Zadie Smith

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the writer Zaidie Smith. First published at just twenty four, her debut novel White Teeth garnered huge attention and praise. As a result,

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She suffered the unnerving experience of doing her literary growing up in public, yet, in spite of the scrutiny, it would appear she blossomed. In the thirteen years since, more novels, essays, and short stories have brought numerous literary prizes and critical praise.

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Born to a Jamaican mother and a British father, she was brought up in Wilsdon, North London, where many of her characters live. She began writing at five, and became a voracious reader, devouring the grates of literature. Now she divides her time between Wilsdon and New York, where she teaches creative writing.

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She describes herself as an English novelist enslaved to an ancient tradition.

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And yet her chosen areas of exploration could not be more of the moment, rooted in the ethno jumble of contemporary Britain. She says I'm really interested in what memory feels like. We only have snapshots of the past. Writing isn't about being experimental. It's about finding something true.

Presenter1:39

So Zadie Smith, exploring what memory feels like. That's a very interesting proposition. What purpose do you think that serves?

Presenter1:46

For me it's the idea of recognizing where you are in time. I just find a lot of the way we live now is is meant to disguise from you the reality of time. And when I'm writing I'm trying to remind myself before anybody else that it's real, that this thing that you're in. I just think it's a human instinct to

Zadie Smith2:01

That is

Presenter2:05

Deeply believe that you, Kirstie, for example, are going to die, but me, on the other hand.

Presenter2:12

I'm gonna last. Living between Willstone and New York, as I mentioned in the introduction, you have chosen to root yourself in Britain, where you have always been rooted. A lot of people, when they find big success, don't do that. I go to New York for work. It's a great place to work in that nobody does anything except work, so you're encouraged to do the same. But when I'm there, I can't say that I'm full of ideas. You know, I can't stop writing when I'm in London. And what about the way you write now? You're a mother of two very young children. Are you one of those writers who can write with the study door sort of flung open and hearing music in the background, the kids' toys around you, or do you need peace and solitude?

Zadie Smith2:39

Uh

Presenter2:48

I'd love peace and solitude. It's not realistic anymore. When I went to college, I met the children of writers or artists, and one of the things they complain about most often is that exactly what you're talking about, that closed door and a sense that you can't come in. So I leave a door open, and the good thing about that is sometimes, for instance, my daughter wanders in, sees what I'm doing, thinks it's boring, and leaves, you know, rather than it being this extraordinary mystery. Letting life in, even if it means a lot of a book here, a book there, it doesn't seem to me a disaster. Your musical list today and music generally in your life, has it been a torture to try and narrow it down to ace, or did you immediately know what you wanted? When I was in college, they did that yearbook thing, you know, where they talk about traits of people, and my trait was having the worst music taste in college.

Presenter3:33

Get ready, folks. Okay. Tell me about your first one then. My first one is Notorious BIG: My Money, My Problems.

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What I loved about it when it came out, it had this extraordinary video. Everybody was dressed in these like white or bright yellow tracks, it's dancing for joy, and with Puffy playing a kind of black golfer because Tiger Woods had just happened. It's the middle of like Clintoni in America. There's this enormous feeling of optimism, like we're here and there's no getting rid of us. It was great.

Speaker 34:04

Now, who's hot, who not? Tell me who rock, who seller in the stores? You tell me who flopped, who copped the blue drop, who jewels drop pops, who knows the goshy down to the juice rock. The same old pimp, lace, you know ain't nothing changed but my limp. Can't stop till I see my name on the blimp. Guarantee a me and sells pull a double up. You don't believe in Harlem World, double up. We don't play around, it's your bet, lay it down. Cause didn't know me 91, bet they know me now. I'm the young Harlem with the goldie sound. Can't hold PD.

Presenter4:34

That was a notorious BIG and more money, more problems. Zadie Smith, we should just tell people how much you've written so far. And I said garnered with praise and awards. We need to really contextualise that. Four novels, a collection of essays. Your first novel published in the year 2000. It won. Here we go, Deep Breath. The Whitbread First Novel Prize, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tate Black Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award.

Presenter4:59

Looking back, you say when you read the first twenty pages of White Teeth, it induces nausea. Why is that?

Presenter5:07

I don't think that's a very unusual thing to say. Like, when I ask people, imagine picking up a letter you wrote when you were twenty-one, or a diary or a journal, what's your reaction? It's like as if somebody else wrote it. There's a kind of shock that you could have expressed yourself that way or thought that way. So that's how it is for me. It's just that the thing is published and everybody's read it. But as I get older, I feel fondered towards it. I think of it as a book that young people really like, and that's great. You talked a minute ago when you were introducing your first piece of music about all the optimism that surrounded Clintonia and everything that was happening then. There was not just a literary optimism, but a cultural optimism about you when you burst on the scene, where there was this sort of opportunity to say, see, see, this is what multicultural Britain can throw up, a brilliantly educated, beautiful, capable, literary young woman of colour. That that's why people wanted to draw attention to, because they wanted in some way to prove the liberal ideal was fine.

Zadie Smith6:00

Right, because

Presenter6:06

Yeah, but it's not proof enough, is it? There's a good line of Kanye somewhere where he talks about being the black spot on a domino. It's not enough, just one or two people out of a comprehensive school of two thousand people. It's just nonsense. That's no kind of success. So I I was never really interested being held up as that kind of example. Or is it the idea that I'd somehow been rescued or saved from a class that you need to be rescued or saved from? Because I don't feel that way either. I love the community I come from and I hope I'm still a part of it. I hope they think I'm still a part of it. I should tell listeners that they don't have the advantage of seeing the wonderful T-shirt that you're wearing today. Tell us what it says on it.

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This black nerd.

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It was a t-shirt shop in New York, you know, you choose whatever you want written on it, and I chose black nerd. That's what I am. It's good to be a black nerd, I enjoy it. Let's have some more music then, Zadie Smith. Tell me about disc number two. This is Billie Holiday, Easy Living. I love singers, female vocalists. I wanted to be one when I was younger. And you have a terrific blues voice, I've been told. I have an alright voice, but Billy is on a different scale from most other human singers. And the thing which I really love about her is that technically it shouldn't be good. Everything's wrong, right? The phrasing is bizarre. She takes songs and kind of dismantles them, and yet there's such beauty in it. And this song, particularly Easy Living, because when I met my husband, he was also a fan of these black female singers, Nina, Billy. And it's easy to live with people you agree with on things with.

Zadie Smith7:09

Yeah.

Presenter7:39

Living for you is easy living.

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It's easy to live.

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When you're in love.

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And I'm so in love. There's nothing in life but you

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That was Billie Holiday and Easy Living. I should tell people, Zadie Smith, that towards the end of that you did start singing and you do have a beautiful voice. And indeed you told me during that I hope you don't mind me telling other people this that you did you used to earn well more than pin money really used to earn money doing what? Well, I s I sing a bit in like the lobbies of hotels at Christmas.

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Sometimes old people's homes. When you were a student or no, when I was in school.

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But

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I didn't like the the performance bit though, that was the problem. I never really got over the difficulty of performing. You were born Slap Bang in the middle of the seventies then. What are your first memories?

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Um

Presenter8:42

It's weird when you have kids, you you think you don't have early memories and then as you're doing up the buttons on their shirt or or smelling bongella you realize that you you do have these memories, incredibly early ones.

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of being held and cared for it.

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I think my earliest memories are kind of knocking about

Presenter8:59

Wilsdon and Kilburn with my slightly odd looking parents.

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Odd why.

Presenter9:05

You know, it wasn't that they were mixed race actually because that was as common as grains of sand around Kilburn. It it was the age gap which was quite severe. So I had a very young mother and and a what I thought was a very old father at the time. What was the actual age gap? Thirty years. Oh right, so it was a big year, right? It was quite a lot. So

Zadie Smith9:19

Yeah.

Presenter9:22

It was a kind of extremity, and that was interesting because I ended up with a lot of the tastes of my father, who was more like a grandfather's age, a lot of my musical tastes.

Zadie Smith9:22

There's

Presenter9:31

You know, I liked a lot of films in the twenties and thirties. And you didn't mind him being older.

Presenter9:36

Uh I did I think I did mind it. I would be untrue to say I didn't mind. I was very concerned about it. So my earliest memories really were always thinking, Well, when's he gonna die? you know.

Presenter9:46

And I think it's just my personal ps psychological theory about myself that that a lot of my writing instinct came out of that concern.'Cause it's not a normal thought to always be thinking about death when you're five, six, seven, eight.

Presenter10:01

And you s you said earlier you're a worrier. Do you think that's where it came from? I certainly think it's where it came from. I was always anxious because I thought he was going somewhere. In fact, he lived till I was in my early thirties, so all the worry was unnecessary. Can you tell me about life at home then? What do you remember? My brother would probably say my brother just underneath me probably say differently, but I was the oldest, and my memory is of my parents at war, basically. They were just always at war. Were they at war over was it we can't pay the bills or was it I really don't like you? They just didn't like each other. It was just general. But they really liked us and I always felt that. So I always felt kind of sympathy for them. Like we're in a car going to Cornwall, they're screaming at each other. But I was aware of the fact that at least they're trying to get us to Cornwall, like united in the idea of giving us a happy childhood. And with my brothers, we had our own thing going, you know, and we had a lot of fun. So it it worked out fine. And when they got divorced, everybody was relieved. My dad lived round the corner. It was a much better arrangement. We were still close, but we didn't have to have the yapping.

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Let's have some music, Zadie Smith. We're on your third. Tell me about this. This is to Ramona Dylan. Dylan was my dad's favourite and my mum loved him too, so that's one place where they were united. And it's just a song about displacement. I always hear it as Dylan saying to a girl, Well, you've moved to the big city and it's tough and everyone's mean to you, but you've just got to try and get on with it. And I felt both my parents were ill in that situation, really. They were just trying to get on with it.

Zadie Smith11:28

Ramona, come closer, shut softly your watery eyes.

Zadie Smith11:37

The pangs of your sadness will pass as your senses will write.

Zadie Smith11:45

Oh the flowers of the city, the old breath like it death like sometimes

Zadie Smith11:56

And there's no use in trying to deal with the dying Though I cannot explain that in line

Presenter12:04

That was Bob Dylan and to Ramona, and you said you'd chosen that Zadie Smith because it reminded you of both of your parents who were united at least in their record collection. I was going to say tell me about the little Zadie Smith, but you were little Sadie Smith. Yeah, I was. Yeah. Yeah, you changed it. What is you when you changed your name? I was about fourteen. I never really did it by Deedpo. I just wrote it everywhere. It's a stupid reason. I just there was a boy I really liked whose name began with the Zed and I I don't know what I was thinking. I thought that maybe it would help if when they changed my name. Maybe it has. It sounds great. Anyway, tell me then about yourself as a little girl. What were you like?

Zadie Smith12:39

Yeah.

Presenter12:40

I was very bookish, obviously it's boring things to say, but it's true. I was quite awkward, I think. I was very self-conscious. I looked pretty funny. I had crazy teeth and I didn't know what to do in my hair and I I guess I was kind of a big kid and I kind of made a decision early on that I wasn't gonna get involved in social things.

Presenter13:02

I had a little core of myself. It's like, well, if they don't like me or whatever, I'm just gonna go to my room and read everything. So the carapace was sort of the library, the books and the yeah. And what did you like reading? I guess Roll Dahl.

Zadie Smith13:09

The bricks in the

Presenter13:13

I was obsessive about Narnia and there's a lot of humour in Lewis I think too. And then my mum got me a lot of Jamaican stories like Anancy stories which are quite funny. But pretty early on I started reading, you know, book books. And started writing at five, was that correct? Yeah, when I was about five I wrote a poem about mice and I showed it to my mum and my mum quickly spotted it as a complete piece of plagiarism from Michael Rosen.

Zadie Smith13:29

Without

Zadie Smith13:36

Uh

Presenter13:37

And Michael Rosen gave you a prize. He did give me a prize for that later in life. No, not for that, not for stealing his own poem, but for a little book I wrote with a friend when I was about nine. So I really I suppose I really had the instinct of reading other people's work and reworking it myself. And you do fess up about that quite openly in some of your more recent work. You say, Well, yes, you know, this is a tribute to Ian Forster. I'm very easily influenced. I think I always have been. I need books to to kind of keep going. And it's to me it's the best bit of writing is being able to read and enjoy what you read.

Zadie Smith13:39

Are you gonna give me a prize for that later in life? No, not for that.

Zadie Smith13:53

And

Zadie Smith13:56

Yeah, yeah.

Zadie Smith14:00

By

Presenter14:09

You said once that as a child the thing that you most wanted to be was middle class. You said I liked the big house, I liked the piano, I liked the cats, I liked the cello lessons. What what about that now? Uh there's an old Kingsley Ames line that nice things are nicer than nasty things. That's obviously true.

Presenter14:27

But it was a a childish obsession. You always think that the grass is greener next door. And is it? I don't think it is. I I mean my mum and dad provided a lot of what we wanted. We she found an old piano. We had piano lessons we shared with another person. She got all kinds of second-hand violins that we did lessons in our school. They gave you free lessons. I was in Brent Orchestra. So I don't think I missed out on much. Let's have some more music. You're fourth. This is Madonna.

Presenter14:56

Uh what are you laughing for?

Zadie Smith14:57

Yeah.

Presenter14:59

'Cause you go on Desert Island like this, you don't expect to be choosing Madonna, but I had to try and be honest. There's something about how I noticed when I was a kid that, you know, there'd be boys running around the playground talking about pop stars or actresses they would do.

Presenter15:11

And I never ever heard anyone say that about Madonna. There's never a question that some nine-year-old was gonna tell you what he would do to Madonna if he got her hands on it, because that was just never gonna happen.

Presenter15:21

And subconsciously that's the effect that she gave to the generation of girls who came up around her, that you were not to be done unto. If anyone was going to be doing the doing, it would be you.

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Um

Presenter15:37

It's human nature, it's human nature nature, and I'm inside. Yeah.

Speaker 415:45

Outside. Son, your bitch go hang your shit on me, it's handled.

Zadie Smith15:52

Ain't just

Zadie Smith15:54

You punish me for telling you my fantasies.

Zadie Smith15:59

I'm breaking all the rules I didn't expect

Presenter16:03

That was Human Nature from Madonna. Um, Zadie Smith, when you were fifteen, you had an accident. You had quite a bad accident. Yeah. I I was smoking a a cigarette, as I am wont to do, on the window sill of my mum's masonette, so it's like the top floor. I didn't want I guess I didn't want her to know I was smoking a cigarette, and I fell out of the window and I fell kind of sitting up, half on pavement, half on grass. I was really lucky to survive, basically. Instead, I just broke my leg very badly. But I had a kind of maybe thirty seconds where I was hanging from the gutter.

Presenter16:37

You know, like in a bag cartoon.

Speaker 416:39

Yeah.

Presenter16:39

With really the full expectation that I was going to die. I mean, why would you think you're going to survive if you fall from the roof? But I was amazed by how calm I felt. It was just interesting. It was an interesting experience to be right on the edge of that thing and and not to be so panicked. And it was a cigarette you were smoking? Yeah, it was. It could have easily been a joint, but it was only a p silk cut I almost died for, pathetic.

Presenter17:01

For for being part of that generation that was, in your own words, embraced by ecstasy, you you say you were encased in marijuana. Yeah, there was a there was a lot of that. When was that?

Zadie Smith17:10

Yeah

Presenter17:13

Through most of my adolescence.

Presenter17:16

There's something about my family, the way I was brought up, that I was always quite controlled about it. I always thought, well, I I've got these exams to do. It's not necessarily the drug of the industrious, though that's quite a mismatch. No, and that's why I gave it up in the end. I find it so annoying now as a drug. I can't bear the fogginess in your brain. I just find it completely intolerable. The one thing I need to have is a clear thought.

Zadie Smith17:24

It's not necessary.

Zadie Smith17:27

No, and that's

Presenter17:39

Did you clearly think you were going to Cambridge always?

Presenter17:42

No, I didn't even know what it was originally. How did you find out? I had a friend whose dad was at All Souls in Oxford, and he was really helpful. They'd go round to his house and he'd

Presenter17:53

Explaining to me what kind of thing they expected.'Cause in my school there were plenty of kids who could have got to Cambridge, plenty. They didn't, because they had no idea what it was, how to apply, how to get there, what to do in an interview. That's the information that I guess middle class people have. That's their great advantage. Um, you say you lived the life of Riley at Cambridge? Yeah, I did. To me, it was a life of Riley, like, you weren't at home.

Presenter18:16

Does no one tell you what to do? You got to read all day long.

Presenter18:19

It was incredible. And it instead of just being like one nerd, you were surrounded by nerds. It was kinda helpful. Um the thing which was hardest being w one of like four black nerds. That wasn't that much fun. Did you get a lot of male attention?

Presenter18:36

I was the opposite. I was kind of a minor stalker of other people. Um I I looked like one of the Thompson twins at that time. I was crazily dressed, like skirt down to my ankles, lot series of very big hats. I was primarily trying to date my husband, who was not at all interested. So this is Nick Leird. How did he try to fob you off? He s he says I used to go round to his room and just sit there all day and half the night just hoping that something would happen. Then finally about four AM he'd be like, Well, I really need to go to bed now

Zadie Smith18:51

Yeah.

Presenter19:06

And then I shuffle off again. That went on for ages. And when did he change his mind? Long after we were out of university. But it was good because we were friends for a really long time. And it's good to be friends with someone you're married with. I think it's a good basis. Let's have some more music. You're fifth. Tell me about this. I think one of the reasons in college why I got that worst taste in music thing is because all I listened to was Prince day in, day out. He had the same kind of skin colour as me. He had this strange kind of gender thing, being almost kind of male and female. And I guess I thought about myself sometimes having both instincts. And this song, particularly Pop Life, I just thought if I was on a desert island, I'd want people, I'd miss humanity. And this is a song about the mess of human life, and it has so many human voices in it. And I've always loved it. It's a joyful thing.

Presenter19:55

Yeah.

Presenter19:56

Uh

Speaker 419:58

When you wanted a girl, when you wanted to go

Speaker 420:02

Don't you think it's pretty hell ain't got no cow

Zadie Smith20:23

I can't wait no time.

Zadie Smith20:25

Life in real fun game Lessons got that bun

Presenter20:30

That was Prince and Pop Life. So, Zadie Smith, your your second book, The Autograph Man, is all about the the corroding nature of fame. What's been your experience of fame?

Presenter20:41

Um yeah, that's a t typical second album, isn't it? The album about being famous or not.

Presenter20:47

I'm so predictable. Um, bottom line is, most people don't read, which is very.

Presenter20:53

You know, it doesn't. I get on the tube, I do everything I want to do. It's not like being, like, my brother's on television, that's completely different. Yes, and you say now, even that you're not interested in being on television. That public thing, is that quite a difficult bit of your job? It's a bit difficult, but it's purely selfish on my part. I just have a great ambition to write. I'm quite monomaniacal. I don't have any ambition to do anything else. And so, a woman writer, this is in italics here, a woman writer, a black woman writer, a beautiful black woman writer. How much do you think how you look has contributed to the way you've been treated in the press? I mean, it.

Presenter21:33

Yeah, people seem to think I put those photos in the paper. I I don't put them in. Uh photo editors put my photo in'cause it's the easiest thing to do, I suppose. And some of it's just ridiculous. Like if Italian friend was telling me

Presenter21:44

That in an Italian newspaper recently, they had a little editorial letter about how I couldn't possibly be I'm probably quite a good writer, but I couldn't possibly be a great writer because, in their opinion, I was too attractive. And when you thought about writers, those two things never went together. Not water type. No, a silver planet. I mean, there's a few, but what's really fascinating about it is if you invert it, what it assumes, it's a really.

Zadie Smith21:59

No bl

Presenter22:07

Misogynistic and fascinating thought, because what it means is, if you were beautiful, you have no need to be intelligent. Yes. Do you see what I mean? I completely see what you mean. It's a very sinister thought, actually. What about your relationship not with your public image, but with your self-image? Is it you you mentioned earlier you used to be overweight. Were you very overweight?

Speaker 322:16

It's moving.

Presenter22:27

Oh, I was, you know, fairly I if pr I was pretty big one way or another. I don't think I really felt ugly though. You know, when you become a teenage girl, it can be tough one way or another. There's one way to be, and I was in many ways the the wrong thing. What do you mean? Explain that to me, I don't understand. You know, if you grew up in England, you're expected to have uh straight hair rather than curly, your skin to be pale rather than dark.

Zadie Smith22:43

You know

Presenter22:50

But all those things are the things I love about myself now. My father said to me when I was young that when I was twenty five I would grow into myself and understand myself,'cause he could see how miserable I was when I was a teenager, and he was absolutely right. I

Presenter23:06

Feel such a kind of happiness in my skin, and it's not really to do with what size you are, it's just the recognition that you're healthy, for example. That you get out of bed and everything works, that it moves. This is an incredible blessing that I was too busy moping around to recognize. Let's have some music then. We're going to listen to your sixth of the morning. Tell me about this. This is Mozart's Requiem. I guess it plays a large part in on beauty. I grew up almost perfectly ignorant of classical music. The first time I met people who listened to it was at college, and I was constantly amazed that anyone would have this music. So, when I first heard the Requiem, I was completely bowled over by its entry-level into that form of music. But to me, it was a kind of overwhelming experience.

Speaker 423:57

Uh

Presenter24:52

That was part of the confertatus from Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor, sung by the Quarten Orchestra of Paris conducted by Daniel Barenboun.

Presenter25:01

You mentioned a moment ago on Beauty, one of your novels. It went on to win the Orange Prize for Fiction. At that point, you had just married Nick Laird, who you had spent many hours trying to persuade to be in your company at university. You've said that in that book you wanted to explore you were newly married, and in writing it you wanted to explore the landscape of a long marriage of this couple who'd been married for I think it was thirty years, something like that. What did you discover?

Zadie Smith25:22

Here's something.

Presenter25:26

I discovered that there's uh there's something very odd about someone who just gets married and then thinks, Yes, but what's this gonna be like in thirty years? As I look back on the books, that

Presenter25:35

That seems to happen over and over. I I last night I read out loud from White Teachers which I literally haven't done in fifteen years. And I was flicking through trying to find a passage. I saw a bit about Samad, who's a guy in the book.

Presenter25:46

Being annoyed that his whole social life is now children. All he sees is other people's children. They come to his house, he has to hang out with them. But I was 19 when I wrote that.

Presenter25:54

But when I was reading it, I was thinking, Yes, that's my life now. So th there must be a part of me that's always trying to make the future safe by imagining it. That would be part of the worrier, isn't it? If I if I catastrophize the worst of it, then maybe I'll be able to deal with it. But the thing I found as I got older, and I definitely found in that book, is that

Zadie Smith26:03

But it's a good fight.

Zadie Smith26:05

Yeah.

Presenter26:10

If that's a psychological work that I'm trying to do s subconsciously when I write, it doesn't work because there's no replacement for experience. You can't fake it, you can't fictionalise it, it won't develop your heart, it won't develop you as a person. It's a kind of game that you can play on the page, but it's not the same as being alive. Being alive is a very radical thing, it it's much more difficult. You said it was a ridiculous thing to assume that writing about a long marriage would suddenly give you the clue to what it was going to be like to hopefully be in a long marriage. So you didn't learn anything in the process as you imagined this world for this couple. You didn't think, ah, maybe that will happen, and I didn't expect that.

Presenter26:47

No, I think what it is when I look back over earlier books, I think this is very true of young writers. They're full of aphorisms, like little moral sentences. Young people are full of that kind of stuff. They're very certain. They think they know what's going on. As you get older,

Presenter27:01

In my experience anyway, that all disappears. I don't write aphorisms anymore because I have no idea what's going on.

Presenter27:09

Uh

Presenter27:10

The person who wrote White Teeth was a know-it-all, you know. At twenty-two, that's that's how you are. The older you get, the less sure you are. Let's have some more music. Then, Zodie Smith, what on your seventh? Tell me about this.

Presenter27:22

This is a recent track by a guy called Wretch32 who I believe is from Tottenham. I heard it on the radio and I just fell in love with it, partly because his voice is so perfectly North London. The rhymes are so clever and funny and yet so completely simple. And it samples the stone roses so it's like two ends of my life squished together. And if I was on a desert island I'd want to remember the 90s as well as the present. So this song kind of does both.

Speaker 427:48

Don't fall in the ground

Speaker 427:51

They quite love what's done for them slow

Speaker 427:55

If what alone is us, don't sit in hell, look down wish him well.

Speaker 428:02

Unofferdots, we call our round shots.

Speaker 428:06

Yeah, I got a good vibe. I ain't tryna be bare with my hook lines I had a feeling I could fly before I hopped on the plane or a new sky I'm a good

Presenter28:16

That was Retch Three Two and Unorthodox. I have read, and I can't quite believe it's true, that you don't have a plan when you start one of your books, Zadie Smith. Is that true? Yeah, it's absolutely true. You don't know what's gonna happen at the end? A lot of readers would say that's what

Presenter28:32

I have the barest idea. Yeah, I never know what's going to happen at the end, and I have a little bit of a sketch for maybe the first half, but I'm talking about maybe three sentences. I write like a thousand words, say three pages, and I just keep going over and over and over it. It's usually a scene, people talking, or however the novel begins. And the more you go over it, over sometimes months, the rest of the novel just kinda comes out of that. I can't really explain it. Just editing those words, changing things, and you realise what's going to happen after. Your father died in 2006, so he had, of course, lived to see much of your success. Did you talk about it?

Presenter29:06

Uh he was great about it. Like, he kept all these clippings. The the thing which mattered to him most was me being in The Guardian'cause you know, he thought of it as a posh paper, he was very proud to take it. So I always dreaded it and he always loved it. So we were slightly across purposes. And I think the thing he maybe liked

Presenter29:23

Best was I wrote a bit about him in the war before he died. And I think what I wanted most from my father, maybe this is quite common, is you want to believe that life was meaningful and he learnt something and he learnt and grew and all those things we've come to accept from television or from movies that that's the shape of a life. That really wasn't my father's experience. And a lot of it was depressing and I couldn't handle the depressing aspects of it.

Presenter29:48

He'd lost so much, he'd lost people he'd loved, he has other children who he hadn't treated well. There were lots of things I couldn't iron out into a pretty shape.

Presenter29:58

And he was really scared of dying, you know. That's the other thing you don't want to hear. He felt at a lot of levels that his life had been a failure.

Presenter30:05

And that's really, really hard to listen to.

Presenter30:09

So

Presenter30:10

It was listening to him, it was the process of really growing up and realizing the shape of a life is not.

Presenter30:17

The shape of a novel, you know. You can't control it.

Presenter30:20

And your mother, does she worry about the expectation and the weight on your shoulder that you're always going to deliver this next prize winning cracker? Or is she just happy to bask in the glow of your success? She likes basking, my mum.

Speaker 430:30

Do you like

Presenter30:32

But she's now she's got my brother. My you know, my brother's a comedian, he's on the telly all the time, so a lot of the pressure is off my back, it's onto Ben's. Very briefly, the island, all alone. Do does that fill you with dread?

Presenter30:46

to be cast away.

Presenter30:48

I need people, I would miss them intensely.

Presenter30:51

And more than anything, perhaps just people watching, which is something which has brought me so much pleasure over so many years, would be kind of torture. Tell me about your last piece of music then. What are we going to hear finally, Zadie Smith?

Presenter31:02

This is Wagner, it's Tristan and Nizold and it's the prelude. It's a sublime piece of music in the kind of extreme sense that it will make you shake and cry. What's interesting about it is that it's a series of unresolved musical phrases. And that goes with the story of Tristan and Isolde as well. You know, that he has this love potion, and when they fall in love, it's like the insertion of something really irrational, something you can't control, something that destroys them both, really. It's incredibly beautiful and incredibly painful. And just as a work of art, I find it perfect.

Presenter32:38

That was part of the prelude to Act One of Wagner's Tristram and Isold, played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karian.

Presenter32:46

So we come to the point, Zaidie, where I'm going to give you some books. You get to take to the island, uh the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and then one other book, what will yours be?

Presenter32:56

I would choose Proust because I've never finished it.

Presenter33:00

Because you can have a lot of time on the island. And I would choose it, if it's possible, in a dual translation, French and English, because you might as well learn French while you're there. You can certainly have that, thank you. And you're a load of luxury. I was kind of torn between goggles and running shoes.

Zadie Smith33:09

Why are you there?

Presenter33:15

I think you'd want to feel your body and move, but I think probably goggles so I could swim. Okay, they're yours. And.

Presenter33:21

Of these eight tracks that we've heard today, which one would you choose to save? I think the Wagner, because it's the most capacious. And in the end, a pop song is gonna drive you mental, but you could live in the Wagner, I think, for a while. Okay. It's yours, Zadie Smith. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island dissipation.

Zadie Smith33:33

Okay.

Presenter34:14

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio Four website: bbc.co. uk slash radio four.