Remembering jazz drummer and composer Jack DeJohnette

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We were shocked and saddened to hear about the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer. Tomorrow, we'll rebroadcast my recent interview with Reiner. And now let's move on to the interview I recorded last week with Zadie Smith.

My guest Zadie Smith is probably tired of hearing this next sentence, but here goes. She published her first novel, "White Teeth," in the year 2000, when she was 25. It was a critical success and an international bestseller. Just a couple of months ago, she turned 50. So instead of writing from the point of view as a young writer, she's writing from the point of view of a middle-aged woman who is, in addition to being a writer, a wife and a mother of two. Age and the new generation gaps, including between millennials and Gen X's are among the subjects she reflects on in her new collection of essays, "Dead And Alive."

She also writes about being raised by TV, watching nine hours a day, and all the warnings about the dangers of children watching TV and how that compares to children today being raised in the social media era with so many warnings about exposing children to social media and YouTube. The essays include book reviews, reflections on the visual arts, speeches and reflections about many aspects of life.

Zadie Smith, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So do you find it objectionable at this point to say, she published her first novel when she was 25?

ZADIE SMITH: No. I mean, you know, it's definitely aging, but I'm always incredibly grateful for the girl who wrote that book 'cause she enabled my entire life, so I like to hear about her.

GROSS: Good. OK. Let's start by talking about age. What subjects had the most interest for you at age 25, when you published your first book, compared to now, when you're publishing your book of essays at age 50?

SMITH: I don't think it's changed that much. I think I'm always interested in time. I'm always interested in, for lack of a better term, like, our existential experience, like, our experience on this earth. I'm always fascinated by culture of all kinds, and that hasn't really aged. Like, sometimes I think it's a bit embarrassing how much I keep up with, I don't know, music or new books or - I have a kind of voracious appetite for that kind of stuff. That's the privilege of my life, I guess. I had the opportunity to continue to be interested.

GROSS: You mentioned time. You write you're basically obsessed with time. What is that obsession like? What is it about time? What aspect of time?

SMITH: I would have assumed that everybody's obsessed with time.

GROSS: I am. I'll tell you that.

SMITH: I don't think I've ever met anybody who isn't. So I always find it strange when people think of it as particular to me because that's - I thought that's just the way people went through life. But that's another thing about writing. You find out the things that are actually peculiar to you. That's always the question you're find to get on the page. Like, is this normal? Do you feel this? And sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. So maybe my preoccupation is stronger.

And I'm sure it just has a quite boring Freudian origin, which is the very large age gap that my parents had. So I suppose, as a child, the question of time was on my mind, in a way it might not be if both your parents are 24, you know?

GROSS: How big was the age difference?

SMITH: Thirty years.

GROSS: Oh, that's a lot.

SMITH: Yeah. My mother was 20. My father was 50. Yeah.

GROSS: So growing up with parents with that age gap, did it make you reflect on things like - you know, in movies, when the male star and the female star who fall in love are 30 years apart, that often appears not to be a good look anymore.

SMITH: I mean, it was never a good look.

GROSS: Yeah.

SMITH: I'm the product of a completely inappropriate relationship, for sure. But I guess my concern as a child was more that it was - I mean, my father's been dead a very long time, but it was the nature of time travel. You know, I was living with someone who went to see "Casablanca" in the cinema, who saw Ella Fitzgerald sing live. And I was also living with someone who was only 20 years older than me, who'd come from a completely different world, different islands. So it was like space and time travel in my house. It was, you know, interesting.

GROSS: What brought them together?

SMITH: Oh, I mean, who knows? My theory is in the '70s, you could really hate someone and be married to them for 12 years, and now you could be madly in love and not make it that far.

GROSS: (Laughter).

SMITH: It was, as they say, a different time.

GROSS: I like the way you write about generational conflicts. And so I want to talk a little bit about that. How did you feel about your parents' generation versus your generation? Like, what were the gaps that you saw? Though your family is a little bit unique 'cause your father was 30 years older...

SMITH: Yeah, yeah.

GROSS: ...Than your mother. And your mother was from Jamaica and your father from England.

SMITH: So we had two generations in the same house. I mean, three, including me. Like, generational discourse is nonsense, really. That's kind of what I'm trying to write about. It's - what amused me about it recently is how vicious it's become, and I wanted to try and think about the reasons why. And I think they're perfectly valid.

But when I think of myself as a child and my mother's generation and my father's, you know, obviously, there are things in both that as a teenager, you find absurd or you roll your eyes at, but I think the absolutely key difference is structural and economic in that I did not think of them as eating up my resources, ending the planet or making my future impossible. So that made it possible to look on their foibles, you know, whether it was, you know, free love in the '60s or a certain kind of patriotism or whatever, with a gentle eye because it wasn't existential. So to me, it makes complete sense that the discussions feel more angry or violent now because they should do.

If you are young and feel like you cannot rent an apartment, you cannot make your life, you cannot buy a house, you cannot start an apprenticeship, you cannot get a job, why would you not look above you and say, you know, [expletive] you? That makes complete sense to me.

GROSS: You talk about how the binary of young versus old is crazy. Why do you think that?

SMITH: I mean, again, just as a structural fact, you know, other discourses - gender discourses, racial discourses - make way more sense because you are on the side of almost absolute division. Of course, in gender, it's not absolute. In race, more or less, if you are Black, you're not going to become white, if you're white, you're not going to become Black, barring some miracle. But if you are young, you are absolutely going to become old. So it would seem, to me, not really worth making an absolutely vicious discourse out of something that you were about to enter literally before you know it, right?

That's the one thing that I know now that I didn't know at 20, is that you become 50 in the blink of an eye. And anyone listening to this who is my age will know that to be true. There's no reason for anyone who's 20 to know that. I didn't know it. But it is true. And so that means, to me, that a certain amount of care around the issue of age should be practiced on both sides because it's one of those deep delusions that you don't realize you're in until it's too late.

GROSS: One of the things that keeps changing is language. Every generation seems to come up with new coinages, new expressions. And those are coming in and going out of style very quickly now 'cause, I don't know, time is moving so quickly.

SMITH: Right.

GROSS: Technology is moving so quickly. So as a language person, what are some of the coinages from your generation or, you know, words and expression that you chose to use at the time and still use now or still - or no longer use because they're just so out of date.

SMITH: I mean, it's one thing I particularly love, is language transformation. So I - and I live in a neighborhood where slang of all kind is how everyone speaks. It's fascinating. So I get updates, you know, practically weekly on what the word for cool is or what the word for a hot person is. You know, it transforms, it feels like, monthly. I love all of that. I think the one that irritates my children most is that a lot of British people of my generation, and maybe particularly ex-ravers - I used to love raving. And a lot of people in this country did. We have the habit of saying choon whenever a good song is anywhere. And that is mortifying to my children, and I think many children. Choon spelled C-H-O-O-N. So I try not to say that in public.

GROSS: Is that a British thing?

SMITH: It's very British, yeah, yeah.

GROSS: Oh, OK, because I haven't heard of that one.

SMITH: No, it's British and for the club crowd, yeah.

GROSS: I know, like, my father used to always use the words like lady, gal, dame and then...

SMITH: Oh, yeah. Intolerable (laughter).

GROSS: Yeah, I know. But lady is back now, like ladies.

SMITH: Yeah.

GROSS: That's a word that many women use to describe themselves now.

SMITH: No, I like lady, actually. Yeah, I like that.

GROSS: Yeah, I'm OK with it. But it has a different meaning than it did, like, when my father's generation was using it. It was very condescending, I thought, at the time.

SMITH: Right. I mean, the creativity of street-level language is something that I just find endlessly thrilling. It's a little sad as you get older as a writer because you can't include it. Like, the kind of slang and street language that is in my early novels is antique now. And so you have a choice. You can continue writing about that period. But I could never write the language my kids bring home.

GROSS: I think children tend to grow up in a different world than their parents did. Technology has changed. Language has often changed. The environment has changed. Like, my parents, they didn't live to see 9/11.

SMITH: Right.

GROSS: Or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the COVID lockdown or the first or second election of Donald Trump. And those are really, like, world-changing events.

SMITH: And sometimes one life can cover enormous change. Like, with both my parents, my father is standing in the ruins of Dachau. And then suddenly it's the '80s. And, you know, he's got a little car, and he's buzzing around a neighborhood in Willesden with a Jamaican wife and three children. That's a transformation. Or my mother, from a tiny, tiny village in absolute poverty to the same strange corner of northwest London in this completely other circumstance.

You pass through ages, historical moments, political moments. It's not easy for anyone to keep moving. And sometimes it's also, as I get older, there are things which pertain to age which I'd be happy to hold onto, rather than pretend that my mind and thought are the same as a 24-year-old's forever. That would be, in my view, a kind of bad look, like your mom dancing at a party (laughter).

GROSS: You mentioned your father at Dachau. Was he a soldier helping to liberate it?

SMITH: Yeah, he liberated it, yeah. I mean, he was 17, so that's another extreme imaginative jump, right, to imagine a 17-year-old doing such a thing. When I was 17, I was just smoking weed. I didn't do anything.

GROSS: (Laughter).

SMITH: So these are extreme differences, yeah.

GROSS: Did he talk to you about it?

SMITH: Not really. I mean, when he was very old and dying, I interviewed him about it a bit. And I wrote about that a little bit. But whatever he saw over there, he really didn't want to discuss. I know it's the old cliche, but I think the trauma was lifelong.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Zadie Smith. And her new collection of essays is called "Dead And Alive." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE WEE TRIO'S "LOLA")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Zadie Smith. Her new collection of essays is called "Dead And Alive."

You write about being raised by TV. What did you get from TV that got you to watch TV nine hours a day? And where did you find the time? You had to go to school, right?

SMITH: I went to school. But I was, I guess, a bit of a latchkey kid because my parents were working. So from 3:30, it was anybody's house. And (laughter) I did. I watched a tremendous amount. I mean, it's the early '80s, right? So TV is still relatively new. And I just loved it. I still really profoundly love television. I have to kind of, you know, keep control over it. But when you're in a household of two such peculiarly different individuals out of two alien histories, and then thirdly, you're in a country which you know is your home but many people in it don't seem to think it's your home, you're kind of looking for clues. Like, what is going on? (Laughter) That's the way I would put it.

GROSS: When you say that, you mean because your mother's Jamaican?

SMITH: Yeah.

GROSS: OK.

SMITH: I mean, this is still a period - like, for my mother when she first arrived, I mean, when they married, they went on honeymoon. They couldn't get a room together in Paris. She would try and get a room in England. And, you know, when you turned up at the door, they're like, oh, no, sorry - I was wrong about that.

GROSS: Was your father white?

SMITH: Yeah, my father was white. So you're kind of strange and you feel strange. And I think for me, TV, it was like a clue, like, what is going on. And also, I used to play, like a lot of people of my generation, you know, spot the Black person. I was watching TV to try and find us anywhere, and always completely thrilled to find anybody. So that also involved a lot of, you know, old movies, a lot of American television. It was just a way of situating myself in the world, I think.

GROSS: What shows made the biggest impression on you?

SMITH: Well, some of it's painful now. I was reading someone a few days ago talking about "The Cosby Show," which of course is now forever stained. But for me, sitting in Willesden watching this, they seemed to be rich. Like, rich Black people in a big house, somewhere I didn't know where it was, even. And he was a doctor, was he? That was all fascinating to me. I'd never seen anything like it. I had all kinds of crazy ideas about America as a consequence, as you can imagine. I now know "The Cosby Show" was not an accurate representation of the great majority of Black life at that point in America.

GROSS: And of Bill Cosby.

SMITH: And of Bill Cosby, of course. But shows like that, it was all fascinating to me, anything American.

GROSS: I want to get back to generations for a second.

SMITH: Yeah.

GROSS: And aging. So there's a section from your essay called "Some Notes On Mediated Time" that I'd like you to read. But just set up this reading for us.

SMITH: This essay came really late in the book because I do not want to be known as the lady who hated the internet, because it's not true, first of all. But I started this essay, which was meant to be just about time. And I realized my feelings about time and the way I experience it have changed over the years because of the different mediums I've been involved with. So this begins with a photograph. Me and my friends on WhatsApp are looking at a photograph of a newborn baby and realizing that the baby is now 15 and so much time has passed. And I should say, we're all in these photos, hanging out with this newborn baby.

(Reading) How young we looked, how absolutely childlike. Except we were not especially young even then. The queer kids, the club kids, the sellouts, the pro creators, the artists, the nine-to-fivers, the unemployed, the rich and the poor, the Black and the white and the neither, we and everybody we knew was 30 or thereabouts. We all still dress like teenagers, though, and in the minds of the popular culture were slackers, suffering from some form of delayed development, possibly the sad consequence of missing such key adulting experiences as a good war or a stock market crash. We defended ourselves against such critiques but privately were a bit sheepish about living at the end of history.

(Reading) We felt history belonged to other people, that we lived in a time of no time. We had some very peculiar ideas about time, generally. It was like we were incapable of properly gauging its passing. Take that moment my brother called me to announce he was having a baby, aged 27. I reacted as if he were a teenage father. Really couldn't have been more astounded. This tendency to be utterly amazed by any sign of time moving forward has continued. I don't think it's just me. It felt like all of us were 27 for the longest time, basically until we were 38. Then suddenly 40 was bearing down on us all like an avalanche.

(Reading) Time did not seem to be passing at all, really, until we moved into a new age bracket as defined by advertisers. And then it seemed to pass all at once in a great panic-inducing swoosh. We thought our lives would be reasonably paced and tell a story full of meaning. Instead, it's just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions except the certainty of death. And over the years, as each perfectly boring, predictable milestone has been met with dumbfounded shock from the first gray hairs to the menopause, I have often had the thought, did the ancient Greeks think of time this way? The Taino Indians? Do the Maasai? Are farmers and peasants and monks this amazed to be 40? Is this reality? How much of all this is mediated, and how much mediation is too much?

GROSS: Yeah. I'm wondering if this sense of life seeming to be - supposed to have a more shapely form, but it's just one thing after another - is the shapeliness - the expectation of a shapeliness, of a narrative in life and about even not necessarily thinking over yourself as getting older when you're young - do you think that's a function of having watched so much TV when you were growing up, where everything is kind of shapely, and there's resolutions?

SMITH: Yeah. That's definitely part of it. But it - I really mean that about that last question. Like, how much mediation is too much? I really don't know. Like, I wrote this book trying to ask myself that question. I think TV definitely did something to me, but it was also - it's important to think about what TV was replacing. And TV was replacing ritual, rituals which formed billions of people's lives. The things they would have done in the afternoons rather than sit in front of a TV with their dinner on their laps, the churches and mosques and synagogues they would have gone to. Ritual.

So the shape of a life used to be defined by those things, and they do bring meaning. They stand in when we don't have the words, when we don't know what to do, when we feel lost. That I think is, in fact, the biggest difference between for me being 25 and 50 is when I was 25, I used to genuinely have the feeling, what's wrong with all these ridiculous people who can't create their own meaning, who run off to these faiths or philosophies or feel they need to be charitable or do these kind of things? Why didn't they just man up? And, of course, now that thought is so repulsive to me that vulnerability and need are to be treated with contempt. But I think - I did think - I used to watch people volunteering, you know, and think, oh, they're only doing it to make themselves feel better. Well, yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

SMITH: That's the point. Yes, smarta**. That's the entire point. It feels good. It feels meaningful. That's why people do it. You couldn't have told me at 20. I was a fool.

GROSS: Let's take a short break here. My guest is Zadie Smith. Her new collection of essays is titled "Dead And Alive." We'll continue the interview after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with novelist and essayist Zadie Smith. Her new collection of essays is titled "Dead And Alive."

Getting back to generations. Do you see splits between different generations of feminists and how the various interpretations of what is freedom - for instance, in the way you dress - versus what is sexual exploitation and commercialization and objectification?

SMITH: Of course, I see it. I find it painful, though. And I don't want to engage in internecine feminist warfare ever because I just think it's pointless. Like, I see I have a daughter, of course. And, you know, I guess I have ideas about how I dress, how I present myself. I'm sure they're not hers. My daughter would say I'm very judgmental. I know I am. I come from a judgmental school of feminism, passed down from my mother. Like, I still have never written the word misses on any document in my life. Miss was burned into my brain since I was about 5 years old.

So I'm aware. But again, with all these things, I try to say to myself I am the way I am because of the way I was raised, because of the ideas I was raised around. OK. Once I know that, then I know it's relational. Like, that's me. It doesn't have to be everybody. But, you know, of course, within any movement, it's easy to get wound up by different approaches. Sometimes, I guess, as you get older, you do see people reinventing the wheel. You know, like I've just noticed some younger feminists now saying, for the first time in a while, oh, yeah, maybe, you know, having loads of plastic surgery isn't the most feminist thing in the world. Well, yeah, babe.

(LAUGHTER)

SMITH: You know, people have to come to these conclusions themselves. It takes a minute, I think. So I just don't believe in that kind of neoliberal idea of progress builds on progress. I think each group of people has to figure it out themselves. And your job, if you've already been through it, is to say - you know, offer support, say, yeah, yeah. Or when you can see something going a bit south, go, oh, maybe not. But enforcement, as you learn as a parent pretty quickly, doesn't work. People will just go in the other direction.

GROSS: I really agree with what you said about not wanting to get into inter-feminist war about, you know, opinions of what feminism really is. But I find sometimes it's hard to state differences about, for instance, what's objectification and what's freedom...

SMITH: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

GROSS: ...Without it being perceived as generational warfare. What I'd like to do is just compare perspectives and have us each understand each other's and figure out, like...

SMITH: Right.

GROSS: ...Why do we think that?

SMITH: This is what I say. The difference, I think, between my generation of feminists and some of the ones that came afterwards is that we have the concept of false consciousness.

GROSS: What does that mean?

SMITH: So the belief that you could do something and think it was something that you wanted, but it turns out it's not really exactly what you want. Like, willing is a very complicated thing. It can be influenced by how you want to seem to be, by pressures from other people, by the male gaze. There is such a thing as false consciousness. So, I mean, the ultimate example would be a feminist of my generation might say, even if this person, this particular person says she really enjoys this act which I find degrading or depressing or self-harming, even if she really enjoys it, says she enjoys it, her saying that does not end the debate because she might be under false consciousness.

Now, there's a whole generation of women who think false consciousness is just a nonsense concept. So that's fine. But I think once you understand that that's the difference, that I do believe in false consciousness because I experience it as a human being. I know that sometimes I say, I really like this, and what I really mean is I don't like this at all and I'm really unhappy. So I believe in it as a concept because I have experienced it. But if there are a generation of feminists who find that concept patronizing or hierarchical, then their feminism will go from a different point. But that's the feminism I was raised in. And that's the one that I experientially find to be true.

GROSS: Does your daughter have different views of what it means to be a feminist than you do because of the generation difference?

SMITH: I don't want to talk for my daughter. But I would say that like any good teenage daughter, anything I am, she'd like to be the opposite of. So I don't know if she would even call herself feminist. But I don't know.

GROSS: Is there any way around that? Like, why is that always so (laughter), or so often so? You know, that...

SMITH: Oh, the opposition? Yeah.

GROSS: Yeah, that children want to do the opposite of their parents. I know I did.

SMITH: That's just what it is. But I notice now, coming around the other side, that you're able to admire your parents more later. Oh, my God, these are not very new things to say. But I really experienced, like, with my own mother, the kind of oppositions we had when I was a teenager. Now, you know, you're able to see things in the round. You're able to see, look at this remarkable woman who came to a country she knew nothing about, raised children alone, for the most part. My parents were divorced pretty early.

Made her own life on very little money, then wrote a novel, for God's sake. Like, you can admire this person as an adult in a way that is harder when you're a kid, when you're kind of fighting for survival. Or that's how it feels, particularly from strong mothers. My mother is an extremely strong person and extremely strong personality. And kids find that hard. But as an adult woman, I admire it so much.

GROSS: I want to ask you a little bit more about your parents and your origin story. Can you describe a little bit what their early lives were like, to the extent that you know?

SMITH: Well, helpfully, my mother has written a novel, a quite autobiographical novel called "The Day I Fell Off My Island." She was born in very tough circumstances. She grew up extremely poor. Her mother left to work with the Windrush generation as an orderly in a hospital. And she left my mother in Jamaica. So she was alone for a long time.

GROSS: At what age?

SMITH: I think she left when my mother was about 5 and then called for her when she was about 15. It was tough. I mean, there's an extraordinary...

GROSS: Who took care of her?

SMITH: Her grandparents. And there were other kids there, but then they were called and then my mother was left alone. When she came to England, her mother didn't want her to go to school because she wanted her to look after some of the other children in the house. So my mother, who desperately wanted to be educated, left the house, went down the road looking for a school. And she found a school and said, I want to enroll here. And the guy was like, this is a private school. Do you have any money? (Laughter) My mom was like, no. So he said, well, there's a public school, you can try that. And so my mother went to the public school, told them her situation, they agreed to enroll her. They gave her a uniform, and apparently, my grandmother was furious at this, but my mother went. So that kind of will is pretty extraordinary.

But that's the background she came from. And my father, he also - they both had missing fathers, so there were no fathers in either case, and it was extreme poverty, so he left school when he was 12. And he also felt very resentful about the lack of education. He was a very smart man, I think, but he never got a chance to be formally educated the way I have been.

GROSS: What are some of the things that you learned from them that have been helpful in your life?

SMITH: That is a good question. I guess from my mother, just the power of will. She gave that to all of us.

GROSS: Did she use it against you when you wanted to do something she didn't want?

SMITH: It's not easy living in a house with two willful women, but, you know, the thing about my mother, which I actually really appreciate, and I only appreciate it by comparison now with what I understand some people feel about their mothers or - my mother was in no way neurotic. There were no, you know, crazy diets or anxiety or - my mother, from the very beginning, has always considered herself to be a tremendous person (laughter). She thinks she's beautiful. She thinks she's brilliant. That's a good thing to be raised around. Like, she was beautiful. She was an incredibly beautiful woman. And all the things that people have said to her, you know, she's very, very dark skinned. And in Jamaica, the colorism was very intense, and she was always called ugly and marga (ph) and bucktooth and all the terrible things they said to her. Somehow, she was not destroyed by these things, and she kind of walked in the world with a lot of confidence. So maybe that's what my mother taught me - kind of impervious to other people's opinions. Yeah.

GROSS: The way you're describing it, it sounds like the discrimination or distrust of her because of the color of her skin because it was, like, so dark, might have been almost worse than it was in London. And Jamaica is a majority Black population. And...

SMITH: No, I wouldn't say that.

GROSS: Oh. OK.

SMITH: You're being, you know, you're being stopped from...

GROSS: Yeah. What was she stopped from...

SMITH: ...At that point - in England, at that point, it's hard to get - even when she went to that school, there's a choice between, as they used to put it, secretarial or the academic route. And as my mom told me, every Black girl in that school was told to go the secretarial route. So that meant no university, no A levels, you learned to type. And she types very fast. But she got her degree later as an adult in her 30s. So that's a kind of structural discrimination which destorts...

GROSS: Absolutely. Yeah.

SMITH: ...Her entire life. Yeah. Colorism is all over the islands because of the history of slavery and the way those islands were run. But my mother never - I don't know. Somehow she knew she was beautiful, and she had confidence in it, and that's something she always radiated.

GROSS: My guest is Zadie Smith. Her new collection of essays is titled "Dead And Alive." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MARCO BENEVENTO'S "GREENPOINT")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Zadie Smith. Her new collection of essays is titled "Dead And Alive."

Now that you're 50.

SMITH: Yeah.

GROSS: Recently turned 50, are there new issues that you're facing in life or new ways of thinking about the future than when you were younger?

SMITH: I mean, there's decrepitude. Like, I'm - you can't see me, but I'm speaking to you with an eye patch on 'cause I've got macular degeneration, so I had an operation on my right eye. So there's that feeling of vulnerability. I've been so lucky, again, I'm barely ill, rarely having any physical difficulties. So there's that shock of, like, oh, yeah, here it comes. This reminder of your human weakness. So there's that. Trying to work out what kind of a sick person you're going to be. Are you going to be the kind who talks about it endlessly on the radio...

GROSS: (Laughter).

SMITH: ...Or are you going to be the kind who just soldiers on bravely and barely mentions it? I don't know. You find out. I always love that line of Salman Rushdie - he says, our lives teach us who we are. That's how it is. Like, you can have all kinds of ideas about who you are, but your life shows you. So I - kind of finding out as I go along.

GROSS: Do you want people to know when you're having a health issue or do you prefer to hide it?

SMITH: I am prone to self-pity when it comes to a cold, but I'm realizing when it's something more serious like this, I do kind of want to just get on with it. And, I did. And when you were a writer, the thing about being self-sufficient is very strong. You know, you do your own work by yourself. You don't need anybody. That's the whole thing. You don't need anybody. And I guess the reality of getting older is that that's just not true. You will need people. People will need you, so you have to recalibrate your brain around that new fact.

GROSS: Do you worry about who's gonna die first, you or your husband? I used to play that game about my parents, like, who's going to outlive the other, and who would be more capable of outliving the other?

SMITH: There's so much magical thinking in it. You realize that if someone actually puts the question to you, you've kind of hazily thought it'll be a simultaneous act. Well, of course, it's ridiculous. We've both done an equal amount of life-shortening things, so we'll wait and see (laughter). I don't know. You know, the main thing, I think, actually, is that - which I never would have thought when I was in my 20s, when I was so terrified of death, and all I wanted to do was live, live, live, live. Now, given all my luck and the pleasure of the work that I've done, I'm less terrified, and I feel like I've been given just about as much as I deserve. So everything else at this point is gravy.

GROSS: Why were you terrified of death earlier?

SMITH: I don't - isn't everybody? That is mysterious to me. I thought everybody was absolutely terrified and then you meet people who just seem completely chill about it, and they are a constant amazement to me. But to me, the idea of not existing, not being conscious, I just experience it as pure terror, but not so much anymore. New things are scarier, like the death of your children turns out to be a lot more scary than your own death, which I couldn't have predicted when I was young.

GROSS: Some people when they're young feel immune from death and take all kinds of risks without thinking about possible consequences.

SMITH: I mean, I've never been physically risky. Like, my view is that - as my mother would say, I thought that bungee jumping and helicopter rides were basically for rich, white people. I'm not taking unnecessary risks at this point in human history.

(LAUGHTER)

SMITH: I was never going to do any of that. But I did take all the drugs and all of that stuff. So I guess I took risks in a certain way. But yeah, no physical dare doing.

GROSS: Am I right that you fell out of a window?

SMITH: By accident, yeah, but that's not something I ever would have, you know, chosen.

GROSS: No, no, I was an accident, but people thought it was a suicide attempt.

SMITH: They did. They thought it was suicide.

GROSS: How did you fall out of a window?

SMITH: I was smoking a cigarette, which is one of the many life-shortening activities I've participated in over the decades. Yeah.

GROSS: And how did that lead you to be falling out the window?

SMITH: Because my mom had kind of laid down the law and said no more smoking. So I was trying to do it surreptitiously, and it went wrong.

GROSS: Were you injured? Was it the first floor?

SMITH: I was badly injured. Yeah. I broke my right leg very, very badly. Like, the whole femur smashed in half, and I had all kinds of smaller fractures, and I mean, it's still a thing. Like, I - people tell me I limp when it gets cold, and it certainly gives me pain sometimes.

GROSS: Were you depressed enough at that time that people had reason to suspect that...

SMITH: I think - yeah, that was the case.

GROSS: ...It was suicide? Yeah?

SMITH: Yeah, I was very, very melancholy and quite isolated, I guess. I read a lot. I stayed at home a lot. I smoke too much weed, which can make you very depressed.

GROSS: Right. Did the depression subside over time?

SMITH: I think I have my melancholies. You know, that's a permanent part of my way of being. So you get used to it. Like, I find writing pretty cathartic. I don't say it ends melancholy or depression, but it does articulate things that otherwise would just kind of sit there and bother me. So it's a way of getting things out that I do find quite helpful. But the melancholy is not going anywhere at this point. This is part of me. And life is melancholy. It would be strange not to to feel melancholy about it. There's a lot of sadness.

GROSS: Yeah. Well, I regret to say our time is up. I want to thank you so much. It's great to talk with you again.

SMITH: Thank you. And thanks. It was so lovely to talk to you again. It was great.

GROSS: Zadie Smith's new collection of essays is called "Dead And Alive."

After a short break, jazz critic Martin Johnson will have an appreciation of drummer and composer Jack DeJohnette. Martin says DeJohnette was one of the greatest jazz drummers of the past 60 years. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE SHEARING'S "GOD REST YE MERRY GENTLEMEN")

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The extraordinary drummer and composer Jack DeJohnette died in October at the age of 83. DeJohnette was one of the greatest jazz drummers of the past 60 years, and he played with a remarkable range of jazz greats, from Miles Davis and Bill Evans to Charles Lloyd and Henry Threadgill. In this appreciation, our jazz critic Martin Johnson says that DeJohnette was one of the most versatile drummers in jazz history.

(SOUNDBITE OF JACK DEJOHNETTE'S "RIGHT OFF")

MARTIN JOHNSON, BYLINE: That's drummer Jack DeJohnette kicking off Miles Davis' 1971 classic "Jack Johnson," one of the highlights of the legendary trumpeter's electric period. DeJohnette was the perfect drummer for that era. He combined the power of rock and funk with the finesse jazz. His thunderous rhythms could match the power of an electric guitar, but his delicate shadings could elevate a familiar standard into a new listening experience as he does here on "I Fall In Love Too Easily."

(SOUNDBITE OF JACK DEJOHNETTE, ET AL.'S "I FALL IN LOVE TOO EASILY")

JOHNSON: DeJohnette was born in Chicago in 1942. Originally, he played piano, an instrument he returned to on many occasions during his career. He switched his focus to drums when he was 13 years old, and he was playing professionally a year later, making the gig in rhythm and blues band, jazz ensembles and even some of the early avant-garde groups. He moved to New York in 1966, and later that year, he played with the saxophonist Joe Henderson and the pianist McCoy Tyner at Slugs' Saloon in Manhattan. DeJohnette recorded the date. It was released last year as "Forces Of Nature," a showcase of exceptional late '60s jazz.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOE HENDERSON'S "ISOTOPE")

JOHNSON: A few years later, he reunited with Henderson on his classic 1969 recording "Power To The People," which features an extraordinary band. Here's DeJohnette mixing it up with pianist Herbie Hancock.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOE HENDERSON'S "AFRO-CENTRIC")

JOHNSON: Hancock recently said of DeJohnette he always played the drums with a pianist's sense of melody, color and harmony. During the '70s, DeJohnette's drums became one of the defining sounds of the then new label ECM Records. And he appeared on many recordings in several contexts as a sideman, a coleader and as the founder and leader of bands like Directions, New Directions and, notably, Special Edition, where he was often the elder, honing and challenging younger saxophonists like Chico Freeman, David Murray and John Purcell. Let's listen to DeJohnette lead Purcell and Freeman on "Tin Can Alley."

(SOUNDBITE OF JACK DEJOHNETTE'S "TIN CAN ALLEY")

JOHNSON: Pianist Keith Jarrett was one of DeJohnette's most frequent collaborators. They played together with Charles Lloyd in the '60s, then with Miles Davis a few years later. For more than 30 years, starting in the early '80s, DeJohnette, Jarrett and bassist Gary Peacock played as the Standards Trio, reinventing classic works. It became one of the most loved bands in jazz. DeJohnette told the podcast "The American Radio Show" that the trio's longevity owed to their strategy of playing every piece as if it were new, playing it for the first time. Let's hear how he framed Jarrett's solo on "The Way You Look Tonight."

(SOUNDBITE OF JACK DEJOHNETTE, ET AL.'S "THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT")

JOHNSON: And now, let's hear DeJohnette's solo. It appears that Jarrett, who often vocalizes during his own solos, is cheering his bandmate on.

(SOUNDBITE OF JACK DEJOHNETTE, ET AL.'S "THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT")

KEITH JARRETT: Oh.

JOHNSON: In 2013, DeJohnette returned to his roots on the Chicago avant-garde scene, assembling a unique ensemble featuring several titans of the Windy City avant-garde - pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, plus saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill. The band played at the Chicago Jazz Festival, and the concert was documented on a recording called "Made In Chicago." Let's hear DeJohnette duet with Abrams, one of his early mentors, on "Museum Of Time."

(SOUNDBITE OF JACK DEJOHNETTE'S "MUSEUM OF TIME( LIVE)")

JOHNSON: DeJohnette never stopped exploring new musical vistas. He collaborated with greats like guitarist Bill Frisell and vocalist Bobby McFerrin, and he made recordings outside of jazz's wide boundaries. His 2010 release, "Peace Time," won a Grammy Award for best new age album. In 2012, he was awarded a Jazz Masters Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. DeJohnette was one of the very few drummers with the daring and musicality to open a recording with a four-minute drum solo, as he did here on his 1979 disc, "New Directions In Europe." Jack DeJohnette was one of a kind.

(SOUNDBITE OF JACK DEJOHNETTE'S "NEW DIRECTIONS IN EUROPE")

GROSS: Jazz critic Martin Johnson writes for The Wall Street Journal and DownBeat.

Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we'll remember Rob Reiner and rebroadcast the interview we recorded just a few months ago. We talked about his TV shows and his movies, his relationship with his father, Carl Reiner, a TV pioneer, and what it was like to grow up in a showbiz family and become a star himself at a relatively young age. I hope you'll join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram @nprfreshair. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF JACK DEJOHNETTE'S "SALSA FOR EDDIE G")

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