Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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We were shocked and saddened to hear about the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle Singer. Tomorrow, we'll rebroadcast my recent interview with Reiner. And now, let's move on to the interview I recorded last week with Zadie Smith. My guest Sadie Smith is probably tired of hearing this next sentence, but here goes.
She published her first novel, White Teeth, in the year 2000 when she was 25. It was a critical success and an international bestseller. Just a couple of months ago, she turned 50. So instead of writing from the point of view as a young writer, she's writing from the point of view of a middle-aged woman who is, in addition to being a writer, a wife and a mother of two.
Age and the new generation gaps, including between millennials and Gen Xers, are among the subjects she reflects on in her new collection of essays, Dead and Alive. She also writes about being raised by TV, watching nine hours a day,
and all the warnings about the dangers of children watching TV and how that compares to children today being raised in the social media era with so many warnings about exposing children to social media and YouTube. The essays include book reviews, reflections on the visual arts, speeches, and reflections about many aspects of life. Zadie Smith, welcome back to Fresh Air.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Zadie Smith share about generational discourse?
I think the one that irritates my children most is that a lot of British people of my generation and maybe particularly English
ex-ravers i used to love raving and a lot of people in this country did we have the habit of saying tune whenever a good song is anywhere and that is mortifying to my children i think many children tune spelt c-h-o-o-n so i try not to say that in public is that a british thing it's very british yeah yeah oh okay because i i haven't heard that one no it's british and and for the club crowd yeah
I know, like, my father used to always use the words, like, lady, gal, dame. Intolerable. Yeah, I know. But lady is back now. Like, ladies, that's a word that many women use to describe themselves now.
No, I like lady, actually.
Yeah, I'm okay with it. But it has a different meaning than it did when my father's generation was using it. It was very condescending, I thought, at the time.
Right. I mean, the creativity of street level language is something that I just find endlessly thrilling. It's a little sad as you get older as a writer because you can't include it. Like this kind of slang and street language is in my early novels is antique now. And so you have a choice. You can you can continue writing about that period. But I could never write the language my kids bring home.
I think children tend to grow up in a different world than their parents did. Technology has changed. Language has often changed. The environment has changed. Like my parents, they didn't live to see 9-11 or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the COVID lockdown or the first or second election of Donald Trump.
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Chapter 3: How does Zadie Smith's perspective on age influence her writing?
And those are really like world-changing events.
And sometimes one life can cover enormous change. Like with both my parents, my father's... standing in the ruins of Dachau, and then he suddenly, it's the 80s, and he's got a little car, and he's buzzing around a neighborhood in Wilsdon with a Jamaican wife and three children. That's a transformation.
Or my mother, from a tiny, tiny village, an absolute poverty, to the same strange corner of northwest London in this completely other circumstance. You pass through ages, historical moments, political moments. It's not easy for anyone to keep...
And sometimes it's also, as I get older, there are things which pertain to age which I'd be happy to hold on to rather than pretend that my mind and thought are the same as a 24-year-old's forever. That would be, in my view, a kind of bad look, like your mom dancing at a party.
You mentioned your father at Dachau. Was he a soldier helping to liberate it?
Yeah, he liberated it. Yeah. I mean, when I say so, he was 17. So that's another extreme imaginative jump, right, to imagine a 17-year-old doing such a thing. When I was 17, I was just smoking weed. I didn't do anything. So these are extreme differences. Yeah.
Did he talk to you about it?
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Chapter 4: What role did television play in Zadie Smith's upbringing?
Not really. I mean, when he was very old and dying, I interviewed him about it a bit and I wrote about that a little bit. But whatever he saw over there, he really didn't want to discuss. I know it's the old cliche, but I think the trauma was lifelong.
You write about being raised by TV. What did you get from TV that got you to watch TV nine hours a day? And where did you find the time?
You had to go to school, right? I went to school, but I was, I guess, a bit of a latchkey kid because my parents were working. So from 3.30, it was anybody's house. And I watched a tremendous amount. I mean, it's the early 80s, right? So TV is still relatively new. And I just loved it. I still really profoundly love television. I have to kind of... you know, keep control over it.
But when you're in a household of two such peculiarly different individuals out of two alien histories, and then thirdly, you're in a country which you know is your home, but many people in it don't seem to think it's your home. You're kind of looking for clues, like what is going on?
When you say that, do you mean because your mother's Jamaican?
Yeah. I mean, it's still a period like for my mother when she first arrived. I mean, when they married, they went on honeymoon. They couldn't get a room together in Paris. You would try and get a room in England. And, you know, when you turn up at the door, they're like, oh, no, sorry, I was wrong about that.
Was your father white?
Yeah, my father was white. So you're kind of strange and you feel strange. And I think for me, TV... It was like a clue, like what is going on? And also I used to play like a lot of people of my generation, you know, spot the black person. I was watching TV to try and find us anywhere and always completely thrilled to find anybody.
So that also involved a lot of, you know, old movies, a lot of American television. It was just a way of situating myself in the world, I think.
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Chapter 5: What reflections does Zadie Smith have on the impact of time in her life?
The things they would have done in the afternoons rather than sit in front of a TV with their dinner on their laps, the churches and mosques and synagogues they would have gone to, ritual. So the shape of a life used to be defined by those things, and they do bring meaning. They stand in when we don't have the words, when we don't know what to do, when we feel lost.
That, I think, is, in fact, the biggest difference between, for me, being 25... and 50s. When I was 25, I used to genuinely have the feeling, what's wrong with all these ridiculous people who can't create their own meaning, who run off to these faiths or philosophies or feel they need to be charitable or do these kind of things. Why don't they just man up?
And of course now that thought is so repulsive to me that vulnerability and need are to be treated with contempt. But I think I did think I used to watch people volunteering, you know, and think, oh, they're only doing it to make themselves feel better. Well, yeah, that's the point. Yes, smart ass. That's the entire point. It feels good. It feels meaningful. That's why people do it.
You couldn't have told me at 20. I was a fool.
Let's take a short break here. My guest is Zadie Smith. Her new collection of essays is titled Dead and Alive. We'll continue the interview after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.
Getting back to generations, do you see splits between different generations of feminists and how the various interpretations of what is freedom, for instance, in the way you dress versus what is sexual exploitation and commercialization and objectification?
Of course I see it. I find it painful, though, and I don't want to engage in internecine feminist warfare ever because I just think it's pointless. Like I see I have a daughter, of course. And, you know, I guess I have ideas about how I dress, how I present myself. I'm sure they're not hers. My daughter would say I'm very judgmental. I know I am.
I come from a judgmental school of feminism passed down from my mother. Like I still never have never written the word Mrs. on any document in my life. Mrs. burned into my brain since I was about five years old. So I'm aware, but again, with all these things, I try to say to myself, I am the way I am because of the way I was raised, because of the ideas I was raised around. Okay.
Once I know that, then I know it's relational. Like, that's me. It doesn't have to be everybody. But, you know, of course, within any movement, it's easy to get wound up by different approaches. Sometimes, I guess, as you get older, you do see people reinventing the wheel. You know, like I've just noticed
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Chapter 6: How does Zadie Smith view the generational gaps in feminism?
She thinks she's brilliant. That's a good thing to be raised around. She was beautiful. She was an incredibly beautiful woman. And all the things that people have said to her, you know, she's very, very dark skinned. And in Jamaica, the colorism was very intense and she was always called ugly and marga and bucktooth and all the terrible things they said to her.
Somehow she was not destroyed by these things. And she kind of walked in the world with a lot of confidence. So maybe that's what my mother taught me, kind of impervious to other people's opinions.
The way you're describing it, it sounds like the discrimination or distrust of her because of the color of her skin, because it was like so dark, might have been almost worse than it was in London. And Jamaica is a majority black population. No, I wouldn't say that.
Because you're being stopped from ā Yeah, what was your start point? In England, at that point, it's hard to get, even when she went to that school, there's a choice between, as they used to put it, secretarial or the academic route. And as my mum told me, every black girl in that school was told to go the secretarial route. So that meant no university, no A-levels, you learn to type.
And she types very fast. But she got her degree later as an adult in her 30s. So that's a kind of structural discrimination which distorts her entire life. Colorism, you know, is all over the islands because of the history of slavery and the way those islands were run. But my mother never, I don't know, somehow she knew she was beautiful and she had confidence in it.
And that's something she always radiated.
My guest is Zadie Smith. Her new collection of essays is titled Dead and Alive. We'll be right back after a short break. This is Fresh Air. Now that you're 50, recently turned 50, are there new issues that you're facing in life or new ways of thinking about the future than when you were younger?
I mean, there's decrepitude, like you can't see me, but I'm speaking to you with an eye patch on because I've got macular degeneration. So I had an operation on my right eye. So there's that feeling of vulnerability. I've been so lucky. Again, I'm rarely ill, rarely having any physical difficulties. So there's that shock of like, oh, yeah, here it comes. this reminder of your human weakness.
So there's that. Trying to work out what kind of a sick person you're going to be. Are you going to be the kind who talks about it endlessly on the radio? Are you going to be the kind who just soldiers on bravely and barely mentions it? I don't know. You find out. I always love that line of Salman Rushdie. He says, our lives teach us who we are. That's how it is.
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