Zadie Smith

AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, bestselling author of Swing Time and White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essays No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has boundless curiosity and the boundless wit to match. In Feel Free, pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect, set brilliantly against the context of the utterly contemporary, and considered with a deep humanity and compassion. This electrifying new collection showcases its author as a true literary powerhouse, demonstrating once again her credentials as an essential voice of her generation.

Essays

Feel Free

Helen 

There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happerning to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. 

Is it possible that what men consider enigmatic in women is actually agency? As in: Ifshe does not what the hell does she want? In room after room at the Louvre we will nt me, find painted women receptive to our gaze, applying for it, offering themselves up for judgement, whether it is the judgement of Paris or Cupid or Brian who just this minute got off the Eurostar. But the most famous portrait in the place, the exceptional portrait, is the one of the woman who doesn't appear to want our gaze or need it or even to know we're there. The woman who is in her own world, occupied with her own unknowable thoughts, though she is every hour surrounded by iPhone-wielding tourists. The woman who has ceased to be - or never was - concerned with whether or not you are looking at her. The woman with other things on her mind. Who has, precisely, mind! 

Why must either life or work be perfect? Writers, like everybody else, are stumbling through this world, constantly re-examining the checks and balances of their choices, knowing they are helping here but hurting there. In my life, at least, the flesh-and- blood 'I' and the I-who-is-not-me stumble equally, neither ever coming close to perfection. But I feel extremely fortunate to be engaged in this lifelong project concerning their inter-relation, communication, mutual rejection and argument. IfI can keep saying T both ways for even half as long as Mr Roth managed it, I will count myself a very fortunate woman indeed.

But it's my sense that no matter howy many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is the family' is always an event of some violence. It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.

 What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles.

Feel Free quotes

Join the club