, the realm of even the mother as a radical place. And that's something that I feel Indigenous communities know, that my original community, African diaspora, know very well. An old woman is not in any way a shameful person in the diaspora I come from. She is a person of wisdom and power. So the denigrating of these roles to me is so purely about capital and from a place of capitalism that for me to denigrate them too is to join in that concept. And I don't believe that.
GROSS: How are you able to change your mind about that and embrace things that you worried would define you in a negative way?
SMITH: Just from watching women as I got older, watching what they do and seeing that it is - it holds up the world. This is not something to be denigrated. And realizing, of course, that when I talk about it being a kind of internalized misogyny, that it's - denigration happens first in the masculine. If you see a person lying down in a forest having a baby, you must be terrified of that power. It makes perfect sense to me that you would look at that and think, I must denigrate this with everything I have because that's not a capacity available to me. That makes complete sense to me. But I am not going to then join my own voice to that denigration, because to me it is not something to be denigrated. There are so many ways you can participate in this world. Children is just one of them.
But even in, you know, very sophisticated feminist discourse, I still hear that trait of, I'm not that kind of woman, not that kind of woman who does those kind of things, those feminine things that should be put aside. And I think that was a very strong strain in my early writing, and I'm not proud of it. I think - I love to write, but I don't consider it a very, - you know, not much, much higher than the arts I see all kinds of women and men, of course, now making in their daily lives - the raising of children, the keeping of a house or whatever you're doing to continue a community. It doesn't have to be domestic. These are all participants in the art of life. And the fact that a certain kind of woman writer wants to distance herself from the traditionally feminine practices is a shame to me. I consider us in sisterhood together, working at different arts of life.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Zadie Smith. Her new novel is called "The Fraud." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE FENTON'S "IN CARE")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with novelist and essayist Zadie Smith. Her new novel, "The Fraud," is centered around an actual trial that happened in real life in 1873 in London. The trial was of a man who claimed to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to the Tichborne estate and the title of baron. And the main characters include Mrs. Eliza Touchet, whose son and estranged husband died of scarlet fever. And as a widow, her only means of support is working as her cousin's housekeeper, and he's a formerly successful, now forgotten writer.
One of the turning points in the book is when Eliza Touchet, the widow who is now a housekeeper for her cousin - she's attending the trial, the fraud trial, and the only witness on behalf of the person claiming to be the heir to the fortune is a former enslaved man from Jamaica, where he was enslaved on a British-run sugar plantation. And she takes an interest in his life and in the life of his father, who was captured in Africa and then brought to Jamaica on a slave ship. I know your mother emigrated to England from Jamaica. Before writing this book, did you know much about the history of slavery in Jamaica?
SMITH: Well, this is exactly the point. That was what interested me. I knew more about the history of slavery in America than I knew about Jamaica. And the question is, why? And looking back at my childhood visits to Jamaica and my experience in English schools, those were two places of absolute silence on the topic, to the point - which I find really embarrassing now, but also somewhat enraging - that I don't think I'm the only one - I would love to be told otherwise. But I think there were quite a lot of Caribbean children of my generation, first generation, who, if you had asked them, where did Jamaicans come from? - they would have said Jamaica. And if you said to them, who were the Taino Indians? - they would not have known. And they were, of course, the Native people of Jamaica massacred by the Spanish. So that is an embarrassing ignorance.
And at the same time, through hip-hop, through American culture, I would have known at the same age a great deal about plantation slavery in America. I may be wrong. Other people might have had different experiences. But I grew up with a mother very determined to give me a great deal of Black history. But that part, I think, both of us had a certain amount of ignorance about, from the way she had been educated and the way I'd been educated. So that...
GROSS: So her family didn't pass on stories about enslavement.
SMITH: No. I think you have to understand, in Jamaica, the brutality of the plantation system in Jamaica is like an aporia. It's like a blank space in intimate histories of families and in the history. It is - it was so brutal that I think the trauma around it is - there isn't really a language for it, to be honest.
GROSS: One of the characters in your book, her punishment is, I think, three months on the treadmill. Would you describe what the treadmill punishment was?
SMITH: The treadmill - I mean, they existed in English prisons, too. This is a class situation. So the poorest and most desperate people in both countries would have been worked on treadmills. You're tied to a moving wheel, basically, that you are moving by continually walking, like an endless step machine, while - often while being hurt, whipped if you are slow. And a great deal of blood used to pool at the bottom of these things. But that is not the novel I wanted to write. I'm not - I was not interested in repeating these almost unspeakable acts. I wanted to structure it just like it was structured in England.
So the strange timelines of this book, the short chapters, the polite conversations - I wanted to try and understand for myself and try to explain to my reader, what is it like for a society to function with this monstrosity underneath it without entirely engaging with it or being aware of it or focusing on it? So the whole purpose of the novel, in my mind, was that you're reading what seems to be a cozy, charming, funny Victorian novel until it isn't suddenly, because that's the structure of British society in the 19th century. You wouldn't have - you could come to London and drink tea and put sugar in your tea and have a very pleasant or interesting time. But this was what was underneath it.
GROSS: Let's take another break here 'cause it's time for that, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Zadie Smith. Her new novel is called "The Fraud." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JD ALLEN'S "COTTON")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with novelist and essayist Zadie Smith. Her new novel, "The Fraud," is centered around an actual trial in 1873 in London of a man who claimed to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to the Tichborne estate, and the title of baron. The main characters include Mrs. Eliza Touchet, whose son and estranged husband died of scarlet fever.
As a widow, her only means of support is working as her cousin's housekeeper. Her cousin, William Ainsworth, is a once celebrated writer who has been totally forgotten. He doesn't realize how bad his latest writing is. The other main characters are the man on trial and the only witness on his behalf, a formerly enslaved man from Jamaica. All these characters are based on real characters, as is the trial based on a real trial.
You know, one more thing I want to ask you about in this chapter is that, you know, you were talking about not learning about British colonizers enslaving Africans in Jamaica to work on sugar plantations, which brought in a lot of money to England. And you were talking about how you didn't learn about this in history, nothing about it.
SMITH: No, I don't think - I can't remember a single...
GROSS: Yeah.
SMITH: ...Lesson anywhere in my education that referred to that.
GROSS: So you know, in America, there's been much more education about slavery, you know, at every level of education. And there are attempts in several states now to shut that down, to, like, ban certain courses on African American history, to ban what's described as critical race theory - basically, to ban saying that there was systemic racism in the U.S. and systemic racism is much harder to eradicate than changing one person's mind about being prejudiced, you know? So what's your reaction to that? I know you're - you'd be reacting at a distance, but you lived in New York for a decade and only recently moved back to London.
SMITH: For me, the whole set of arguments you're describing, it's like a prepackaged binary that has nothing to do with the way I think about history. I don't believe in witchcraft, so when I'm thinking about history, I'm not thinking that the students in front of me are in any way the magical carriers of the arguments or ideas of 300 years ago. I don't think of history that way. It's not a thing in conflict in that way. So if I were teaching, for example, "Pride And Prejudice," nothing could be more natural and normal to me to hold multiple ideas simultaneously.
I adore that book. I can teach it at the level of rhetoric, at the level of character, as a history of the middle classes in England. I know exactly where Darcy's money comes from. It comes from the Caribbean. I can speak in that class about plantations in Jamaica, about the class struggle in England, about the characters themselves, about what a good sentence is, about Jane Austen. To me, that is all part of the same class, the same lesson. And nobody in my classroom in that lesson needs to feel particularly weighted or freighted with some intimate personal guilt.
What we're here to do is to interrogate history together. That is not a complicated idea in my mind. What's going on in America is a long-term consequence of a kind of binary argument that happens online and that is the opposite of thought, in my view, the opposite of history, the opposite of understanding. It's like a childish football game - you win, I lose. You did this, you did that. History is something we participate in together. We are all involved in history, and all have something to gain from understanding what happened, exactly what happened. I don't feel any guilt or superiority, either case, when I'm in a classroom.
GROSS: Don't you find it kind of ironic, you know, when we're talking about how two opposites sometimes happen at the same time or within the same chapter of the Bible? And, like, now in America, people are so obsessed with their ancestry, and they want to know their personal history. And in the meantime, history is being totally whitewashed or eradicated from many schools.
SMITH: It's a kind of magical thinking. Like, I know when I'm studying Jamaica that I could have the profound sentimental feeling and say I'm writing about my ancestors. I know I am in some sense. My family are from the next - they're from St. Elizabeth. They were on a different plantation. They're right there. And I'm - but my duty to them goes beyond the personal. I would hope the duty I feel towards them any human would feel. When I was writing that section, I'm writing - of course, my interest in it comes from the fact that my ancestry is from Jamaica. But to me, it is a human interest. And when I'm writing those pages, I want to do absolute justice to the truth - the truth, not because I feel an extra special feeling, though, of course I do. That's my intimate feeling. But that's not what I'm writing about. That's my family and my intimate life.
But when I'm writing, this is a human thing that happened. It involved everybody in Britain, and I'm writing about everybody. And I don't feel that anyone who is in my classroom, if I was still teaching, should feel anything but deep curiosity and interest in that situation. What happened? And also, just the simple duty - given that hundreds of people lived and died in pain and obscurity and under total oppression, the very least you can do is want to know it. That's the least you can do. And that's not a Black issue. That's not a white issue. I don't think in those terms. That is a human issue.
GROSS: You live in England now. I mean, you were born in England. You live in the neighborhood that you grew up in. You lived in New York for 10 years, and you've traveled a lot, too. Do you have mixed feelings about England as both your home, the place your mother emigrated to from Jamaica, but also as the colonizer of the place where your mother was born, the enslaver of your mother's ancestors?
SMITH: I guess perhaps the difference between me and, sometimes, people I come across is that mixed feelings to me are completely normal and healthy. I live in a place of mixed feelings. They don't agonize me. I just experience them as fact. But, I mean, if I wanted to...
GROSS: Can I stop you for a second?
SMITH: Yeah.
GROSS: I sometimes think there is something wrong with me if I have mixed feelings, that I have to - (laughter) that I have to, like, straighten it out - not in terms of England being colonizer and enslaver. But I don't know - I feel like it's sometimes, like, a flaw, so I'm glad to hear you say, no, embrace it.
SMITH: No, we're not children.
GROSS: Yeah.
SMITH: Yeah, adults can have two thoughts at the same time, children can't. Children find it very hard. They need one idea. But we're adults, and we can contain more than one idea. And, you know, if I wanted to defend my little, intimate life, I could say, well, now, both my parents are from poor, poor people. So it's a kind of fantasy to imagine that my father's family were the colonizers of my mother's family. They were both under the symbol of capital, both of them. My father's family are peasants going back generations and generations to Sutton Hoo, and my mother's family are peasants. So they both lived under the sign of capital, and they both were families that lived and died in total obscurity and oppression for hundreds of years. So that would protect my little intimate soul. But even if my father was from a rich or aristocratic family, I again don't believe in witchcraft. So I don't believe in the magical passing down of experience directly to me. I believe in history and the things that happened. And I'm fascinated by them, and I want to know what happened. But I don't - I'm not torn apart by the vision of my mother and my father. It just interests me. Those two histories interest me very much.
GROSS: Do you feel like you understand yourself better and your personal history by having written this novel and done the research for it?
SMITH: I found it really cathartic. I'm just going to say that. I really did. And that's probably some, you know, childish, Freudian part of me that, as you say, really wanted to know where did my parents come from and how did I come to be here. What are the historical factors that put me here? And I did find that cathartic. But I think more than understanding myself, I really understood something about money. That's the best way I can put it - about the way economics work and the way people work around them and the fact that power is a moveable force. Like...
GROSS: Yeah. Well...
SMITH: It was really amazing.
GROSS: Let me just...
SMITH: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Stop you for a second. Where do you fit into that story of capital and power? - I mean, because you come from a family where your mother and father came from poverty. You described them both as peasants.
SMITH: Right.
GROSS: Age of 24, you get a book advance of, like - was it a quarter of a million dollars?
SMITH: It wasn't, but everyone always says that, so...
GROSS: OK, that's what I've read. So...
SMITH: Let them say it.
GROSS: I'll repeat the lie.
SMITH: It was less.
GROSS: It was less. OK.
SMITH: It was less. But, yeah, go on.
GROSS: But it was enough to buy the home that you still live in.
SMITH: Yes.
GROSS: Yes. And you've been a celebrated writer ever since, an in-demand writer. You write for The New Yorker. You write bestselling novels. So it's this, like, big jump forward between where your parents came from and where your children come from now...
SMITH: Yeah.
GROSS: ...And a big step forward in your life. So now you are the person who is esteemed, who has money, who has the advantages of being famous. It might - it's not, like, movie star fame, but it's literary fame.
SMITH: Thank God.
GROSS: Yeah (laughter).
SMITH: Yeah.
GROSS: Yeah. So - but anyways, can you apply to yourself, for instance, not wanting to fall into the trap of capital that you've seen around you, not wanting to be the capitalist person because...
SMITH: That's it.
GROSS: ...Just because you've become successful.
SMITH: I'm always aware of it, but it works both ways. Like, I see people who've risen on this meritocratic wave just like me who continue to describe themselves as working-class or - I don't believe in that because, again, I don't believe in these things as identities. They are structural. I'm not working-class anymore. It's not some identity that I carry around forever because I was born into it, and I can't wave it like a flag whenever I want to. It's just not true. I don't find these things like personal identities. To me, they're structural situations, and my situation has changed. I think as anyone would tell you, when it changes, there's a long afterlife. For years and years, every time I went to a cash machine, I still have the anxiety of thinking, you know, is it going to be there, and in a shopping queue still thinking, is there enough to pay for the groceries? It lingered a long time, but it does go. And at the moment it goes, I think a good Christian would tell you your soul is in danger, right? It's the rich man and the eye of the needle. It's impossible to always keep it in mind because poverty is not a cosplay thing. It's something that happens to you, and it gets deep into your bones. And when it's over, it's over. And when you're in it, you're really in it. So it's ridiculous to claim that you can stay in the same mental space. I can't, but it is always on my mind. Would I think this if I didn't - wasn't in this situation? Do I feel this about, you know, whatever political situation because I'm comfortable? I'm always trying to remind myself of my biases. That's the best way I can put it. But it's not something I can achieve completely because no one can because the reality is the reality.
GROSS: Let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is novelist and essayist Zadie Smith. Her new novel is called "The Fraud." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR. No.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAIA WILMER OCTET'S "MIGRATIONS")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with novelist and essayist Zadie Smith. Her new novel is called "The Fraud."
So your mother is Black and from Jamaica. Your father is white - was white. He's he's deceased. He was white and from England. And you've said that in books and in films when you were growing up, you could never find yourself because the only characters like you racially were the, quote, "tragic mulattos." There's a, quote, "mulatto" in your novel. Tell us about what you wanted him to kind of represent racially.
SMITH: Well, I got to take issue with a few things. One is that I didn't find myself - I feel like talking earlier about sometimes the small benefits to be conferred by not having labels and not being represented. I think sometimes we don't think of that in America. But when I was growing up, of course it would have been nice to see people, quote-unquote, "like me." But I also got a lot out of not being represented, of being free, of being interested in whatever I wanted to be interested in. So I did find myself - but they perhaps didn't look like me - and all kinds of unlikely places.
Henry Bogle is the biracial, mixed-race son of Andrew Bogle and his wife. I try not to think of characters as representations of anything, but Henry certainly is a radical compared to other people in the book. The thing I love about him is that he's not a gradualist. He's not interested in this idea of first your rights, then your rights, then your rights, as Eliza is. You know, first working-class men, then women, then maybe we'll get to the colonies. Henry has a radical - I would say radical, socialist, Christian perspective, which is every human being is sacred. Everybody's rights are immediate and inviolable and must happen now. So I love that about him, that he is absolutely without compromise.
GROSS: Mrs. Touchet, the housekeeper, finally realizes what writing is for. She's watched her cousin, who is the person who she's housekeeper for - she's watched him write all these years. She doesn't really respect his writing, although she cares for him. But at some point, she starts writing about Andrew Bogle, the formerly enslaved man from Jamaica who is a witness at the trial. And she basically writes his life story 'cause she says to him, tell me everything about you - everything. And so when she starts writing, she says she realizes what writing is for, or at least what it was for her cousin - escape from the void, distraction. And that reminds me of something you wrote in one of your essays that you wrote during the COVID lockdown era about how many people stuck at home isolating had more time and how to figure out ways to use it. And that included you. And when asked why you write, you sometimes say it's something to do. Like when people say, during COVID, I baked banana bread. Why? It's something to do. It fills the time.
So can you talk about that feeling of - that life can sometimes be a void that needs to be filled, that time is something - sometimes we have no time at all, but sometimes it is a void that needs to be filled. But the larger thing is that life is this space that you have to fill, that you have to figure out what life you're capable of leading.
SMITH: I mean, ever since the, quote-unquote, "death of God," that's been the problem. That's not a problem anybody had in 1312, but it's a problem they have now. And, I mean, speaking for myself, I would rather write a 400-page novel than sit and think about death for five minutes. So that's how it goes for me. Like, I'm very clear about what I'm doing. So despite all the kind of, you know, highfalutin talk about presence and being present and - I find writing a kind of absolute avoidance, you know? It's what I do so that I don't have to do things I can't - can hardly tolerate.
GROSS: But it focuses the mind in a very good way. It focuses...
SMITH: It does, and that's what I think.
GROSS: It focuses your mind and distracts it from frightening, unproductive thoughts.
SMITH: Yes. And for me, it stops me thinking about myself, and that's its greatest purpose in my life. But the purpose in my life and the purpose of my books in other people's lives are two different things. I know that from being a reader, that I gain so much from reading my peers, both alive and dead. I gain so much more from it than I think they did. It's a weird act in that sense.
GROSS: Being a writer and a reader figures heavily into your novel. When the novel opens, a young man has arrived in the home where Mrs. Touchet serves as housekeeper to her cousin, a very prolific writer. And he has a huge collection of books - his own books, and, of course, everybody else who he's reading. And the floor is literally collapsing from the weight of the books. And I see that as a very funny metaphor. What is it a metaphor for? Is it about the dangers of living in books more than in the world? How - (laughter).
SMITH: You know, like a lot of things in the book, it's true. It happened. His floor fell in. So that was the amazing thing about writing this book, that instead of beginning with metaphors, as I have a tendency to do, I had all this amazing truth. So his floor really fell in. There really were too many books. It's something I worry about for myself. I also have too many books. But, yes, I guess if you ask me personally, I do slightly dread a life that only involves books and has no external content. I don't think that's a wise life, personally.
GROSS: Well, let's take another short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Zadie Smith. Her new novel is called "The Fraud." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with novelist and essayist Zadie Smith. Her new novel is called "The Fraud."
You say that people think of writing as creative, very creative. But you say writing is really about control. And you think the creative writing department where you taught should be called the controlling experience department because in the field and the real world experience has no chapter headings or page breaks or ellipses in which to catch your breath. It just keeps coming at you. Is that - so that's part of the reason why you write, to have a sense of control in life?
SMITH: I think so. Like, whenever I'm gathered with a group of people over 40 now, we just kind of sit and stare into space and say things like, what is this life? (Laughter). And I think that probably comes to everyone. You just - you - I have no idea what's going on most of the time. Like, I cannot - I can't handle life at all. But when I'm writing, it's a controlled area, and I can think things through a bit more calmly, think through ideas, feelings, sort them. But in the life, no. I'm like a merchant of chaos. I don't know what's happening. I don't know which way is up. I'm terrified of the future. I worry for - about everything. I'm just another citizen caught up in it. So the people you really need to admire, the people who are in the world facing everything we're facing and yet able to really function, get out there, do grassroots action, act, keep acting, make decisions - I am not that person. I know I'm not. I'm a writer. It's a very reduced role. And I enjoy it, and I love to do it. But it's not to be confused with people who are really able to act in the world in a positive way for others.
GROSS: So when you're in between books and you're not immersed in a novel and you're not immersed in an essay that requires deep thought, is life more difficult? Or is it more fun because you have some free time? You can go out more. You can enjoy yourself.
SMITH: For the first 10 days, it's glorious. I'm feeling very smug and happy. And I have more free time. But very soon, I become extremely anxious. And I think my children now say to me, look - because they have the language of mental health. They would say to me, you're manic depressive, or you're bipolar. And I resist. I don't think that's true. I've never been diagnosed. But they're absolutely correct that I get sad without a book, and I get energized with a book. So as I get older, I try to work on an even keel a bit more to recognize, oh, when there's not a book, I might be in some emotional trouble. I might feel anxious. And to really enter the world and make up for the things I'm perhaps not doing when I'm writing - to really be involved with people, both people close to me and in the wider world. So I just try and bring it to mind. It's much better than when I was young, where I think I just really didn't realize, and people would have to point out to me, when you don't write, you can be a pain in the arse. And now I know.
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GROSS: Well, Zadie Smith, it's been a pleasure talking with you again. Thank you so much for coming back to FRESH AIR.
SMITH: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
GROSS: Zadie Smith's new novel is called "The Fraud."
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be comic Maria Bamford. She's written a new memoir called "Sure, I'll Join Your Cult," in which she describes the lengths she's taken to fit in, from self-help books to 12-step programs and why making fun of her anxiety, depression and OCD has been a powerful medicine. I hope you'll join us.
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GROSS: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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