The Current - Why Zadie Smith loves Billie Eilish, clubbing and third-rate novels

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Zadie Smith wonders if she's weird. She pays attention to a lot in an age when our attention has been captured and her phone-free life can be lonely. It's been twenty-five years since Zadie Smith published her widely acclaimed novel 'White Teeth'. She talks to Matt Galloway about aging, attention, clubbing, why she loves Billie Eilish, and her new book of essays 'Dead and Alive'.

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Watch free on CBC Gem. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. In an interview in 2000, the author Zadie Smith spoke with Charlie Rose about her newly released novel, White Teeth. What's your best quality as a writer? Empathy. Empathy. Yeah.

That's all I got, really. It's quite a hard thing to keep as well, because you need to be a certain kind of, remain a certain kind of person to keep it. Empathy and voyeurism, kind of two sides are the same. Well, vorism is easy, but empathy is different. You have to like looking, and then once you finish looking, you have to make an effort to understand. Sadie Smith has been looking and understanding for a while now. It has been 25 years since White Teeth was published exploding into the world.

Since then, she's published six novels, including Swingtime, NW, on Beauty, and the Fraud, as well as numerous essays. Her latest book is an essay collection called Dead and Alive, and in it she reflects on aging, attention, why she doesn't have a smartphone, and a whole lot more. Zadie Smith joins us now from London. Zadie Smith, hi. Hi, that clip is crazy.

Oh, my God. What is crazy about it? I don't, I don't know, I'm literally speechless. I have never watched that interview. I'm like 23 or something. You sound younger. Yeah, child being interviewed. television for some reason. Anyway, thank you. Thank you. It's been a hell of a year. How are you doing?

I'm okay. Yeah, I'm okay. I'm, you know, just like everyone else trying to get everything done for Christmas and just trying to get through. But I'm okay. Yeah. What about, I mean, in that clip from way back when, you talked about empathy and how you maintain empathy. How do you do that? How you keep empathy now in times like these? I mean, that part is not my problem. Like, there are other things that are my problem. And also, empathy is not, you know, a silver bullet. It's just one in a great parade of tools that you need to be a human being who functions in the world and doesn't cause too much damage.

I wouldn't overstate its power, as maybe I might have done when I was 23. You know, what's more important than relying on people's individual feelings is just creating structures, political and social structures, which enable people to behave decently. But empathy is not, that's something that I generate despite myself, even when I'd rather not. So that's not the problem. You, in the forward of this book, you note, and it's kind of obvious in some ways, what it makes sense, that a lot of the essays begin by you walking into a space and encountering something. Where does that, I mean, that's an elemental kind of basic sense of curiosity.

Where does that come from, do you think? I think most people have it, really. It's just what gets in the way sometimes is a need to defend yourself. I think that's what happens. You've become insecure. Like, for instance, if I'm walking into a novel all about love and at that moment, I have no love or I've been hurt by love, it's hard to remain open to that novel, right? You're kind of angry on behalf of the whole subject. So those are the kind of things that interrupt us.

And they're completely reasonable. It's completely reasonable to have those personal feelings as you enter the novel. But I guess I've tried on principle to always meet the object, particularly the art object, on its own terms, and not try to reshape it so it makes me feel better. Are you somebody who's always, I mean, if you're out sitting at a cafe walking down the street, Are you always somebody who's looking to see what other people are up to? Again, it's a kind of counterfactual.

Like, I guess we all assume that our way of being in the world is general, and then you learn as you get older that, oh, maybe you're weird. That's been my main takeaway from the past 25 years that I guess I do look a lot, but I thought everybody did. And I guess now it's more obvious that a lot of people aren't looking because they're usually looking at something else that's in their hand. But originally I thought everybody, look like that and and I guess I am extra curious it might just be a kind of um a symptom like I

guess when I was a kid my family was certainly something to stare at right and something to um to observe what do you mean and well because we you have a kind of very old white man a very young black girl it's a mixed race children it's 978 people are going to have a look you know they're going to stare so I think maybe I had a kind of hyper awareness of being watched or being observed and and I kind of internalized it and started looking at other people. That's one defense to being looked at. But you write a lot about paying attention. And I mean, that seems really key, not just in these essays, but more broadly.

You mentioned the fact that people aren't doing that now, that they're looking at the thing that's in their hand. What does it like to be the person who's paying attention when people don't seem to be paying attention? Sometimes it can be very lonely. But I also would say that people come back to it. Like, I don't know, there's this crazy TV show that my husband, informed me of yesterday, people in England making absolutely miniature copies of things of whole streets, houses. There's a whole school of these people who make tiny, tiny, miniaturized

furniture and miniaturized everything. I saw one glimpse of this on TV and the people doing it were not old. They were in their late 20s, late 30s. So they had come to this extreme active attention again. And I think that can happen. I think people sometimes come through their 20s and they see the life horizon coming and they think, wait a minute, what else is there to attend to? And that always fills me with excitement. I was just wondering, I wonder why the world isn't interesting enough for some people. Do you know what I mean? There's this Marilynne Robinson quotation where she talks about the world as an interesting planet.

I mean, yeah, that's the bit I really, I'm afraid I'm with Marilyn there and I'm always, I use her as an example. The world is illuminated. Like, the world is extraordinary. So it does my head in a little bit when people are like, I can't be without this thing for 15 minutes out in the world because I'll be bored. That is a wild concept when you think about it for five minutes.

But I think they genuinely feel it. But I think maybe it's being expressed in an upside down way. I think what they might mean is actually the world is extremely intense and unmediated and uncontrollable. And that can feel like too much sometimes. So then you can go back into the security of whatever it is, the scroll, the mediated image, or just a controlled area where you know what's going on. That's really interesting. I mean, that's a bit of grace that maybe I didn't expect.

I think it's more like that. The world is intense. And I, you know, I speak as someone who frequently chooses a book over reality. So I get the instinct. I'm just a couple of years older than you, but we're of the generation where, I mean, we grew up in both of these times, right? you didn't have it, and it's not just weird, just out wilding in the streets, but that you didn't have that algorithm or that thing that was shaping your reality, and now we do. What do you think people who are younger than you miss by not having that experience

of being in both places? I think it's not helpful to express it that way to them. I mean, that always drove me insane when I was young and my parents would be like, God, you should have been there at Woodstock or God, you should have been there when Marley. And I was like, well, dude, I wasn't there. So, It's not helpful to me for you to continually tell me what an extraordinary moment that was. So I don't think that's helpful, really. But I think you can make a case for the world. And I don't think it's that hard to make.

And I think what I notice at the moment is a lot of much younger people beginning to make that case. I feel, I guess, most sorry for the people who really got the full dose. I guess they're the millennials, because that was hardest. They got the full blast of it with no. caution with no with nothing but kind of tech boosterism and double thumbs up and I think they they have a right to be really angry you write in in the collection about how when you were younger I mean the internet had this promise and you loved that idea of the internet and what it was offering what happened do you think but it always had that I was remembering recently I first saw

the internet in my second year of college they put computers because it's such a fancy university So they put these like 10 computers in the basement and we were connected to a few other fancy universities I think Yale, Harvard, like the beginning of the intranet and then they gave us email addresses and only about two months into that me, someone I had a crush on and some other person who also had a crush on this person

entered into a kind of Serrano de Bergerac lying cycle where I was pretending to be this other person who was like it happened immediately we immediately use the anonymity to distort reality and to cause unbelievable emotional pain to each other so I think some of that is embedded in the whole concept of anonymity but I also remember having just the best time just the most incredible time talking to people in chat rooms

in group spaces from the other side of the world I mean that to me remains miraculous and I still to this day you know an email is my favorite thing in the world. I love email. Because of why? Because it's extraordinary to be able to communicate with someone on the other side of the world at length in a second privately, pretty much, though I'm sure email isn't as private as I wish it was.

But I can say whatever on email. I can have all the lulls that you get on social media, but it's just between me and my friends. And to me, that's ideal. I don't want to do it in public. Why would you want to do that in public? You know, one of the things that you write about is the capture of our attention by social media. You say it's the double theft that gets me the way that it makes the public private and the private public and how in doing that, the common spaces that we kind of assumed would be just part of our lives forever have been eroded. What do you mean by that, the public private and the private public?

I mean, I just, I literally, I'm not trying to be metaphorical or fancy. I'm just literally saying when you go out in public now, people are in a private space. They're not with you. They're not with you on the train, not with you on the bus. You're not experiencing anything together. They're in separate realities. And at the same point, the thing that they think is private that they're putting online is eyeballed and surveyed. Those two things happen simultaneously.

It doesn't have to be that way forever and ever. The structure of the internet as it is does not have to be like this. They can be other ways. It doesn't have to belong to four. men, it doesn't have to be a capitalist monopoly. All of these things are available for change if people want them. You talked in the book about, you addressed this room full of what, 14-year-olds and they, I mean, the conversation is supposed to be about fiction, but all they want to do is ask you about social media. And you talked about that possibility and what they could do.

You said there's a, we call it a radical and thrilling, simple act of resistance. What did you tell them about how they could change that world that they feel trapped in? I mean, it is very silly, But it did strike me that normally in enormous liberation movements, it's a lot harder, right? Like to end apartheid in South Africa takes so many marches, so much protests, boycotts, political action. Like, it's a 20, 30 year procedure. But to stop these guys, if you really want to stop them, all you have to do is take away the thing that they live on, which is our attention. And that's kind of an exciting idea to me. does seem to be already happening. Some of the dating sites are collapsing. I always had this

faith that people want joy in their lives. They want, they want human joy. And if this system continues to not provide it, and not only not provide it, but take things from so many people, at some point people will stop. There are two kinds of Canadians, those who feel something when they hear this music. And those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howley. And I'm Neil Kuxel. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens, and every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard-hitting, heartbreaking,

and sometimes hilarious news stories. Also, we have puns. Here Why As It Happens is one of Canada's longest running in most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. What about those common spaces? I mean, again, what do we lose if we don't have, and you've written a lot about the commons

and talked a lot about the threats to the commons when you were living in the United States, but it happens around the world as well. What is at stake when we don't have those common spaces that extensively bring us all together from a bunch of different backgrounds, a bunch of different ideologies in one place? I mean, there are two different, to me,

two different definitions of the commas. There's the ones you're describing, which is just about literally making fellowship with other people. But I think the one that concerns me more is economic. So I am a product of the Commons, and the Commons is a place where we agree as a society to put money in together into a pot so that the worst doesn't happen. So there is both a safety net and support.

And if we're feeling, you know, social democratic and forward thinking, we might even do things like create a health service, create basic public housing, decent public housing, and a free education system, all of which my country used to have. So, you know, you can aim for the sky if you're really interested. And that commons in which people without means, and I had no means, and I knew many people without means, have a possibility of human flourishing. And by the way, just from the pragmatic standpoint, if they do get to human flourish,

may then, as I have, add to that pot substantially, financially in other ways over time. That version of the commons is the one that matters most to me, and the one that I guess it's hard to argue with for when you don't have the other kind of comments, when you're not talking to people about what a shared space means. Are you optimistic that something like that can be? Because they are linked in some ways. You need to have people together to understand the value of those larger systems, yeah. You know, I'm just a novelist, so I'm easily patronized and called foolish or economic matters.

And I always would submit to that argument, except when I hear figures about how many billions are kept offshore in my country, for example. Then I think it's not that complicated, actually, that this math is criminal and deeply unfair. So I get tired of being told that it's some kind of distant dream or that I'm historically or economically nostalgic when people are hiding billions of taxable pounds offshore and have been for a while. And enormous companies, many of them by no coincidence tech companies, do the same. So to kind of pretend that it's such a mysterious and impossible thing is to kind of make the argument of the libertarian of the right. And I don't think it's actually that impossible. You said you're just a novelist, but I mean, you believe in the power of fiction, right? One of the things that you say in one of these essays is, like a lot of writers, I want to believe in fiction.

What do you want to believe fiction can do? I guess what it did to me, which is help shape my consciousness and my view of the world. You know, we're quite limited beings. We've got one body, one mind, one set of experiences. So on that information, you can act, but you can act. you're in a kind of limited form, right? You don't actually know what it's like for the peasant in Russia, the Palestinian child, the Gambian child.

You didn't live any of those lives. One of the things that fiction allows is some kind of entry into the experience of others. And I always find that incredibly enriching and just a pleasure, you know. But it doesn't, I'm not a kind of, I'm not a novel Nazi. Like, stories can come in different forms. I love TV. I love film. I love music.

I love narrative. And I think it can come in different forms. It can also, you know, there's a lot of digital narrative, which is amazing too. People do incredible things with their five-minute block of time on all kinds of platforms. So it's going on all the time. But I just guess it would be lovely for those creative people online if their work was liberated from some of these oppressive economic structures. I've heard you talk before about. but like looking for transcendent moments in art.

I mean, is that what you're looking for? Is that when you talk about all those different structures? Is that kind of at the heart of what you're searching for? It depends. Like I'm always, Virginia Woolf has this good line about, you know, of course there are great and transcendent works of art, but don't sleep on the second rate. Second rate novels are great too.

And also third rate novels. There's a different charm, you know, in different kinds of art practice. But yeah, of course, I guess as you get older, it gets exciting to, that's why people, start reading, you know, the brothers, Karen Ratzoff or whatever, they want to be very close to the source of something really beautiful. But I guess my experience of transcendent art is that it's always happening. I see it all the time. It amazes me. Like someone like, I don't know,

Billy Elish is an incredible example. She fundamentally changed my mind, right? Like I was thinking, well, I just thought, oh no, watching what was happening. both to all the children around me, my own children, generation of children. I was like, what will happen here if people are subjected to this from the age of 8, 9, 10? How will they survive? And I think Ilish is an amazing example of, like, it's hard. Like 13, 14, she struggled a lot. But fortunately, for all of us, she's a musical genius.

And so seeing that that can come through and cannot be dented and will survive is such a vote on the on the side of the human being. It made me so optimistic. I thought, oh, okay. What you don't want to think is, oh, it takes genius to get through alive. You don't want to think that. I want to think many people can get through alive

in their full humanity. What is it when you encounter something like that? I mean, what happens to you? Because as you said, there's... I was like, God damn. That was my first thought. I couldn't believe it. It's like listening to Billy Holiday almost,

and she must have listened to a lot of those records. The power of a human, voice. That's what she's about. At a human scale, making you attend and listen to someone who's very quiet, but has all the power in the world. That can seem like, I mean, you've said human a few different times in this conversation. That can seem, we keep talking about, I mean, AI was named the thing of the year or what have you. When you talk about humans, that can be like an act of resistance or something. I'm not ashamed to be on the side of the humans in the machine human showdown. I am absolutely.

on the side of the humans. I don't care if you call me a ludder. I don't care about any of it. I'm actually a big fan of technology, but I am on the side of the human being. Absolutely. You said as you get older, this is something you pay attention to. You recently turned 50 and you write a lot about getting older, you write, and talk about aging as well. What was that like? How are you thinking about aging? Well, the whole year up to the date was terrible. I threw in like a 10-month pity-pity for myself, which went on and on and on and on and then actually when it happened, and I'm sure this is a very common experience, it was kind of great and fine. You know, you wake up the next day and you're like, oh no, this is fine. This is going to be fine.

What are you looking forward to about getting older? Oh, gosh. I don't know. I mean, I've got more books to write, I think. I'm not sure how many, not a great deal, but a few. I would really like most people with children like to see my children What do we mean by it? Well launched. I don't think it's a work thing or just to know that they, that thing Freud said that, you know, what you're looking for life is just not to be acutely miserable. You just want to be ordinarily sad and have work and love.

That was his argument. And I absolutely agree with it. That's what I would like to see. My children are being ordinarily sad and have some work that's meaningful to them and love. So I think that would be a good thing to see. Are the things you miss about being younger? One of the pieces you talk about how you opened up iTunes and there's that jam by the young disciples, apparently nothing.

And you put it on and you put it on and it's like a time machine. What happened when you played that tune? Well, you know, I love to dance and I love to be reminded of dancing. But the only thing which makes me really sad about being older is that I want to not to be able to be in young people's spaces. Like, I want to be able to go out dancing. I don't, I would be sad not to be able to do that. But I have so many good examples.

Like, in my family, I mean, I guess they do look young, right? They're Jamaican, so they have that kind of genetic advantage over a lot of people. But they just keep going. My mom will party all night. You have to drag her out the club. I'll drag her out anywhere. I'll be home before my mother. So I have a lot of examples of just, like, continuing to have fun.

And I don't think you're ridiculous unless you feel ridiculous. And I just don't want to feel ridiculous. As long as I can dance and nobody minds, if I'm not bothering anyone. You want your kids to be dragging you out of the club? I mean, I certainly clubbed more than my kids ever will. But I'm that generation, right? That was that we grew up in those clubs. So it's still meaningful to us.

I'm going to let you go. But I just want to, one of the things I said at the beginning is it's been a hell of a year. And there's been a lot that's gone on. And there's a lot of bad news. but great things happen in that time as well. What's the best thing that happened to you this year, do you think? Oh, wow. Well, I have spoken about this elsewhere,

by I had this eye operation, so then I had to lie down for a week and during that dark period, I listened to that Rosale album, and I really did find it to be a transcendently beautiful thing that entered into the world. What's so weird about music is the week before, none of these songs meant anything to you. You didn't know anything about them.

I knew who Rosalia was, but this particular album did not exist in my mental universe. And then a week later, you know that you'll listen to these songs till the day you die. They're part of you forever. What an amazing thing. I don't think fiction really can do that. So it was a wonderful experience. And, yeah, God bless it. It'd be a trip to have to just lie down for a.

a week. It was crazy, yeah, with like tiny breaks. So you have to sit down, lie down for hours, face down, like on a massage table, and you're allowed to get up for 15 minutes every few hours. It was also very beautiful. Like I listened to Aaron Tarty Roy's book. I was really close to the source of, to extraordinary women. So it was a good, good thing in the end. And you really may only just write a couple more books, do you think? I don't believe in writing books that don't have a necessity and internal urgency. I'm never going to do it for the money. I'm never going to do it because a publisher says you have to carry on with your career. I never wanted a career. I wanted to be a writer. I'm glad I have a career. It's a great advantage in life, but it's not was never the

aim. The aim was to write the books that are inside me and when I'm done, I'm done. I have a great model for that. Ian Forster, he stopped. He didn't write for 50 years because he was done. And you have to know when that is. And I hope I will know. We'll see. Selfishly, I hope you're not done yet. Okay, thank you. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. The book, I mean, the collection is fantastic, but just you talking about art and music

and the world that we're in is also a real joy. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Matt. I really enjoyed that. Thank you. Zadie Smith is the author of six novels, including White Teeth on Beauty and The Fraud, her new book of essays,

is called Dead and Alive. Zadie Smith was in London. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.