Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Zadie Smith lives more in the world than on the page

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

London today is very different from the one Zadie Smith grew up in and the one she wrote about in her debut novel "White Teeth." That is just one of the things Smith is grappling with 25 years after her best-selling book's debut. She talks to Rachel about the difficulty of revisiting the first few pages of "White Teeth," the wisdom only teenagers possess, and fighting despair with crème brûlée.To listen sponsor-free, access bonus episodes and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Is time a positive or negative force in your life? I mean, time, if anyone who's ever read me, knows that this is my number one. Number one topic. Time, it's a complete obsession. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard. The game where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life. Questions pulled from a deck of cards.

They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one question back on me. My guest this week is the author Zadie Smith. I take it personally. Time? But also, I know that a world without limits would be an intolerable world. I've always felt there wasn't enough time. And it has to be accepted. Anyone who understands that time is here not to be battled, but to be accepted, is my hero.

I want you to think back to when you were 19 years old. hold that person in your imagination for a minute. What motivated you back then? What goals did you have? How did that version of you spend time? At 19, I was in college in Tacoma, Washington, taking a class called Physics for Poets, muddling through my first existential crisis about religion

and hanging around my boyfriend's house watching him smoke a lot of pot. Zadie Smith may have had a few parallel experiences, but when she was 19, she was also writing a best-selling novel called White Teeth. A few years passed, and in 2000, when Zadie was 24, white teeth was released into the world. It was an instant hit and won a bunch of literary awards. Early success like that can be a blessing and a curse.

Lots of doors open, but walking through them comes with all kinds of pressure. Zadie Smith put all that aside and just kept writing. There was on beauty and swing time and several others. Her most recent novel is called The Fraud. But it's white teeth that's back in the spotlight because there's a new edition, marking 25 years since it first came out. It's a story about identity and belonging, race and privilege and the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to our lives.

And it's just as relevant today as it was 25 years ago. Zadie Smith, welcome to Wildcard. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. So we're going to hop right into this game. Yeah. We're going to break it up into three rounds, memories, insights, and beliefs. And we'll get deeper as we go.

You're ready? Right. Okay. Here we go. First, three cards. One, two, or three? Um, one. One. Okay. Number one. What do you admire about your teenage self? Um, I mean, not very much, to be honest. Um, what do I admire most about my teenage self? Um, I, I was very down on myself as a teenager. So that, that is actually pretty hard to answer. I didn't really I felt very kind of isolated and alone so I think books were my

refuge a lot of the time I wouldn't have I didn't have like a trumpet to blow at that point in my life yeah and I guess when you're a teenager that's the point where things that like you know

how you look and how you socialise with people became really important and I just felt on the other side of all that you know, I felt like I was an awkward kid. So I really kind of retreated a little bit, I would say, into a world of fantasy, more or less. Yeah, books and movies and, you know, anything else but reality.

But even when with the benefit of hindsight, when you look back now on that time, I mean, you were a teenager when you started writing white teeth. So you had some talent, you had some things going on. Yeah, I had a lot of willpower, I guess, and I guess I did have talent. I, um, what did I have? I was really, I really loved books. I was really curious about the world.

I just felt myself at a remove from it. That's the best way I can put it. I just thought there's this amazing world full of beautiful people doing all these kind of things and it was my job to observe them. I think that's probably quite common in a lot of writers. You have this great love for the world, but it's hard to, fully participate for one reason or another. Right. Okay. Let's go to the next one.

Three more cards. One, two or three? Three. Okay. What have you learned to appreciate about your hometown over time? I mean, my hometown, I really be talking about my home corner, which is northwest London. There's a lot of London. I don't know very well. I'm quite ignorant of. But my corner is very beautiful to me. I mean, I, I, live on the same street I was born on, which is crazy when you think about it. Like currently? Yeah, yeah. There can't be many people for whom that's true who, you know,

in the 20th century or 21st century. Yeah, I live right. Wow. I live right where I was born. And we should just say that that was intentional because you've lived many other places. Yeah, yeah. I freely chose to return to Wilson. The thing about my neighborhood, You know, what gives white teeth it's light. And I always say, you know, if the characters in white teeth seem, you know, to be, you know, relatively cheery, it's because there are things that they can count on. Pretty decent schools, free healthcare and housing they can afford. That is what laid the foundation for the relative cheeriness of my neighbourhood.

But I'm sometimes aware, like, particularly with white teeth, that there's a kind of historical misremembering. They think that white teeth is the expression of a kind of Blairite. Tony Blair, former Prime Minister, yep. Multicultural Paradise. But Blair and everybody who came after him are the people who unpicked my neighborhood. They ended that world, you know. So when I'm in my neighborhood now, I feel the affection for what it was, a real sadness for some. some of the changes and what it's become. But I guess the kind of like burning principle of my life

is that those conditions that I grew up in are not a fairy tale. Like they are possible. And it is possible that they could return. But it needs, first you need to analyze what was lost and understand what was lost. And secondly, really think about what would it take to get us back there, you know, or get us anywhere close. I mean, is it still the multicultural, socio-economically diverse place that it was when you were growing up?

No. I mean, there are corners of it. The poor have got unimaginably poorer. There's an enormous new population of rich people, a great amount of gentrification. It's the same story you can get in Brooklyn or, you know, all over America, I'm sure. But it feels extreme if you've sat and watched it happen over, you know, a 30-year period. So no, it's not that place. And certainly for the young people growing up there, in no way it's at that place. They have no expectations of the things that I have. expected and thought of as my right. And it's not to say, by the way, that the world of white teeth is some kind of perfect paradise. Obviously, when you read the book, there are struggles, there are racial struggles, class struggles, but there is the possibility of equity and the suggestion of it. And now those things really don't exist in my neighborhood or in England generally. It was clearly important to you, though, to raise your kids there. I mean, that was part of your decision to go back. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the main reasons. I was looking for what I would define as a normal school

and I found that really hard to find in America, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Last one in this round. One, two or three? Should we ever done two? Let's do two. Also two.

Why not? What period of your life do you often daydream about? Gosh. I really had a wonderful thing. time in New York in my um in my early 30s you know I had a it was a wonderful period in my life and I I daydream about that a lot particularly spring in New York it's such a joy um this is when you were you were teaching at NYU right that's not the part that's not the part that you did to be fair it was more the evening activities um but yeah I had a lot of fun like I just met so many interesting

people I had. It was extraordinary to me to be here. I love that. Despite all the kind of dramas of my adolescence, I do think about that period a lot because it's my feeling about teenagers that they are the purest of people. I know they're ridiculous a lot of the time and I was for sure ridiculous. But they're like philosophers. like they're experiencing things for the first time they take them to heart, both their politics and their existential lives are taken so personally. So to me, that's when my life seemed most real or something.

It stays with you with clarity, both the sadnesses of it and the pains of it, but they were so acute. So I think I return to that period a lot. I guess I write about it a lot too. Yeah. No, it makes sense. I mean, you're trying to figure yourself out, and everything is just heightened, and you have a lot of new ideas.

Everything's heightened. It's so extreme. And I was never bored then. The world seemed, you know, so much to me and so present. Yeah. Are you bored now? You know, it's different. I still think I'm not easily bored because I can get a lot out of just, you know, just looking at anything, I get a lot out of just observing the world. So, and I'm understimulated, right? I'm just, if you remember how life felt in like 1987, that's where I am at.

It's a slower, it's a slower place. And so you're more in things, you know, blossom. You can get me crying at blossom or just a kid's face in the street or hearing two people argue in the subway or, you know, That's my stimulation and that's everywhere and continuing. We're going to pull back and talk about white teeth. How are you feeling, 25 years on? I mean, you know, it's very aging.

That's what I have to say about it. I mean, would you rather just like, let's just move on? I wrote that thing when I was like 19, 20, 20, 20. You know what's actually really hard if I'm just being real with you is that, you know, I'm going to be 50 this year. I'm menopausal. And it's hard to, I think what comes with these feelings is a lot of silence. You know, you feel quite quiet inside. If you had me here in the chair at 27, I'd be talking 12 to the dozen.

But I find myself much more quiet inside. So it's sometimes hard, yeah, to kind of answer to that 21-year-old girl who wrote that busy book. I love her and God bless her, but, you know, she's just not me. Yeah. You haven't, do you have occasion to go back and open it? I mean, for the anniversary, I was meant to do that. And I did, I mean, I opened it. I took a look at one page and I was like, not today, Satan.

That was kind of my reaction to that experience. So, you know, I really, I love, the thing I love about it is that teenagers love it. Teenagers pick it up and read it. And to me, that's exactly where it. it should be. That is a book for young people. And all the books for young people that exist from Catcher to, I don't know, something like Sula, Tony Morris, I love those books. I love books that are for young people and that young people respond to strongly. So I'm really delighted if White Teeth has any place in that canon of books you pick up at 15 and 16 and get excited about

literature. Nothing could make me happier than that thought. But at the same time, when it came out, it's not fair to put your words to you so many years later. But you said in a New Yorker interview, I really don't think anyone should write a first novel at my age. You said this when you were like 24. You know, I was in shock because I didn't know about this machine that goes around novel writing. You know, I was really naive.

I just didn't understand what I was getting into. So it was kind of hard to suddenly have to be, you know, a public person of any kind or someone who was meant to know things about things. I didn't feel like I knew anything about anything. So it was like a kind of catch-up. I had to play catch-up with this idea of what a writer is. But I don't get that. You say you didn't know anything about anything. But you're writing about the – I just read the book.

It was a huge hole in my literary history, but I just read it so it's on my mind. Okay, thank you for a whole. But when you were 19, 2020, how did you know what it was like to walk around the world as a middle-aged Bangladeshi man cheating on his wife and splitting up his twin? But you knew so much intrinsically about other people. I thought everybody thought that way about other people, I guess.

That's a surprise when I published it, that it seemed an unusual thing to others. But I've always operated like that. And I think for me, everything about people interest me. And I have this kind of, I don't know, just like deep affection. I know it's not very fashionable. But I kind of, you know, I like people for the most part. Yeah.

Does that mean the idea of writing a memoir is anathema to you? It's inconceivable, yeah. So are those characters? at all in your consciousness anymore? Oh, God, that's a good question. I don't know. My characters, maybe one character in each book stays with me strongly. Like, I guess in White Teeth, it might be Samad.

And on Beauty, it's definitely kiki. It might just be the person who's most well-created is the one that you feel fondness for because they seem most real. Real, yeah. And you spent the most time with them. And you spent the most time with them. I like the idea of the more kind of existing independently from me.

That seems like a wonderful thought, if it were true, if they kind of exist in the world somehow. But I don't know. Where's your creative energy focused right now? I think for the very first time in my life, I may have run out of that. We'll see. But, you know, up from the earliest stage, I've always... known exactly what I was writing, what was coming next, etc., etc., without a moment's doubt, and now, if I'm really honest, I have a lot of doubt. I don't know what is next for me.

I finished a book of essays, which comes out in October, but because I've never had a very professional outlook when it comes to writing, you know, I've only ever written because I felt I had to or felt compelled to and wanted to. I don't know. how writing will be if I don't have that feeling. But maybe it will pass. Maybe it's just something to do with midlife. I mean, as a person who is also sharing that experience of midlife, I think that's a... Yeah, it's a hard.

It's a hard moment. And you're not kind of driven on in the same way. But at the same time, whatever that retraction is of your great big shining personality, new things can come into that space. Like I find myself just enormously moved by people. Like I always was, but now it's really almost overwhelming. You know, everybody seems to me so precious. That's how I feel to have little tiny moments.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So we're going to go on. Okay. Okay. Back to the cards. So this round, we've called the Insights Round, three new cards.

One, two or three. Go for one again. One. What emotion do you understand better than all the others? Gosh. Regret. I think that's the one I know very well. May I ask one?

I think people's lives are so profoundly shot through with regret. And they don't talk about it very often, particularly in America. It's like a failure, right? Oh, it's like a four-letter word. And when people bring up the ideal of regret, you don't admit it because it's made you who you are, et cetera, et cetera. I'm always hearing people on television saying, no regrets. Sorry, not sorry. I'm like, wow, dude.

I don't believe that for one second. I am so sorry. I am so filled with regret. It must be amazing, never to feel sorry. Right. So, yeah, regret is something that I really feel. If only for the simple and selfish fact that you get one life, you know, and I'm so hungry for life that I could live it like 10 times.

And once it's, you know, it's a tough deal. May I ask if you're willing to share a thing that you wish you had done differently or that had gone differently? I just I honestly I just wish I was less selfish Writing is a very selfish thing To have done with your time And it takes up all the time

And I wish I I had done a bit less of it Or thought about what else I could have done With in that time Because it's all I did I just wrote and wrote And wrote and wrote Which is great

But there's a lot of other things in life that you can do apart from that. Yeah. It's the bummer about time. Yeah. That's kind of bound. Yeah. But it's cool. Like once I realized it, like I've taken steps.

You know, I do other things now. I'm out in my community. I'm volunteering. I'm like engaged. And it feels so much better than sitting at a desk just writing every day. It's also lonely, I imagine. Like just what that work is. It is a little bit lonely.

Like during COVID when everybody was freaking out, I took it kind of personally because it's like, wait, so the thing you hate is my life? Is my life. You hate my life. But I've been living my life for 30 years. And to you, it's the worst thing imaginable. I'm like, oh. To be sequestered at home with your thoughts. So I did take it a little bit personally, but it was a wake-up call.

I was like, this is not normal. People don't enjoy this. this thing that you do every day. You should try doing something else. Okay. I'm going to go to the next cards. One, two, or three. Three.

Three. What feels unreachable to you? Oh. At the moment, justice, and I've never had that feeling so acutely. I don't want to be in political despair but that's all I can say I've never had the feeling so acutely

of being so far from what I would call just societies yeah I'm just sitting in that answer I'm sorry it's a depressing answer it's a depressing edition of your interview but it's it's painful

it's very real it's very real and you know it's right is it's, you always have this feeling of, or fear of impotence, like what, what is it, you're doing anyway? I think every writer's a different answer to

what they're doing, but for me, I have, the thing that I've tried to insist on since I started writing and I, I'm trying to hold on to, is this sense of the sacred nature of every single human being. I absolutely, I personally don't believe that you can do politics and a just way without that comprehension. So that's the thing I'm trying to hold on to,

but it's very hard, yeah, in moments like this when you're having to deal with people who seem to have abandoned that principle. Do you feel like you want to write about it? I mean, I think in the book of essays I've just written, it's really all about that. It's just trying to rescue people from, from this flattening of themselves to restore them to the humanity. Because what I'm thinking of is how can I give people who are much better than me a concept

of the human that they can work with that will undergird their work. And, you know, the thing which won't work is deciding that half the people are just trash people. So there's nothing can be done about these trash people. That is not a just idea. it's not a socialist idea. It's not a Christian idea. It's not useful. It's not useful.

So I'm trying to find a way to give people a concept of a human that is useful, that has utility. Thank you. It's the last round. Okay. Okay, beliefs. One, two, or three. Oh, boy. Okay.

Three. Three. What's a belief you chose to let go of? I should remind you you have a skip and a flip if you are so inclined. No, it's a good question. I just need to think about it. Please, yeah. That's such a difficult one. You want me to skip it?

Maybe, yeah, to try another one. Yeah, let's do it. Go with your instinct. Okay, so I'm going to do this one. When do you think about your smallness in the universe? I cannot exaggerate how small I feel. to the universe. I don't know how to how to put that into context.

A better question is when do I think about my bigness? Yeah, that would be more. I feel it all the time. I guess I think of contingency all the time. It seems once you understand and once you know the truth that your birth is a kind of miracle but also an accident,

the possibilities of it not happening are so large. The possibility of it. of it happening in a different way. See, I'm the kind of person I am, because the kind of experiences of a have from the place I was born on, but all those things could have been otherwise in a second. It was all so incredibly contingent.

Like, you know, my father was at the Normandy landings and he didn't put his head up as the tank came to the beach, but the guy behind him did and was shot dead immediately. So there's one example of contingency. I didn't have to be here. And my mother might never have come from Jamaica and they might never have met. And so those things are always in my mind and they always keep me in the sense of a universe far larger than me. Is that unsettling for you or it's it is what it is?

No, I like it that way. Yeah. Like some of the emotions I enjoy, like I love to be lost in a massive crowd. I love carnival. I love, you know, that moment when a crowd seems almost frightening. That's what I like. Yeah, I hate that moment. You're into that moment.

I like that. I like to be with 100,000 people listening to a band and everyone goes kind of crazy. I like that. And I recognize that as a weird instinct. But I've always liked that. I'm really interested in this because, so this is what happens to me when I'm in a crowd or even walking down Midtown in New York. city, or driving down a street in Washington, D.C. and just tracking all the people who are passing me, I start to think about each life and each sorrow. Right. And I get overwhelmed. It is overwhelming,

but it's so beautiful. And I just think I, I mean, again, maybe I'm just depressed, but I find it hard to be a self. Like, I would rather be in community. I think when I'm in my novels, I get to not be one. I get to just disappear into this world of the many and it's liberating for me. That's the best way I can put it. Three new cards.

One, two or three? Two. Is time a positive or negative force in your life? I mean, time, if anyone who's ever read me knows that this is my number one, number one topic.

Time... It's a complete obsession and I take it personally. Time. Yes, but also I know that a world without limits would be an intolerable world. I know that. I know it philosophically and it's a common sense matter. I'm always amazed at these longevity tech bros on the other side of your country trying to live forever. for what, like they don't seem to know why they want to live forever. It's just a, it's just a pure

principle. It's just the goal. Yeah, just to go on and on and on and on. Just to keep going. Because you're so awesome. Right. Truly the world wants your brain forever. It's wild. That concept is wild. So I, I find it really, like, it's hard getting older. It's really, really hard. And melancholy. Tell me why. Because I love being young. and I'm really going to miss it. I'm sure you get over it. Like when I meet women, particularly in the later 50s and their 60s,

there's a lot of joy returns. But I think the moment of transition is melancholy, for sure. And I've always felt there wasn't enough time. And I've always kept extraordinarily busy thinking that I could beat time more, but you can't beat it and it has to be accepted. And all of those traditions from, you know, the Buddhists to various indigenous faiths, to the Unitarians, anyone who understands that Time is here not to be battled but to be accepted is my hero.

But, you know, I did grow up in the Anglo-American world where Time is to be defeated by superheroes in capes. You remember that image of, I remember of Christopher Reeves spinning, going around the world as fast as possible. Yes, yes. That is the archetypal image of my generation. Like, yeah, we can beat this or back to the future. We can, don't worry, we got this.

We can redo it. Or if not through fantasy, like a time machine, beat it through productivity. Yeah, productivity or interventions or tweaked. You know, it's none of that's going to work. So my thing is to try and. reach acceptance, but without pretending that it's easy. So I'm aware of it even as a kind of indulgence. But for me personally, I would like to accept time and also love it. I would like to love being an old woman and hopefully a wise old woman like in a fairy story.

But also you mentioned earlier intentionally trying to slow down. And I have most definitely made changes in my life to try to do that. And I do think it helps. It gives me some ownership over it. And I just am intentionally trying to walk, literally walk slower through the world. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. When I left New York, for the first few weeks in London, I was still walking like a New Yorker and people would be like, what the hell is wrong with you? People aren't so agro about moving through the world. It's extreme here. But also, I'm so grateful for it because it put this, as you've probably noticed, I'm prone to melancholy. In New York, I didn't even have time to be melancholic.

It just kicked my ass for 15 years every single day. And I got a lot done. But life is not just about getting things done. Yeah, yeah. Life is for living. It's not just for endless productivity and working. And I don't want to not have lived my life. And I have loved writing these books, but there's more.

More to life than, yeah, that. Yeah. Last one. One, two, or three. One. One. What is your best defense against despair? Oh, there's a few.

Dry martini with a lemon twist. Ha ha ha. It's always a good thing. Often with a creme brulee together. That's a perfect combination. All music, particularly music of Black Origin, which is almost all music in the 21st century. So all music, dancing, drugs. Are we allowed to say drugs on the radio?

Sure, yeah. Joy, all pleasure. Talking to people, I love to talk to people. Comedy, kids, you know, kids are. that, you know, it's challenging, but they are also, they're just full of the future. May I ask how old your kids are? 15 and 11. And they help.

I think it is hard, like I, particularly when I was teaching my students, I think all of us, you know, you're doing writing together. And then every now and then the subject of environmental collapse comes up. one's like, oh God, you know, it's hard. Fighting off despair is an everyday matter at the moment for everybody. It's coming at you, fast and furious. Yeah, I know. And when you're doing something which seems so tiny, like sitting in a class talking about books,

it's hard. Like, I think one of the great antidotes to despair is being involved. Like when I meet, like I work sometimes with environmental activists, and I don't find them to be despairing. I find them, like, energized and because they're involved. So that definitely must be one. solution. But it's so funny to me when I think back on my, when I was

young, when I was teenagers, I'm talking about the teenager I really don't admire. If you'd asked her, you know, why do people do that kind of work? She'd rolled her eyes and said, oh, you know, they're just trying to make themselves feel good. And now I'm like, yes, they're trying to make themselves feel good.

Yes, you're correct. That's right. That's right. That's good. And if it has an ancillary benefit of helping someone else, then great. I could not understand why people did good works. And so that's what, that's, I think that's where my, it was because we're all self-righteous at that age. So I was such a fool. So when I look back on my teenage self, I'm just like, you have no clue what this life is for and about. But she was, you know, a reader. And I thank her for that. Yeah. We end the show the same way every time. So in the memory time machine,

You pick one moment from your past that you would not change anything about, but you would like to linger in that moment a little longer. What moment do you choose? I can't believe I'm going to say this. But it's true, I think. When I fell in love with my husband, he'd been my friend for a very long time. and so I wasn't expecting that to happen but we were in Poland

because he was working in Warsaw and I don't have anyone's ever if you ever fall in love with a friend it's a very you know it's a nice Harry and Sally type thing to happen to a person but the day that it happened we were on a train and I

I remember kind of sitting in the carriage and I put my feet up on him and he was just kind of holding my feet and I remember that as a very happy day. Of course, now I've been married so long, it's annoying to say it. And please, you know, you never want to say anything to please your other half, but, um, we won't tell him that you said it. But that, that I do remember that being, yeah, a moment, a kind of blissful

moment of, um, of, yeah, happiness. I think it was a moment of extreme happiness, yeah, that it was very, it was a very blissful thing. And I, I remember it fondly. I think anyone answering that question would think of a moment of love if they were honest. Love is the joy and the reason. It's a great thing in people's lives. It doesn't have to be romantic, but it's always love. Zadie Smith, the author of many books, including White Teeth, which is marking its 25th anniversary.

Thank you so much for talking with me. Thank you. If you'd like this conversation, go back and check out my episode with the author Margaret Atwood, Both Zadie and Margaret have this uncanny ability to fully inhabit these interior lives of their characters and their experiences. Even if those characters have completely different lives than the authors themselves.

If you want more from Zadie, check out this week's Wild Card Plus, where she shares something she has recently discovered about herself. I could feel this kind of instinct in myself. Maybe it's middle age, but it's just something that happens to people, where you kind of object to various things You can hear that answer by signing up for Wildcard Plus, which is an excellent way to support our show and public radio, and listen sponsor-free.

Find out more at plus.npr.org slash Wildcard. This episode was produced by Summer Tamad and edited by Ramel Wood. It was mastered by Patrick Murray. Our supervising editor is Dave Blanchard. Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Senwen. Our theme music is by Ramteen Arablewe. You can reach out to us at Wildcard at npr. I hope you do. We're going to shuffle the deck and we'll be back with more next week. I will talk to you then.