Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: This is talk Easy. I'm standing Fragoso. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Today. I'm joined by one of the most beloved authors
Speaker 1: of her generation, Zadi Smith. She emerged seemingly fully formed
Speaker 1: at the age of twenty four when she published her
Speaker 1: debut novel, White Teeth. That was back in two thousand.
Speaker 1: Since then, she's published five more novels, three essay collections,
Speaker 1: and a short story collection entitled Grand Union. She's also
Speaker 1: a regular contributor to both The New Yorker and The
Speaker 1: New York Review Books, and a former professor at NYU,
Speaker 1: where she worked in the Creative Writing department for more
Speaker 1: than a decade. She's now moved back to Northwest London,
Speaker 1: where she grew up in the nineteen seventies and eighties
Speaker 1: in a mixed household. Her father English, her mother Jamaican.
Speaker 1: And it's the complicated, sometimes sordid history between England and
Speaker 1: Jamaica that's at the heart of her new novel, The Fraud.
Speaker 1: It's set in Victorian England around the year's long trial
Speaker 1: of an Australian butcher who claimed to be Sir Roger Titchborne,
Speaker 1: the missing heir to the Titchborne estate. Although he bore
Speaker 1: little resemblance to the man he claimed to be. He
Speaker 1: had one witness willing to testify on his behalf, Andrew Bogel.
Speaker 1: Bogel grew up enslaved on the Hope plantation in Jamaica,
Speaker 1: and continued to work for the Titchborne family even after
Speaker 1: the people on the island were emancipated in eighteen thirty four.
Speaker 1: But beyond the plot points, this is a book about
Speaker 1: the fine line between fact and fiction, fraudulence and authenticity.
Speaker 1: It's about our rocky relationship to history and our desire,
Speaker 1: especially in twenty twenty three, to distance ourselves from its
Speaker 1: more unseemly chapters. In the case of the brutality of
Speaker 1: the plantation system in Jamaica, Smith argues that all that
Speaker 1: is required of readers of Us is curiosity, an interest
Speaker 1: in lives lived in obscurity, lives that endured a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of pain under total oppression. She had this line
Speaker 1: in a recent interview I really liked. She said that
Speaker 1: as a reader, the least that you can do is
Speaker 1: want to know that history and that is not a
Speaker 1: black issue. That's not a white issue either, She said,
Speaker 1: that is a human issue, and so fittingly, what you're
Speaker 1: about to hear is a very very human conversation. It's thorny, vulnerable,
Speaker 1: silly at times, deeply imperfect at others, as both Zadie
Speaker 1: and I try to make sense of her brilliant novel
Speaker 1: and its unnerving timeliness. In twenty twenty three, we also
Speaker 1: discuss her ever changing relationship to writing, the humanism she
Speaker 1: once believed in the politics of her work, and what
Speaker 1: she sees in this next generation of young writers. That's
Speaker 1: all coming up with my guest, the one and only
Speaker 1: Zadie Smith. I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3: So what is the what is sorry? What is the
Speaker 3: idea of this podcast? Exactly? Just people talking? That's it.
Speaker 1: No, No, I mean yes, we're gonna talk.
Speaker 3: Okay, we're gonna talk easy.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk easy. Right, Do you have any other questions?
Speaker 3: There's so many podcasts that I'm just wondering, how come, Like,
Speaker 3: what is it about your podcast that makes everyone listen
Speaker 3: to it? It's just you talking to people.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should do it. We'll see and then we'll
Speaker 1: see why one may want to listen to it.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: I love someone coming into the studio and immediately being
Speaker 1: sort of incredulous about the whole enterprise.
Speaker 3: You remind me of my friend Alex Edelman. Do you
Speaker 3: know that guy comedian? Yes, I don't know him, but yeah,
Speaker 3: you remind me of him. You have the same voice.
Speaker 3: It's funny. He's a good comedian. Well, Zady Smith, Yes,
Speaker 3: thank you for being here. Pleasure.
Speaker 1: You're in the throes of a book tour. Yes, you
Speaker 1: have the excitement on your face to prove it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, it has actually been kind of amazing. I
Speaker 3: can't complain.
Speaker 1: The writer Ian McEwan once said, yes, going on book
Speaker 1: tour is like being the blue collar employee of your
Speaker 1: former self.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I used to quote that a lot.
Speaker 1: Is that true?
Speaker 3: I mean like, sometimes if I'm signing a very large
Speaker 3: part of different books that I've written, I sometimes have
Speaker 3: feen like, who the oh I wrote? I wrote? This is?
Speaker 3: This is my fault. I think when you're in the
Speaker 3: tunnel of writing, the accumulation doesn't occur to you. I
Speaker 3: think that's really what I've noticed this time. I didn't
Speaker 3: realize how old I got, and I didn't realize how
Speaker 3: many books I'd written, because genuinely, when I sat down
Speaker 3: at the table and people brought one of each I
Speaker 3: couldn't believe it. Yeah, it's like a feeling of complete dissociation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and how did you feel being reminded of your age?
Speaker 3: It's not that, it's just that time passes so differently
Speaker 3: when you're in a room writing books. It just doesn't
Speaker 3: occur to you that years going by. I don't know,
Speaker 3: I just I'm just struck by on this tour, like
Speaker 3: I always felt like I was just getting started, and
Speaker 3: I was kind of like, oh, what am I going
Speaker 3: to do next? In this time is like? And I
Speaker 3: had to face the fact that I am no longer
Speaker 3: getting started.
Speaker 1: Well, I will tell you in preparation for this conversation,
Speaker 1: it definitely didn't feel like you were just getting started.
Speaker 3: So many books to read.
Speaker 1: I have poured through a whole lot, as you can
Speaker 1: see by my Yeah, the body of evidence here. Can
Speaker 1: we talk about a former self that wrote this new
Speaker 1: book of yours? Yes, it's called The Fraud. In the
Speaker 1: pages of The New Yorker, you wrote about your checkered
Speaker 1: history of dodging the historical novel in part because growing
Speaker 1: up in north West London with a Jamaican mother and
Speaker 1: an English father, you would spend a majority of your
Speaker 1: childhood reading quote too much Charles Dickens. I was never
Speaker 1: able to quite get out from under his embarrassing influence,
Speaker 1: as much as I've wanted to to begin. What made
Speaker 1: you stop running away from it?
Speaker 3: I think it's better described as like a revenge on
Speaker 3: the historical novel or an explosion of it. You know,
Speaker 3: it's not really like a historical novel quite so. Once
Speaker 3: I realized what I wanted to do with that history,
Speaker 3: then I was all in. I really enjoyed it. It
Speaker 3: was a fantastic experience.
Speaker 1: What did you want to do?
Speaker 3: I I wanted to uncover something for my own kind
Speaker 3: of mental health and interest. I wanted to know what
Speaker 3: the relationship was between England and Jamaica, what the real
Speaker 3: relationship is between England Jamaica. And that was kind of
Speaker 3: at the heart of the book. And you know, that's
Speaker 3: a Freudian question on my part, but it's also a
Speaker 3: historical question, a political question, and it was just fascinating
Speaker 3: working on it and thinking about it to that degree.
Speaker 1: To set it up for people who haven't read it right,
Speaker 1: that education that you were trying to attain, it's one
Speaker 1: that wasn't taught to you in school, right.
Speaker 3: No, it wasn't taught in school, And there's a lot
Speaker 3: of things about English life you don't really learn in school. No,
Speaker 3: there was no history of that kind. And then I
Speaker 3: guess writing this book, I realized that the history, there's
Speaker 3: the obvious case that, oh, they don't talk about slavery
Speaker 3: in British school. Well that's perfectly obvious and annoying enough
Speaker 3: as it is. But what they also don't talk about
Speaker 3: is two hundred years of radical, mostly working class activism
Speaker 3: in England in opposition to not only forced labor, but
Speaker 3: all kinds of oppressive labor, both in England and in
Speaker 3: the Caribbean. So you kind of miss out on both stories,
Speaker 3: both a story of what happened and the story of
Speaker 3: the challenges to what happened.
Speaker 1: So in Unpacking the book, where do we begin in
Speaker 1: terms of describing what happened at.
Speaker 3: The heart of it? It begins kind of somewhere else.
Speaker 3: In this crazy court case about a rich Catholic aristocrat
Speaker 3: called Sir Roger Titchborne, who was a young man a
Speaker 3: bit younger than you, Sam went missing at sea and
Speaker 3: his mother desperately going to find him and put out
Speaker 3: a kind of advert saying I'll give you X amount
Speaker 3: of money if you can find my son and return
Speaker 3: my son. His adverts went all over the world world
Speaker 3: one went to Australia and a man there read it.
Speaker 3: He was not a tall, skinny, young Catholic aristocrat. He
Speaker 3: was three hundred pounds, He was working class. He didn't
Speaker 3: speak French. This is what sir Rogers spoke. He in
Speaker 3: no way seemed to be this man. But he turned
Speaker 3: up in London with a black man with him, a
Speaker 3: guy called Andrew Bogel, who previously enslaved and was a
Speaker 3: servant of the Titchborne family for years. And together these
Speaker 3: two men said this is he. This is Roger Titchborne.
Speaker 3: And Andrew said, I swear it is. And it started
Speaker 3: this enormous court case because the mother accepted them for
Speaker 3: whatever reason. Then the mother died. So that case is
Speaker 3: kind of what began my fascination. First, the idea that
Speaker 3: a recently enslaved man is given testimony in court for
Speaker 3: like almost three years. That was the first kind of
Speaker 3: fascinating fact to me, partially because I think I'd lived
Speaker 3: in America for so long I'd forgotten the key differences
Speaker 3: between England and America in this period, which one is
Speaker 3: that the English plantations were sure, which is key to
Speaker 3: the whole mentality of English people. But also there are
Speaker 3: no racialized laws in England. They just don't exist. So
Speaker 3: it's the difference between being legislated against or being practically invisible,
Speaker 3: you know. So there's no way a black man could
Speaker 3: sit in an American court in eighteen seventy three and give
Speaker 3: evidence against white people. That's not something that could happen.
Speaker 3: But in England it was perfectly possible. And not only
Speaker 3: did he give this evidence for three years, he became
Speaker 3: a kind of national hero. And I was just really
Speaker 3: interested in what psychologically was going on in that case
Speaker 3: and in England at that time.
Speaker 1: Your description of him as a national hero, Yeah, not
Speaker 1: to make it all about America, but does sound unnervingly
Speaker 1: similar to a certain someone who was president for a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that guy, I mean, there is that guy. But
Speaker 3: that is a case of right wing populism. And this
Speaker 3: really is a case of left wing populism, because what
Speaker 3: the people of England were interested in was the fact
Speaker 3: that the courts almost more like the OJK. So these
Speaker 3: courts are fundamentally unjust in the English case, they were
Speaker 3: constantly sending working class boys to Australia because they'd stolen
Speaker 3: a piece of bread. That was a common enough punishment.
Speaker 3: You could also get hung for stealing a sheep. You know,
Speaker 3: these crimes were small and punished brutally by an aristocratic
Speaker 3: court system. So for the first time they saw these
Speaker 3: two obviously working class guys, one black and white, trying
Speaker 3: to fuck the system basically, and it was that which
Speaker 3: really entertained the English public and they got behind it.
Speaker 1: You said recently that England's mental picture of the past
Speaker 1: is entirely based on offshore logic. Everything we don't want
Speaker 1: to think about happen somewhere else.
Speaker 3: But that seems to me something that we have a
Speaker 3: problem with at the moment. When I go through my
Speaker 3: normal consumer life, the labor that is involved in everything
Speaker 3: I eat, drink, where is happening out of my sight.
Speaker 3: I don't mean the point of Thevictorians to say, you
Speaker 3: guys were up to some terrible stuff. I'm kind of
Speaker 3: more interested in, Oh, that mindset is continually available to us, like,
Speaker 3: I'll take what I need. It's convenient to me in
Speaker 3: this moment, and I don't want to hear about what's
Speaker 3: going on behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: In the spirit of how those old Victorian novels were written. Yes,
Speaker 1: you produced the fraud in installments. Yes, email in chapters
Speaker 1: to two of your close friends right each week.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Despite how fragmented that process sounds, the book as a
Speaker 1: whole reads is carefully mapped out. It seems almost deceptive
Speaker 1: by design, which is that initially it reads as a cozy,
Speaker 1: kind of funny Victorian novel and then suddenly it really
Speaker 1: is not.
Speaker 3: You know, you can plan the novel very self consciously,
Speaker 3: or you can work subconsciously. That's the best way I
Speaker 3: can put it. Like I think, like when I if
Speaker 3: I'm dancing, if I'm out dancing, I'm in the club.
Speaker 3: You don't stand there thinking how am I going to
Speaker 3: dance this track for the next four and a half minutes.
Speaker 3: You kind of move the way the new moves. Though
Speaker 3: some people look like they're Yeah, some people do that,
Speaker 3: and that's it's unfortunate for them, but not you. No,
Speaker 3: I'm a pretty good dancer and I like to dance.
Speaker 1: And when you're sing, same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the form comes to you as you're doing it.
Speaker 3: And the older I've got, the more I've trusted in
Speaker 3: that subconscious logic, that rhythm. But absolutely before I started,
Speaker 3: I knew that I wanted to start in the drawing rooms.
Speaker 3: Like I remember, like living through the Iraq War, and
Speaker 3: it was the same, like we were always spent all
Speaker 3: our days in chairs in London and New York, frantically
Speaker 3: talking about the Iraq War, the rights and the wrongs
Speaker 3: while people were dying, you know, people putting their bodies
Speaker 3: on the line, People who had no choice about it,
Speaker 3: were putting their bodies in the line. I got very
Speaker 3: That was my first example, I guess, as a young person,
Speaker 3: of realizing that this huge gap between political conversation and
Speaker 3: reality the monstrosity. Yeah, it's kind of a monstrosity. And
Speaker 3: so I did want to start with that drawing room
Speaker 3: conversation because it wasn't that people weren't talking about Jamaica.
Speaker 3: They were talking about it all the time. But I
Speaker 3: think it's interesting to try and reconstruct their logic because
Speaker 3: it seems so impossible for us to understand. We think
Speaker 3: of slavery as an absolute evil, as we can't imagine
Speaker 3: anyone discussing it apart from purely evil people. But the
Speaker 3: problem with that logic, to me is that if you
Speaker 3: think things like this happen only because sociopaths and incredibly
Speaker 3: evil people do it, it's a comfort to you because
Speaker 3: you think, you look at yourself, you think, well, I'm
Speaker 3: not a sociopath and I'm not an incredibly evil person,
Speaker 3: so I would never. But that's not how these systems work.
Speaker 3: At the grindstone, there are certainly sociopaths and devilish folk,
Speaker 3: just as they were in the concentration couch, just as
Speaker 3: they were in the Laggers, but they're very small amount
Speaker 3: of people. They're just you know, turning the gears. What's
Speaker 3: actually needed to make the system work is lots and
Speaker 3: lots and lots and lots of well meaning people, vaguely
Speaker 3: complicit people, people who just want to make money, people
Speaker 3: who just want to get rich this year. It takes
Speaker 3: many people to build these horrific places. So I wanted
Speaker 3: to try and write a novel that took into account
Speaker 3: all these different kinds of logic. People who really considered
Speaker 3: it reasonable to say, look in Jamaica, at least they
Speaker 3: get fed and it's warm, and they have somewhere to live.
Speaker 3: In Manchester are living on the streets. That was a
Speaker 3: genuine piece of logic.
Speaker 1: You know when people talk about past lives.
Speaker 3: Right, I mean no, when I know, because I don't
Speaker 3: talk to people who talk about those kind of things.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you've heard it conversationally. Yeah, Zada Smith just
Speaker 1: coming in here attacking all manners of me and my life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but go on, Okay, well obviously no one you've spoken
Speaker 1: to Paradise Circle. Okay, but when they talk about past lives,
Speaker 1: they're always like sort of kings and queens and pharaohs, like, no,
Speaker 1: no one, no one is ever just like a sad farmer.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think in some ways people have the same relationship
Speaker 1: to the past, which is that they could never be complicit, right,
Speaker 1: They are never one of the many people, like you said,
Speaker 1: that could have passively tacitly agreed to a system of slavery.
Speaker 3: Right. And the thing of thinking of sugar the way
Speaker 3: you think about, you know, the conveniences in your life
Speaker 3: and particularly our phones. I mean it really or another
Speaker 3: example the environmental collapse right now, like we are sitting
Speaker 3: in a studio with two plastic bottles, it will be
Speaker 3: seem completely amazing. I imagine in about twenty thirty years
Speaker 3: that civilized people watching the world burn still went around
Speaker 3: buying plastic water bottles or getting in planes as I
Speaker 3: did this morning.
Speaker 1: And I want to say to you, thank you for
Speaker 1: bringing the plastic water bottles in here.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's on me. So when I say something like
Speaker 3: that we all got on a plane this summer, many
Speaker 3: of us, I imagine, bought a plastic water bottle, then
Speaker 3: there's this feeling of absolute culpability and guilt and defeat.
Speaker 3: Right you think, oh god, it's true, I shouldn't have
Speaker 3: got on the plane. I got on a plane. I
Speaker 3: know people who refuse to get on a plane and
Speaker 3: would never buy a plastic bottle. These people are heroes.
Speaker 3: And then there are people a further degree than that
Speaker 3: who are out in the street for XR or for
Speaker 3: just stop oil, and they're putting their bodies in the road.
Speaker 3: So I guess what I trying to think about is
Speaker 3: like an f career, where when you realize you are
Speaker 3: the person who got on a plane this summer, that
Speaker 3: doesn't mean you shut down from the political project. You're
Speaker 3: not like, Okay, well there's nothing to be done. It's awful.
Speaker 3: Everybody's awful. I'm awful. That is possible to kind of
Speaker 3: work in solidarity and also to know the distinction, like
Speaker 3: the young people who were working for x R at
Speaker 3: the moment, to me are the heroes of the age,
Speaker 3: Like they take the crown, but you cannot give up
Speaker 3: on the will and political energy of everybody else. They
Speaker 3: can also do something. And what I saw in the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century was a lot of people failing, absolutely, a
Speaker 3: lot of people making money hand over fist, many sociopaths,
Speaker 3: many dark forces, but also a lot of people doing something, trying, trying,
Speaker 3: and it does create change. But I think the more
Speaker 3: cynical view, which I think there's a complete historical case for,
Speaker 3: is that in case of something like plantation, slavery, all
Speaker 3: the sugar boycotts, all the activism, all the petitions in
Speaker 3: the world wouldn't have worked if the business wasn't failing anyway.
Speaker 3: And I think that's the dark perspective, which I think
Speaker 3: is partly true. They had exhausted the land, They had
Speaker 3: exhausted three hundred years of the people that were making
Speaker 3: less and less money all the way through the end
Speaker 3: of the nineteenth century. So reform comes, I say, when
Speaker 3: you actually can't get another dollar out of that country.
Speaker 1: The moral trist comes when it is convenient and.
Speaker 3: It's not an optimistic like we all suddenly decided to
Speaker 3: It came when they really didn't have anywhere else to go.
Speaker 1: I predict that's all happen with the manewable energy energy,
Speaker 1: very little crisis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, And that's so depressing, But this seems to
Speaker 3: be the pattern.
Speaker 1: I still thank you for the water in the plastic water.
Speaker 1: So that's a thirty thousand foot view of the book, right,
Speaker 1: But more personally, I'm thinking about why you write what
Speaker 1: you write and the role of projection in your work.
Speaker 3: Right, More personally, it was a joy. It really was
Speaker 3: a joy. Like it was the first novel I think
Speaker 3: I've written where every single person in it was as
Speaker 3: vivid to me as you sitting opposite me. I really,
Speaker 3: I really was fascinated by them all. I love them all,
Speaker 3: apart from the purest sociopath. Is only a few of
Speaker 3: truly evil people in the book, but they were just
Speaker 3: animated to me. And I think so much of what
Speaker 3: I'm interested in, both personally and socially or politically, it
Speaker 3: was all possible in this book. It covered all the
Speaker 3: things that concern me from like my most intimate feelings
Speaker 3: to my most general ones.
Speaker 1: In terms of the intimate behind. Yes, that note around projection.
Speaker 1: You said before there must be a part of me
Speaker 1: that's always trying to make the future safe by imagining
Speaker 1: it on the page. And so for this book when
Speaker 1: it comes to projection, yes, what were you trying to
Speaker 1: make safe this time around?
Speaker 3: Perhaps old age and finally death. Eliza touche is I'm
Speaker 3: forty seven, she's about in her mid sixties and onwards
Speaker 3: in this book, and that's you know, that's a scary territory.
Speaker 3: You're twenty eight, so you're still probably still have that feeling.
Speaker 3: I remember having it, thinking that when people are sat
Speaker 3: having this conversation, you think, oh, it's sad that they're
Speaker 3: gonna die. That's bad for them. And even now, like
Speaker 3: I speak about death all the time, I think I
Speaker 3: think about it all the time. It's been the kind
Speaker 3: of dominant idea of my life. Saying, by the way,
Speaker 3: but even now I think it's hypothetical. Even now I'm thinking, sure,
Speaker 3: it's not going to happen to me. So part of
Speaker 3: writing is to try and kind of drill it into
Speaker 3: my head. No, this is this is real.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to get into aging immortality on all
Speaker 1: the really fun subjects I.
Speaker 3: Love to talk about in la I know it's the favorite.
Speaker 1: Round here, especially with you. I can't imagine talking about
Speaker 1: anything else. There's a great passage at the top of
Speaker 1: chapter seventeen, Volume two where you seem to be working
Speaker 1: out some of these ideas around the cycles of womanhood.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that was quite a late edition. I really
Speaker 3: enjoyed writing that. In the Silence, Eliza was pricked on
Speaker 3: the sudden by an overwhelming and acute sense of loneliness.
Speaker 3: It was a severe revisionist feeling, and worked upon her cruelly,
Speaker 3: making her feel that loneliness was all she'd ever known,
Speaker 3: a consequence perhaps of what old women called the change,
Speaker 3: a special feminine form of delusion, not to be trusted,
Speaker 3: and yet apparently impossible to avoid. It marked in the
Speaker 3: mind of missus Touchet the final hurdle in the ladies steeplechase,
Speaker 3: the humiliations of girlhood, the separating of the beautiful from
Speaker 3: the plane and the ugly, the terror of maidenhood, the
Speaker 3: trials of marriage or childbirth or their absence, the loss
Speaker 3: of that same beauty around which the whole system appears
Speaker 3: to revolve the change of life, what strange lives women lead. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean it's a pretty crazy system.
Speaker 1: You know. You said that death was a subject you've
Speaker 1: been preoccupied by for a long time. You even said
Speaker 1: recently that you'd rather write a four hundred page novel
Speaker 1: than sit and think about death for five minutes. Did
Speaker 1: I say that writing is a kind of absolute avoidance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it isn't my case. I'm sure it's
Speaker 3: different things for different people, but for me when I'm writing,
Speaker 3: all I'm thinking about is what I'm writing about. So
Speaker 3: it's a wonderful distraction.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating because wasn't it the subject of mortality, especially
Speaker 1: growing up around your father, that defined your instincts as
Speaker 1: a writer?
Speaker 3: I think so. Yeah, my father was super old. I
Speaker 3: mean yeah, he was fifty when I was born, so,
Speaker 3: and he was in the war, and he just seemed
Speaker 3: like an ancient person. So I thought about death a law,
Speaker 3: and I do remember my earliest thoughts, like watching those
Speaker 3: old movies, was everybody in this movie is dead.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: I was always preoccupied by it.
Speaker 1: That was like the fretisteraire gender Rodraphon.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But also, you know, without death, there's no ethics
Speaker 3: like it's an absolutely necessary thing people would behave. I mean,
Speaker 3: when I think about that Palo Alto dream of living
Speaker 3: for ever, I mean they they're awful enough with the
Speaker 3: fact of death. Can you imagine Elon musk eternally for
Speaker 3: all time?
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine him for the end of this day.
Speaker 3: Right, It's a nightmare. It's so I know that death
Speaker 3: is a gift and without it, this life would be
Speaker 3: a hell with that end, but I still really object
Speaker 3: to losing consciousness.
Speaker 1: So I'm just trying to imagine you as a teenager,
Speaker 1: this was your preoccupation. You'd be walking down the street
Speaker 1: contemplating your own mortality.
Speaker 3: No, that makes it sound very deep. What I really
Speaker 3: was percupied with was my looks, which I considered to
Speaker 3: be absolutely disastrous. Was I was a really I mean's
Speaker 3: a very old story, I guess with actors and all
Speaker 3: kinds of people. I was an ugly kid. But I
Speaker 3: really was an ugly kid, and I really was one
Speaker 3: of those really bitter ugly kids, and that I considered
Speaker 3: myself superior to all good looking kids and I in like,
Speaker 3: I just thought they were petty and shallow, And you know,
Speaker 3: it's like a bad John Hughes movie and that one
Speaker 3: day I'd have my revenge on them, you know, all
Speaker 3: that stuff. And it's actually a disgusting personality trait. It's
Speaker 3: really unpleasant because you you accuse everybody of being preoccupied
Speaker 3: with beauty and being good at sports, but you're the
Speaker 3: person who's obsessed with these things. You're the one who's
Speaker 3: thinking about it twenty four to seven. Those people are
Speaker 3: just playing football and going to prom and having a
Speaker 3: nice life. So I was really a resempful nerd, very
Speaker 3: angry and kind of certain that if I look different,
Speaker 3: my whole life would be different and all the rest
Speaker 3: of it. And then when I grew up and ended
Speaker 3: up looking okay in the end, like the teeth weren't
Speaker 3: so crazy, I got contact lenses, I learned how to
Speaker 3: do my hair, et cetera, et cetera. I remember thinking, oh,
Speaker 3: it is true, they're nicer to you, and so the
Speaker 3: world is trash being even more furious. So I was
Speaker 3: that kind of super annoying teenager. Yeah, I was the worst.
Speaker 3: I can't I can't defend myself.
Speaker 1: You know that I did have that in the notes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that you were the worst.
Speaker 3: The worst, But but part of it was. I mean,
Speaker 3: of course, as you get older as a woman, you
Speaker 3: realize that to be considered unattractive, whether or not you
Speaker 3: were as a teenager the girl is a great gift
Speaker 3: because you get left alone and you get to be
Speaker 3: interested in things you're interested in, and you get to
Speaker 3: develop a kind of human personality outside of being looked at.
Speaker 1: Well I'm trying to Yeah, I'm picturing a teenager like
Speaker 1: retreating to the library.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was it. I just decided, like, screw you, guys,
Speaker 3: I'm just going to read in my room.
Speaker 1: In your room had posters of Fred Astaire and a
Speaker 1: beautiful MGM poster. Yeah, from a movie exhibition in London.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I must have said that somewhere. Yeah, I did.
Speaker 1: Imagine when you're not reading, you're listening to Darling Nikki
Speaker 1: by Priends.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, a lot of that, and then a lot
Speaker 3: of rappers and Hollywood stars, a strange mix of things.
Speaker 3: But I just recently discovered hip hop, and so that
Speaker 3: was the other thing that I was preoccupied with.
Speaker 1: I guess I'm wondering do you think these obsessions that
Speaker 1: you had that you were preoccupied with, which included writing
Speaker 1: and reading honestly, do you think they offered you a
Speaker 1: sense of control in an environment where you didn't probably
Speaker 1: have a whole lot of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that was also I mean in my house,
Speaker 3: my parents' marriage was absolutely brutal, so you know, you
Speaker 3: went to your room to kind of get away from
Speaker 3: it and get away from the noise and shouting and screaming.
Speaker 3: And we all developed our preoccupations, you know, in our rooms.
Speaker 3: Some of them overlapped because we were all interested in language,
Speaker 3: so you could kind of get one of the siblings
Speaker 3: to help you in your crazy projects. Like Ben would
Speaker 3: force me to help him memorize comedy skits. We were
Speaker 3: always doing, like whole Monty Python skits or whatever. And
Speaker 3: I would sometimes force my brothers to like sing harmonies
Speaker 3: with me if I was trying to. So it's that
Speaker 3: kind of thing. And it's also weird that we all
Speaker 3: have fake names, which is strange, three kids with alternate names.
Speaker 1: You changed it at fourteen. Over all.
Speaker 3: Ben's was called Doc Brown for years when he was
Speaker 3: a rapper, and then now he's Ben Bailey Smith, which
Speaker 3: is also not his name. And Luke is Luke Sky's
Speaker 3: as a rapper. Yeah, we have these aliases. I think
Speaker 3: we just really lived in quite a fantasy land, all
Speaker 3: three of us when were kids. We just were not
Speaker 3: really engaging with reality.
Speaker 1: Well, I was going to ask you to further describe
Speaker 1: you as a teenager, but you actually have written about
Speaker 1: it once before in an introduction for the Best American
Speaker 1: Non Required Reading Edition.
Speaker 3: Where did you find that?
Speaker 1: Of two thousand?
Speaker 3: I never remember writing that.
Speaker 1: Well, it's okay, I have a write here for it. God,
Speaker 1: really you'd like to read it.
Speaker 3: I don't remember writing this. You want me to read? Okay,
Speaker 3: here we go.
Speaker 1: Do you think I wrote it for it?
Speaker 3: No, I just have no memory of this. When I
Speaker 3: was in my teens, making a few stabs at writing,
Speaker 3: I had a very low opinion of experience. It did
Speaker 3: not seem to me that trekking to the cob web
Speaker 3: corner of the world for six months and returning with
Speaker 3: a pair of ethnic trousers made anybody a more interesting
Speaker 3: fellow than when they left. Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Speaker 3: were all the uses of the world to me, which might,
Speaker 3: of course that I was not much good at anything
Speaker 3: and had no friends. No matter what anybody says, it
Speaker 3: is a mixture of perversity and stomach sadness that makes
Speaker 3: a young person fashion a cocoon of other people's words.
Speaker 3: If the sun was out, I stayed in. If there
Speaker 3: was a barbecue, I was in a library. While the
Speaker 3: rest of my generation embraced the sociality of ecstasy, I
Speaker 3: was encased in marijuana, the drug of the solitary. It
Speaker 3: was suggested to me by a teacher that I might
Speaker 3: write about what you know, where you love, people you see,
Speaker 3: and in response, I wrote straight pastiche Agatha Christie stories,
Speaker 3: Woodhouse vignettes, Plath poems, all signed by their putative authors
Speaker 3: and kept in a draw. I spent my last three
Speaker 3: summer before college reading, among other things, Journal of the
Speaker 3: Plague Year, Middle March, and the Old Testament. By the
Speaker 3: time I arrived at college, I'd been in no countries,
Speaker 3: had no jobs, participated in no political groups, had no lovers,
Speaker 3: and put myself in no physical danger apart from an
Speaker 3: entirely accidental incident whereupon I fell fifty feet from my
Speaker 3: bedroom window. While trying to reach for a cigarette, I
Speaker 3: dropped in the guttering. In short, I was perfectly equipped
Speaker 3: to write the kind of fiction I did write, Saturated
Speaker 3: by other books, touched by the world, but only vicariously.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the house that books built, all papered with
Speaker 3: other people's words, to which one moves like a tourist
Speaker 3: through an English country manor somewhat impressed but uncertain whether
Speaker 3: anybody really lives there. God, that's depressing. I mean that's fair.
Speaker 3: I mean since then, I've just had so much life,
Speaker 3: so it's kind of unrecognizable to me now. But yeah,
Speaker 3: that was me for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know we spent the first thirty minutes joking
Speaker 1: and teasing and playing around, but that description kind of
Speaker 1: broke my heart. I have to tell you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's bad. I mean I did have good times,
Speaker 3: and I wasn't unpopular in school. I had like a
Speaker 3: you know, gang of freaks, and we watched those John
Speaker 3: Hughes movies and we thought we were, you know, instead
Speaker 3: of going to art class, we bunk like Feris and
Speaker 3: all that kind of stuff, go to a museum and
Speaker 3: we were nerds. But you know, I made up for
Speaker 3: it in my twenties. I had a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: That description of a saturated by books, right touched by
Speaker 1: the world but only vicarious, sayah, is that the writer
Speaker 1: that produced the pages of white teeth.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean when I got out of the neighborhood
Speaker 3: and met more middle class kids who'd gone to grammar
Speaker 3: schools and private schools in the country, they thought my
Speaker 3: life was unbelievably exciting, and I thought, well, maybe it
Speaker 3: was exciting, like amazing things were happening around us all
Speaker 3: the time. How do you mean, Well, we're in North London.
Speaker 3: We you know, it was completely normal to see I
Speaker 3: don't know, you go clubbing and you'd see Goldie and
Speaker 3: Buork or the Blur Boys are always you know, these
Speaker 3: people were like around all the time, and there was
Speaker 3: loads of drugs and we went clubbing and that kind
Speaker 3: of stuff. But to me, all, I don't know, I
Speaker 3: was a bit of a refusnik. But compared to like,
Speaker 3: what is that a refusnik someone who refuses to do things.
Speaker 1: I've felt that in this interview.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I thought I was kind of boring
Speaker 3: by the standards of the kids in my neighborhood who
Speaker 3: really went for it. Like you know when you watch
Speaker 3: those documentary of nineties ravers, that those are the kids
Speaker 3: I knew. They were out in fields every weekend. They went, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they went hard, and I was more like you take
Speaker 3: an e and I'll wait to see if you die,
Speaker 3: and if you don't, then I'll take any I was
Speaker 3: that kid, So I took them, but in a kind
Speaker 3: of controlled way. It's the best way I could put it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you let them potentially die first.
Speaker 3: Take the risk. So I was like, yeah, they were
Speaker 3: much wilder than me. But when I look back, we
Speaker 3: had so much fun on no money, you know, just
Speaker 3: walking the streets, talking, smoking weed. That was like the
Speaker 3: daily that was our life.
Speaker 1: So you did put a lot of that life into
Speaker 1: that book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that part is there. There's a lot of conversations
Speaker 3: like that's what I remember, just talking and talking and
Speaker 3: talking all the time to all these super interesting kids.
Speaker 3: The kids in my school were unbelievably interesting.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: The book was published in two thousand. Yeah, and you've
Speaker 1: made a note of my age. I think least three
Speaker 1: times by now. I was rereading the press around this book.
Speaker 1: Oh god, yeah, which was all news to me. As
Speaker 1: the book was published and received a whole lot of
Speaker 1: acclaim and attention, you said, some of that attention included
Speaker 1: terrible insane projections. I was expected to be some expert
Speaker 1: on multicultural affairs, as if multiculturalism as a genre of fiction,
Speaker 1: do you think that expectation was born out of a
Speaker 1: desire from the press at the time to present a
Speaker 1: newly multi racial Britain.
Speaker 3: I was so out of context. You have to understand.
Speaker 3: My life seemed to me like the center of the culture.
Speaker 3: I didn't realize that we were a marginalized community. So
Speaker 3: I remember like an Evening Standard interviewer came to my
Speaker 3: mom's flat and interviewed me, and then when I opened
Speaker 3: the article, the first thing was like, I went to
Speaker 3: Grimy Wilsden, if you've any idea where that is. My
Speaker 3: mom were like, excuse me, I'm sorry. Yeah. It was
Speaker 3: just unbelievable, and a lot of it was, you know,
Speaker 3: it was straight up racist. But I was so young.
Speaker 3: I remember a Daily Mail article which was about me
Speaker 3: and Naomi Campbell, and I think it was about the
Speaker 3: idea that we were kind of uppity. That was like
Speaker 3: basically the principle of this article. And they'd gone to
Speaker 3: my mom's street and photographed my mom's flat is like
Speaker 3: the top half of a house, but they'd photographed the
Speaker 3: house and claimed that the house was worth like three
Speaker 3: million pounds and said it was my house, and the
Speaker 3: whole implication of the article was like, look at these
Speaker 3: black kids thinking that they can have houses.
Speaker 1: I was like wow. There were a few other descriptions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you were called literature's great black hope, the George Elliott
Speaker 1: of multiculturalism, the Lauren Hill of London literature. I don't
Speaker 1: even know what that means.
Speaker 3: No, there was a lot of that, And I remember
Speaker 3: an interview I think it might have been with The
Speaker 3: Guardian where they asked me who my favorite writers. I said,
Speaker 3: Tony Morrison might have been a telegraph actually, and the journalist
Speaker 3: stared to laugh. It was a different universe nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3: Tony Morrison England was like some kind of I mean
Speaker 3: to your average English journalist was like an exotic. That
Speaker 3: would have been like saying PC gone mad. Like to
Speaker 3: mention her would be like you'd attempting to be politically correct.
Speaker 3: That was literally the mindset of these journalists, like why
Speaker 3: would you ever mention such a person unless you were
Speaker 3: trying to trying to make some point about your leftist
Speaker 3: It was. It was a different universe.
Speaker 1: Someone's unfathomable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank god, but that's what it was like. So
Speaker 3: I was naive because in my house Tony Morrison was
Speaker 3: Queen and I didn't have an idea of the rest
Speaker 3: of England. I'd never been in the rest of England.
Speaker 3: I was a Londoner, and so having suddenly this relationship
Speaker 3: with England generally, it was a lot of learning. I
Speaker 3: just had no idea that that's how England thought. What
Speaker 3: did you learn that London was really frightening to a
Speaker 3: lot of England. I think they really don't live like that.
Speaker 3: They had never heard of any like it like that,
Speaker 3: so many different people living cheek by jail with each
Speaker 3: other and going to school with each other. That was
Speaker 3: not something It was beginning. People were abandoning the state
Speaker 3: system around that point, so it was just something so
Speaker 3: far from their imagining that anybody still lived in that system.
Speaker 3: And now, of course they've abandoned it entirely, but that
Speaker 3: was still the point where they wanted to be kind
Speaker 3: of supportive of it in principle, but of course not
Speaker 3: actually participating themselves.
Speaker 1: At the time, as you're trying to make sense of
Speaker 1: all this, did all of that affect your sense of self?
Speaker 1: Like did it make you want to retreat or not write,
Speaker 1: or to just go away for a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that's what they did. I just left.
Speaker 3: I went to Italy, and I don't think I ever
Speaker 3: seriously thought about not writing. But I mean from the
Speaker 3: very beginning, like before White Teeth was published, I had asked.
Speaker 3: My instincts were in that direction anyway. So originally I
Speaker 3: didn't want my name on the book because I was
Speaker 3: full of these like pinch and esque dreams, you know,
Speaker 3: as a nineties kid. Then I wanted to be zed
Speaker 3: a Smith and they wouldn't allow that. Then I wanted
Speaker 3: no photograph. They wouldn't allow that. So I had these
Speaker 3: dreams that I was going to be able to publish
Speaker 3: and not be At the other end of it.
Speaker 1: The photograph win in the opposite direction. Yeah, it was, Yeah,
Speaker 1: your photograph was everywhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, and used, you know, if they wanted
Speaker 3: to write ans about anything, that was always my photo
Speaker 3: in it. It was all very discombobulating, also because I
Speaker 3: had always thought of myself as a strange looking kid,
Speaker 3: so then to them find it turned around and people
Speaker 3: literally saying to me, oh, you would never have been
Speaker 3: published if you didn't look like But it's also classic
Speaker 3: to the meritocracy, so you jump through all these hoops
Speaker 3: and I'd already had it in college. And then you
Speaker 3: get there and then someone says to you, well, you're
Speaker 3: only here because you're black, and you're like, oh, you've
Speaker 3: got to be kidding. You've got to be kidding me.
Speaker 3: I can't have done all this. And then I get
Speaker 3: here and you tell me it's because I'm black. So
Speaker 3: that was a classic English So at the losing game, yeah,
Speaker 3: you can't win. So it's that talk to is just
Speaker 3: a trap in every direction.
Speaker 1: Were bright back with author Zadi Smith, whoever that person
Speaker 1: was that wrote White Teeth, and then the autograph man.
Speaker 1: You said they died with the publication of On Beauty,
Speaker 1: which was inspired a lot by Iam Forster. You said,
Speaker 1: all things that were my childhood interests and obsession, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of done with. I wonder when you reflect back,
Speaker 1: do you think these ideas of transformation and transition were
Speaker 1: heightened at the time, given that arm Beuty did coincide
Speaker 1: with the passing of your father.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. But I also think it's a nineties
Speaker 3: logic that you know, we grew up on Madonna and
Speaker 3: Prince and Jack, this idea of every time you do something,
Speaker 3: you appear in a different persona that's very deep in
Speaker 3: nineties cultural logic and even our short story collections and
Speaker 3: our albums. The point was variety. It's just a weird,
Speaker 3: asthetic tick. I notice it in other people and my cohort,
Speaker 3: and I think that's how I always thought of novels.
Speaker 3: It that each one had.
Speaker 1: To be the shed your pastelf.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: Easier said than done.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I mean, obviously, the longer you go on,
Speaker 3: the more the bits of you you can't get rid
Speaker 3: of are evident. What do you mean, I think writing
Speaker 3: books is so embarrassing because you know, your ticks and
Speaker 3: your habits of thought become clearer and clearer the longer
Speaker 3: you go on. But I just try and keep thinking,
Speaker 3: challenging myself one way or another.
Speaker 1: I guess I have pinpoint this one moment time because
Speaker 1: we started at the beginning of this conversation talking about
Speaker 1: your preoccupation with death, which very much comes from I
Speaker 1: think having an older father.
Speaker 3: Right, and also the fact that everybody dies. I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't want to. It's not like an unusual idea.
Speaker 1: I was going to save that. Thank you for getting
Speaker 1: out in front of it. Yeah, but you've written so
Speaker 1: beautifully about that time when he passed and having those
Speaker 1: conversations with him where he expressed a sense of regret
Speaker 1: of not living a life that he wanted to lead.
Speaker 1: And I wonder if you were starting to ask yourself
Speaker 1: a different set of questions after having written these three
Speaker 1: books and letting go of that younger past self, And
Speaker 1: if so, what were those questions?
Speaker 3: I think you stop writing out of revenge, Like George
Speaker 3: Orwell said that most people are writing novels to revenge
Speaker 3: themselves on the kids that were at school with. That
Speaker 3: is literally the reason that people write novels. At a
Speaker 3: certain point, you get over it, or you should get
Speaker 3: over it, I think, And I just my interest kind
Speaker 3: of expanded, and I thought more kind of structurally, like
Speaker 3: I'm just more interested in not just the individuals that
Speaker 3: I've known in my life and in my community, but
Speaker 3: how that all came to parts like why are our
Speaker 3: lives this way? Why are our schools this way? Even now,
Speaker 3: like my kids are in the same schools. You feel
Speaker 3: this kind of fury sometimes, like why are we so underfunded?
Speaker 3: Why are these streets like this? Why can't this change?
Speaker 3: And so I just became more and more interested in
Speaker 3: the systems that create that permanent poverty. It's just more
Speaker 3: interesting to me. I'm still completely interested in the individuals
Speaker 3: in those worlds, but I maybe less sentimental about it.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about that great quote from Their Eyes Were
Speaker 1: Watching God by Zor O'Neil Hurston. She wrote, there are
Speaker 1: years that ask questions and years that answer. It's beautiful
Speaker 1: that period of moving to Rome than Boston, than New
Speaker 1: York City. I wonder if if you were starting to
Speaker 1: discover some answers for yourself.
Speaker 3: It was just great to get out of this parochial
Speaker 3: context to learn a different language. That's an incredible thing
Speaker 3: for a writer like you. Just it's like you see
Speaker 3: around the edges of what you do into a whole
Speaker 3: different universe. I don't speak Italian world, but just to
Speaker 3: have it is it made me understand translation and it
Speaker 3: was just huge. And in Italy, I just decided to
Speaker 3: I don't fere allowed to say this, but just like
Speaker 3: devote myself to pleasure, like I worked so hard my
Speaker 3: whole youth when other people are like having fun, I
Speaker 3: was writing books and then I was just like I
Speaker 3: just want to live and it was fantastic. You know,
Speaker 3: it's a fantastic place to do very little.
Speaker 1: Why would you not be allowed to say that?
Speaker 3: I don't know, I'm such I come from such a
Speaker 3: Protestant culture and it was such a privilege, Like who
Speaker 3: the hell gets to just sit in Rome and not
Speaker 3: do very much? But I didn't do very much. I
Speaker 3: didn't I ate and drank and talk to people and
Speaker 3: had fun and it was kind of great. And I
Speaker 3: just learned a lot about beauty. And like my husband's
Speaker 3: a you know, Northern Irish Protestant, which is the most
Speaker 3: Protestanty Protestant you can get apart from perhaps Scottish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, top Protestant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And is he okay, he's good, but he also
Speaker 3: in itally learned like some of the lessons of Italian life,
Speaker 3: which is like, you know, enjoy yourself. Things are beautiful,
Speaker 3: like don't rush everywhere, sit, have a coffee, chill the
Speaker 3: fuck out, And that's what we did. It was good.
Speaker 1: You did eventually find yourself back to the page, so
Speaker 1: like you not like you ran away entirely.
Speaker 3: No, But I remember the moment I was sitting in
Speaker 3: Tuscany at this lady's house and she runs the writer's
Speaker 3: to treat but I wasn't doing any writing now. I
Speaker 3: was just sitting around and the phone rang and it
Speaker 3: was Bob silversmrom a New York Review. He wasn't really
Speaker 3: talked to me. It's ring to talk to this woman.
Speaker 3: Be a treacher, right, sorry? But I answered the phone
Speaker 3: and he was like who is that? And I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm Sadie and he was like Smith. I was like, yeah, oh,
Speaker 3: are you interested in Kafka? I was like what I
Speaker 3: had never like all the time in England, if anybody
Speaker 3: asked me to review something, they would only ever ask
Speaker 3: me to review books about multicultural London, like over and
Speaker 3: over again. It was that kind of not that I
Speaker 3: have anything against them, of course I wrote them, but
Speaker 3: the idea that I had no other concerns in the
Speaker 3: world was so English to me. And that for the
Speaker 3: first time, as American was saying to me, are you
Speaker 3: interested in something else? And as it happened, I really
Speaker 3: was interested in Cavca. So he said, well, why don't
Speaker 3: you write so see what you can do? How about
Speaker 3: four thousand words? And so for the first time in Italy,
Speaker 3: I thought, oh, maybe I should do some work, and
Speaker 3: I wrote that essay and that kind of just changed everything.
Speaker 1: It was for the New York Review Books that you
Speaker 1: wrote that piece on Forrester. Yeah, that was in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. Yeah, and I I have a passage
Speaker 1: from it here where I think it seems like you've
Speaker 1: started to develop that idea of good writing requiring good
Speaker 1: being puke.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't believe any of that anymore. So I'm
Speaker 3: not going to defend that for one second. That's a
Speaker 3: young person's feelishness. Okay, Well, it's moralistic and it's just exhausting.
Speaker 1: Well, let's let's interrogate what okare go on?
Speaker 3: What do they say? Uh?
Speaker 1: Is what Forster said? Oh God, do we in these
Speaker 1: terrible times? This is not you? Don't worry? Do we?
Speaker 1: I do have courtes from you. We can do that too, Right,
Speaker 1: do we in these terrible times want to be humanists
Speaker 1: or fanatics? I have no doubt as to my own wish.
Speaker 1: I would rather be a humanist with all his faults
Speaker 1: than a fanatic with all his virtues.
Speaker 3: Well, look, that is a good quote. But the argument
Speaker 3: is what what does humanism mean? And at the moment
Speaker 3: it means to a lot of young people just some
Speaker 3: kind of neo liberal cover story some willly bullshit about
Speaker 3: how we're all the same blah blah blah. So you
Speaker 3: can think that that's humanism, and there is certainly a
Speaker 3: version of that. That's the version sold to you by
Speaker 3: particular corporations right in their adverts, and in there that's
Speaker 3: the general human they're trying to sell to. But there
Speaker 3: is another humanism, which to me is radical and socialist
Speaker 3: and is interested in finding a collective category in which
Speaker 3: you can perform acts of political solidarity.
Speaker 1: Can you unpack your definition or one that actually matters
Speaker 1: to you?
Speaker 3: Look, I would say it's about having a kind of
Speaker 3: Angela Davis talks about it a little bit. You need
Speaker 3: to have a bracketed sense of yourself as a political citizen.
Speaker 3: So it's absolutely the case, particularly in America, because of
Speaker 3: the way your politics are structured, that you need to
Speaker 3: gather in identity groups in order to pressure government for rights.
Speaker 3: That's how America works and that's not going to change.
Speaker 3: But it is important, I think, to know that that
Speaker 3: is not the only way that politics can function. At
Speaker 3: moments where you are I'm sticking particularly about like the
Speaker 3: wave of AI that's about to come at us, or
Speaker 3: also the literal wave that is coming at us through
Speaker 3: climate change. If you don't have a radical collective idea
Speaker 3: of the human flintered in the face of the wave,
Speaker 3: that is my problem. Can you explain that you're going
Speaker 3: to have to find a way just as they did
Speaker 3: in the nineteenth century in the battle against slavery, to say,
Speaker 3: I am a Manchester cotton worker. You are a sugar
Speaker 3: worker and forced laborer, an enslaved person in the Caribbean.
Speaker 3: We are not in the same situation exactly, but we
Speaker 3: are working under the same system, which is a system
Speaker 3: of capital. Can we work together even though our situations
Speaker 3: are not perfectly analogous. To do that, you need some
Speaker 3: conception of your human situation under this power structure. And
Speaker 3: if you say no, we can't work together because you
Speaker 3: can't exactly comprehend my situation that you comprehend yours. The
Speaker 3: only person who wins from that is capital itself.
Speaker 1: This seems like you're hinting at the You kind of
Speaker 1: reminded me of Chappelle's line the imperfect allies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's okay to have in perfect allies. It's not
Speaker 3: a compromise, it's it is a way of making politics work.
Speaker 1: You did just accidentally kick me? Was that because I'm
Speaker 1: twenty nine and then I represent a younger generation?
Speaker 3: No? No, And that's the even that's the most of
Speaker 3: all the stupid binary dialectics, Like if you're young, you
Speaker 3: are going to become old, So that dialectic is literal insanity.
Speaker 3: There is no point screaming about how awful the old are.
Speaker 3: It is coming at you so soon, so we might
Speaker 3: as well find some That's a classic example. Some way
Speaker 3: of communicating that isn't a war.
Speaker 1: I think we've done a good job. So, yeah, you
Speaker 1: said recently, I can't emphasize how quickly people much younger
Speaker 1: than you are going to find you utterly absurd.
Speaker 3: I know you never believe it. No one believes it.
Speaker 3: Everybody thinks. But I'm young in a new way that
Speaker 3: will never age and I will never but it just
Speaker 3: always happens, so you might as well get ready for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good writing requires good being. This is something you
Speaker 1: said for many years, and you think it's absolute nonsense.
Speaker 3: Now yeah, I think it's absolute nonsense. Nonsense nonsense.
Speaker 1: Does writing make you a better person or okay, are
Speaker 1: you a better person because of writing? No?
Speaker 3: Sorry, I just I don't that's not my experience.
Speaker 1: Okay, because these were all feelings you had and sentiments
Speaker 1: you had before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I was when you're in the world. Part
Speaker 3: of the kind of simplicity when I was young. At least,
Speaker 3: I can't speak to other young people when I was young.
Speaker 3: The ethical area that you're dealing with is really small.
Speaker 3: So if you wake up in the morning, like if
Speaker 3: I'm twenty four and I'm writing novels, all I have
Speaker 3: to do to be a good person is get up
Speaker 3: in the morning, have my breakfast, write my book. Maybe
Speaker 3: it is to hang out with my friends and go
Speaker 3: to bed. Right, The ethical area is really small, so
Speaker 3: you can really do it the moment you add more people, partners, kids.
Speaker 1: Dogs, you have two kids, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: The ethical area immediately what's that thing they sometimes say
Speaker 3: online like, just be good? It's not complicated. It's so complicated.
Speaker 1: That's quite hard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so hard. And the more people involved, being
Speaker 3: good to one person of course means perhaps not being
Speaker 3: good to another. Rights and duties are in constant tension.
Speaker 3: So it's just something you maybe don't know when you're
Speaker 3: twenty four, but it becomes radiantly clearly older you get.
Speaker 3: But the eth glary is so complicated that the hope
Speaker 3: of being perfectly good is you know, of course you
Speaker 3: can hope it, but it really is deeply delusional. Parenting
Speaker 3: is just so humbling and destructive of your sense of
Speaker 3: yourself as some great person. It just it destroys that.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, she says, staring at me, knowing I'm twenty nine
Speaker 1: with no kids.
Speaker 3: No, but I don't know. I never felt I was
Speaker 3: a particularly great person. So that's not something. It's not
Speaker 3: like I'm falling from a great height. But the only
Speaker 3: thing what I do is not giving. I write, which
Speaker 3: is for me. People who actually are outward facing and
Speaker 3: are constantly giving of themselves, like actually doing that are
Speaker 3: to me the admirable people.
Speaker 1: You know. In fact, beyond the personal reasons of making art,
Speaker 1: you've written pretty extensively about the perceived political power and
Speaker 1: the quote necessity of storytelling. Yeah, because throughout the pandemic
Speaker 1: and through lockdown many people, we're making the case for
Speaker 1: arts nobility, its capacity to change us, to enlighten. And yet,
Speaker 1: in an essay from your book Intimations, which was written
Speaker 1: I think in the throes of the pandemic, you seem
Speaker 1: to have a very different view, at least when it
Speaker 1: comes to the work you've been making for the past
Speaker 1: twenty six years, Can we take a look at that? Sure,
Speaker 1: don't sound so excited.
Speaker 3: You go have a look? Okay, oh boy, here to here? Okay.
Speaker 3: The more utilitarian minded defenders of art justify its existence
Speaker 3: by insisting upon its potential political efficacy, which is usually overstated.
Speaker 3: Artists themselves are especially fond of overstating it. But even
Speaker 3: if you believe in the potential political efficacy of art,
Speaker 3: as I do, few artists would dare count on its timeliness.
Speaker 3: It's a delusional pain to finishes a canvas at two
Speaker 3: o'clock and expects radical societal transformation by four. Even when
Speaker 3: artists right manifestos, they are hopefully aware that their exigent
Speaker 3: tone is finally borrowed, only echoing and mimicking the urgency
Speaker 3: of the guerrilla's demands or the activists protests, rather than
Speaker 3: truly enacting it. The people sometimes demand change, they almost
Speaker 3: never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a
Speaker 3: dubious relation to necessity and to time itself. It is
Speaker 3: something to do, yes, but when it is done, and
Speaker 3: whether it is done at all, is generally considered a
Speaker 3: question for artists alone. An attempt to connect the artist's
Speaker 3: labor with the work of truly laboring people is frequently made,
Speaker 3: but always strikes me as tenuous, with the fundamental dividing
Speaker 3: line being this question of the clock. Labor is work
Speaker 3: done by the clock and paid by it too. Art
Speaker 3: takes time and devis it up as arts these fit.
Speaker 3: It is something to do. Do you know what I
Speaker 3: want to say something. It's occurred to me on this
Speaker 3: tour recently that I think what it is when I
Speaker 3: listen to other artists talk like they use the words
Speaker 3: radical every other word. They're constantly stating these apparently progressive arguments,
Speaker 3: but then I know about them, like I know their
Speaker 3: kids are in private school. I know that. It just
Speaker 3: really blows my mind that people haven't literally no shame
Speaker 3: about this rhetoric that has no relation to their lives,
Speaker 3: particularly in America, they continue to live these like hat
Speaker 3: bourgeois lives. And then so I've never said I never
Speaker 3: speak like that, because embarrassing, I realize my life is
Speaker 3: actually in the commons, like I have a case.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3: I mean, I try and live like some of the
Speaker 3: things that I really believe a society should be arranged.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I mean, my parents had their kind
Speaker 3: of moments of activism when I was a kid, and
Speaker 3: so I connect that activism with actually going out and
Speaker 3: doing it, Like they went out and marched and they
Speaker 3: were involved at a kind of grassroots level. So that's
Speaker 3: the thing I take seriously. I just cannot take seriously
Speaker 3: people speaking as if their very existence is just radical.
Speaker 3: They're just radical because they are alive and willing to
Speaker 3: give you their art. I can't. I find that really
Speaker 3: hard to take seriously.
Speaker 1: It sounds like the part that's rubbing you the wrong
Speaker 1: way is that you have contemporary writers that are acting
Speaker 1: like politicians or speaking in public like that's what I say.
Speaker 3: I realized that in the age of the algorithm, politics
Speaker 3: is something that has to be legible. So because I
Speaker 3: haven't said I am this and this is what I believe,
Speaker 3: I think I've allowed people to assume politics that I
Speaker 3: really do not engage with. But I always assume that.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know, I just does that bother you, No,
Speaker 3: it doesn't really, Because I want The lesson I took
Speaker 3: from my parents is do you want to label yourself,
Speaker 3: you know, endlessly in your armchair, or do you want
Speaker 3: to get on the streets and actually change people's minds.
Speaker 3: So to me, the arguments in my books are they're
Speaker 3: open enough that people can enter. Hopefully they enter and
Speaker 3: something happens.
Speaker 1: It's funny. The very thing that I probably love most
Speaker 1: about your work is that it does feel inviting and
Speaker 1: that it's not not particularly dogmatic, and perhaps in the
Speaker 1: absence of clear definition, others, especially on the Internet, have
Speaker 1: maybe trying to define you and your work for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I've realized that they have no idea where
Speaker 3: I come from with the people I come from, because
Speaker 3: I never said but that's because I believe in privacy.
Speaker 3: I just don't understand this kind of public facing person
Speaker 3: who's a series of statements. I can't engage with it.
Speaker 3: But it just surprises me that people think making radical
Speaker 3: work is saying my work is radical. That's not what
Speaker 3: I think radical work is. I think radical work is
Speaker 3: radical work. It does something radical to you as you're
Speaker 3: reading it, to the way you think, and to the
Speaker 3: formation of your ideas.
Speaker 1: As we believe we're trying to sift through a whole lot, yes,
Speaker 1: very big ideas right, And the truth is, as you
Speaker 1: were talking, I couldn't help but shake that headline that
Speaker 1: came about from a recent Vulture review. I think it
Speaker 1: was how Zady Smith lost her teeth, which did take
Speaker 1: issue with your politics, or at least how you think
Speaker 1: of politics in relation to your work. What did you
Speaker 1: make of that?
Speaker 3: I mean, I do slightly take issue of being judged
Speaker 3: the level of my black radicalism by someone who isn't
Speaker 3: in that tradition. And also, yeah, I don't know how
Speaker 3: to put it.
Speaker 1: I just what.
Speaker 3: I think, What do I think? Oh God, it's about
Speaker 3: the principle of hospitality. I think that's like even like
Speaker 3: that kind of ancient Greek idea that the door of
Speaker 3: pros is open. Like I so remember when I was
Speaker 3: a kid, like we used to hand out the socialist
Speaker 3: work all that kind of stuff, and there was always
Speaker 3: this idea when you're dealing with like upper middle class intellectuals,
Speaker 3: they have this idealized proletariat figure in their mind, and
Speaker 3: of course that was we. We're the people. We were
Speaker 3: there waiting for their And I remember, particularly my father,
Speaker 3: like watching the way they would talk to my father
Speaker 3: that there's this disappointment that the proletariat when you meet them,
Speaker 3: isn't using the same language that you're using, right, doesn't
Speaker 3: fully embrace the Marxist discourse. In his language, is worried
Speaker 3: about his rent and his food. Maybe doesn't have the
Speaker 3: same aesthetics as you, and and I was always struck
Speaker 3: by that, And even when I got to college, it
Speaker 3: was more intense right, that there's this kind of leftist movement.
Speaker 3: And the inconvenient thing is that the people they speak
Speaker 3: to they don't really like or understand. So I come
Speaker 3: from somewhere else, and I do think I both like
Speaker 3: and understand the people I grew up amongst. And I'm
Speaker 3: not ever willing to just shut the door in them
Speaker 3: because their language isn't correct, or they're not thinking in
Speaker 3: quite the way that I would wish they would think.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to find common ground. And to me, common
Speaker 3: ground is not a middling space. It's like a radical space.
Speaker 3: It's a space you can share in common. The commons
Speaker 3: is the thing that concerns me.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand, Yes, you went on Charlie Rose.
Speaker 3: God, yeah, that's the only time to be on television
Speaker 3: twice on Charlie Rose.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I've seen them both.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it, and after that it's like, I never
Speaker 3: want to do this again in my life.
Speaker 1: Well you did just fine. You had a quote in
Speaker 1: that first one that I wonder if it's still true
Speaker 1: for you. You said, empathy and voyeurism are kind of two
Speaker 1: sides of the same thing. You have to like looking
Speaker 1: and then once you finished looking, you have to make
Speaker 1: an effort to understand. Does that still ring true to you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's my kink for sure. I like to watch.
Speaker 3: I like to watch people. I like to watch their lives.
Speaker 1: I wasn't gonna say kink, but no, but it's fine.
Speaker 3: I don't mind. That's truth. I am really voyeuristic. It's
Speaker 3: deep in my nature and I know it is. And yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess the problem people have the idea that in
Speaker 3: understanding people, you forgive them. It's all very Christian, that
Speaker 3: kind of idea.
Speaker 1: And your husband says, you have to do everything in
Speaker 1: your power to not be a Christian.
Speaker 3: He said, but you know, when I was writing this book,
Speaker 3: looking at these radical socialist Christians who were some of
Speaker 3: the greatest anti slavery campaigners, Thomas Spence, Robert Wedderburn, who
Speaker 3: turned from christ but then spoke of correctly that when
Speaker 3: you get into the social gospel, what you're being asked
Speaker 3: to do there is beyond any Marxist fantasy. It's like
Speaker 3: you're being asked to give every single thing that you
Speaker 3: have to the weakest and poorest in front of you.
Speaker 3: So there is certainly a radical gospel, but now I'm
Speaker 3: nowhere near anything like that. But understanding doesn't have to
Speaker 3: mean approving. But I think that the really hard thing,
Speaker 3: the difference between me and perhaps younger writers, is that
Speaker 3: whether I approve or disapprove of the people in my
Speaker 3: novels is not the point to me.
Speaker 1: This was your point around tar. That's interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just it's a serious difference. Of course, I
Speaker 3: have my personal views, and but that's not the beginning
Speaker 3: and end of when I'm critiquing something. I just, you know,
Speaker 3: like I'm reading Virginia Wolf's stories now, and I love Wolf,
Speaker 3: and sometimes she's an asshole, and I can just know that,
Speaker 3: do you know what I mean? I just know that
Speaker 3: sometimes she's a fucking asshole. Yes, So that's that. It's
Speaker 3: not I'm not condoning it. I'm just it's just the
Speaker 3: fact it's okay to contain more than one idea like
Speaker 3: you can just have have it and know it.
Speaker 1: And you think my generation is not capable of holding them.
Speaker 3: No, I think they absolutely are. I know they are,
Speaker 3: because you.
Speaker 1: Think they do the beginning and ending thing that it
Speaker 1: begins ends with their own personal politics.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think that either. I think that dumb
Speaker 3: people are like that. But I keep reading really brilliant
Speaker 3: novels by people younger than me all the time, and
Speaker 3: brilliant criticism, and so it's not I don't believe in
Speaker 3: like it's some kind of generational trait. It's always that
Speaker 3: instinct is in every generation of like shutting down at
Speaker 3: a certain point. Or No, I don't believe that. I'm
Speaker 3: just talking about my particular interest which just don't stop.
Speaker 3: They just keep going. I can't help that.
Speaker 1: You know. Eighteen years ago, Yes, you interviewed author Ian
Speaker 1: McEwan in the Believer magazine. Yeah, he was about fifty
Speaker 1: seven at the time.
Speaker 3: Is this the meaning of deep dive? Is this what
Speaker 3: happening here? Sam? Is that what you like to do?
Speaker 3: I really understand it now.
Speaker 1: You were skeptical in the beginning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, but now I'm like, who It's intense,
Speaker 3: It's amazing the things you've managed to find go on.
Speaker 1: He was about fifty seven at the time. Yes, And
Speaker 1: toward the end of your interview, you asked him what
Speaker 1: it feels like to look at your own bookshelves and
Speaker 1: this nice little backlog of work, this little stack. I
Speaker 1: don't know what that would feel like. Amazing, I would think,
Speaker 1: does it give you any pleasure?
Speaker 3: Though? What did he say?
Speaker 1: I'm a little more interested in what you would say now,
Speaker 1: because you know, when we started this conversation is that
Speaker 1: I've been on book tour and people keep bringing all
Speaker 1: these books to me, and I don't know how time
Speaker 1: has moved so fast, And I've never imagined having all
Speaker 1: these things written that you have spent your time on,
Speaker 1: in your life, invested in.
Speaker 3: I just it's weird, Like I you know, when you're young,
Speaker 3: you come to destroy the generation above. I came to
Speaker 3: destroy Ian. I love Ian, but I came to destroy him,
Speaker 3: just as he came to destroy the generation above him,
Speaker 3: just as young novelists come to destroy me. That's like
Speaker 3: the natural ecosystem of lisure, and if it doesn't happen,
Speaker 3: it's not healthy. So I'm so used to coming to
Speaker 3: be the destroyer and now I'm here to be the destroyed,
Speaker 3: and it's just a weird feeling. I don't know, it's weird.
Speaker 3: I did these books, I'll probably do some more. And
Speaker 3: what I do notice about the writers I came to
Speaker 3: destroy is that you feel a kind of new fondness
Speaker 3: for them. You see new things in them and which
Speaker 3: I like. And I hope I feel that way about
Speaker 3: my work as I get older, that I come around
Speaker 3: to it again. But the moment, I'm still like full
Speaker 3: of beans. Man, I'm kind of excited to do something new.
Speaker 1: Have they given you pleasure?
Speaker 3: This one gave me a lot of pleasure, satisfaction And yeah,
Speaker 3: like I didn't know if I could do it, and
Speaker 3: I did it to my own satisfaction. That's the best
Speaker 3: way I can put it. And then last night when
Speaker 3: I was signing, people came up talking to me about
Speaker 3: White Teeth have so moved like a book I barely remember,
Speaker 3: and it was so nice, like kids coming up and
Speaker 3: talking about reading it. And I still felt quite disassociated,
Speaker 3: like it's not I couldn't remember writing it. But I thought, God,
Speaker 3: that's so nice that it's just out in the world
Speaker 3: being with people. What an incredible thing.
Speaker 1: Do you want to know? His answer? Oh yeah, go on,
Speaker 1: he said, to your question, does it give you pleasure?
Speaker 1: It's like a family album, the consciousness of your own past.
Speaker 1: People say what you were doing in such and such years,
Speaker 1: And I know exactly what I was doing. I know
Speaker 1: I was publishing a particular book or halfway through another one.
Speaker 1: These books are the spoonfuls with which I've measured my existence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly it. And I don't know if that's
Speaker 3: a normal thing to do with your life book. That's
Speaker 3: what I've done. It's okay, is it okay? Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: actually it's good. Yeah, I mean I I personally feel
Speaker 3: that relations with human beings are more important, and I
Speaker 3: treasure my friendships and my loves and my children and
Speaker 3: all of that. But it's not a bad way to
Speaker 3: spend the day, not at all.
Speaker 1: When I asked a peer of yours for a question, yes,
Speaker 1: I asked George Saunders.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, he didn't.
Speaker 1: Really have one for me, but he did say, the
Speaker 1: thing I love most about Sayti's work is her interest,
Speaker 1: her ability, maybe her obsession with trying something new. And
Speaker 1: I was thinking about that young kid obsessed with Prince right,
Speaker 1: focused on transformation. Yeah, I guess my question for you
Speaker 1: the last one after this book at forty seven? Are
Speaker 1: you still interested in seeing who you'll become next? God?
Speaker 1: I am?
Speaker 3: Is that really childish? That's such a childish thing. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm always curious. Yeah, I don't feel like my life
Speaker 3: is over. Maybe I should, But I don't.
Speaker 1: You sound almost disappointed by that.
Speaker 3: I feel like maybe I should be more grown up
Speaker 3: by now. That's what I think, that I should be
Speaker 3: a bit more staid or something. I just think like
Speaker 3: I'm not, like, am I grown up? Like Jennifer Egan? No,
Speaker 3: she seems like a grown up person.
Speaker 1: I've talked to her.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she seems like an adult. Do I seem like
Speaker 3: an adult like that?
Speaker 1: No? No at all.
Speaker 3: No, that's the problem. That's what I'm talking about the problems.
Speaker 3: So I don't know how long that situation is going
Speaker 3: to continue, you know.
Speaker 1: I guess we'll find out. Yeah, next time you come on.
Speaker 3: Okay, good. I desperately want to be a real boy.
Speaker 3: As Pinocchio said, we're grown up. I really would like
Speaker 3: to adult soon. So I hope it will happen soon.
Speaker 1: I'll be here when it does.
Speaker 4: Okay, great, Thank you so, Zadie Smith, thank you an
Speaker 4: absolute pleasure. Thanks, and that's our show.
Speaker 1: If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us
Speaker 1: five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening,
Speaker 1: if you've already done that, or if you just want
Speaker 1: to go above and beyond sharing this show on social media,
Speaker 1: sharing it with a friend, or just leaving us a
Speaker 1: review on Apple really is the best way for new
Speaker 1: listeners to find the podcast. Doing that also ensures that
Speaker 1: we can continue making Talk easy each and every Sunday.
Speaker 1: I want to give a special thanks this week to
Speaker 1: Julie keon Penguin Random House, Mickey Collins, Nathan Heller, Kathryn Waterston,
Speaker 1: and of course our guest, Zadismith, if you can find
Speaker 1: her new novel, The Fraud wherever you do your reading.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to check out any of the pieces
Speaker 1: mentioned in this episode, be sure to visit our show
Speaker 1: notes at talk easypod dot com for more conversations with
Speaker 1: fellow writers at check out our talks with George Saunders,
Speaker 1: Margo Jefferson, mn jin Lee Jumplihiri, and of course Jennifer
Speaker 1: Egan to hear those and more Pushkin Podcasts listen on
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You
Speaker 1: can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at talk Easypod.
Speaker 1: If you want to purchase one of our mugs they
Speaker 1: Come and Cream or Navy, you can do so at
Speaker 1: talk easypod dot com slash shop. That's Talk easypod dot
Speaker 1: com slash Shop. As always, Talk Easy is produced by
Speaker 1: Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Chenick sa Bravo. Our
Speaker 1: associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Our research and production assistant
Speaker 1: is Paulina Suarez. Today's talk was edited by Caitlin Dryden
Speaker 1: and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editors are Clarice Gavarro,
Speaker 1: c J. Mitchell, and Lindsay Ellis. Our music is by
Speaker 1: Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chrisia Shanolin, photographs by
Speaker 1: Julius Chu, video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzak,
Speaker 1: Ian Jones and Ethan Seneca. Our team at Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: includes Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John Stars, Kerrie Brody, David Glover,
Speaker 1: Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Isabella and Narvez. Caraposa, Tera, Machado,
Speaker 1: Maya Cannig, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, The Tall Mullade, Malcolm
Speaker 1: Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for
Speaker 1: listening to Talk Easy. We'll see you back here next
Speaker 1: week with a new episode. Until then, stay safe and
Speaker 1: so on.