Zadie Smith

That is mysterious to me.

I thought everybody was absolutely terrified.

And then you meet people who just seem completely chill about it.

And they are a constant amazement to me.

But to me, the idea of not existing, not being conscious, I just experience it as pure terror, but not so much anymore.

New things are scarier, like the death of your children turns out to be a lot more scary than your own death, which I couldn't have predicted when I was young.

I mean, I've never been physically risky.

Like my view is that, as my mother would say, I thought that bungee jumping and helicopter rides were basically for rich white people.

I'm not taking unnecessary risks at this point in human history.

I was never going to do any of that.

But I did take all the drugs and all of that stuff.

So I guess I took risks in a certain way.

But yeah, no physical dare doing.

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

They did.

They thought it was suicide.

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

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

Were you injured?

I was badly injured, yeah.