Ali Smith

Presenter0:00

This Is the B B C

Presenter0:03

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.

Presenter0:37

My castaway this week is the writer Allie Smith. Her novels and short stories have won lots of prizes and endless admirers. But for an author of her stature, she remains intriguingly shy of the publishing publicity machine, believing that the more readers know about a writer, the more it gets in the way of their stories. Born to an English father and an Irish mother, she was brought up in the Highlands of Scotland, on the banks of the Caledonian Canal, reading from the age of three and writing her first poetry at eight. If this all sounds achingly Arcadian

Presenter1:10

It wasn't. Her mum had been a bus conductor, her dad was an electrician, and little Allie was the youngest by far of five kids. Something of a surprise baby. She says of her work, Stories can change lives if we're not careful. They will come in and take the shirts off our backs. Tell the right stories, and we live better lives. So welcome, Allie. It's a very interesting thing to say, this idea of telling the right stories. Tell me more about what you mean by that.

Ali Smith1:37

Stories are incredibly powerful. In fact, we think we live and we're just living and it's just we're just living along, going from day to day. Actually, we live by telling ourselves stories about the lives we are living. And we take in like sponges the stories that come at us on all the waves, on all the radio waves, on the T V wave, on the internet, all the waves. Everything's a kind of story, which all adds to the story of which is supposed to be the story of each individual's life. So it's not surprising if the stories are good and they come into us and we're the sponges that take the stories in, then we'll feel better about it. And if those stories are coming into us and us being so porous, if we aren't careful with our stories, then we'll you know we'll probably block our pores, you know?

Presenter2:13

If there are right stories, then by definition there are wrong stories that can do harm. Now, that seems quite a curious thing for a writer to say.

Ali Smith2:14

It's then by

Ali Smith2:20

We have to know that our lives are narrated to us, and also the way that we narrate the lives around us. It's all construct. As soon as we become aware of that, we can do whatever we like with the construct. We can change it if we need to, we can stay with it if we like it, we can change bits of it. So, in other words, it gives us a kind of empowerment. So, if we're not careful, they'll take the shirts off our back.

Presenter2:24

It's all

Ali Smith2:39

But if we're careful, the stories will see us through like boats, you know, on on whatever, you know, surface the sea is doing, you know.

Presenter2:46

We've got a treat of a list in terms of your music today. Uh do you listen to music while you're writing then?

Ali Smith2:51

Not while I'm writing, no. I think if I was listening to it while I was writing, it would remind me I was here and I would you know, I would listen to its rhythms instead of the rhythms of the sentence. Because music is all rhythm, it goes straight to the heart, but so does writing, so does speech, so does syntax, it comes straight from the heart. They're really related.

Presenter3:07

Tell me then, Ali Smith, about your first track this morning.

Ali Smith3:09

My first track is Julie Fowlis singing Longue Du, which is a Gaelic version of Beatles Blackbird. Last year I had one of the best jobs ever. I was offered the chance to guest direct the Brighton Festival, which meant that I had the carte blanche to invite anyone I liked from all over the world. And if they said yes, then probably they would end up in Brighton in May on the three-week festival. One of the people I invited was Julie Fowlis. I had a vision, I mean I'm from the Highlands, I had a vision there on the south coast.

Ali Smith3:37

that if Julie Philas came down and brought with her the sound of the landscape, the sound of the place that I know in my bones you know, you put these two together, you have the north and the south just happened in that room, and she came and she sang to a room full of, I don't know, eight hundred, a thousand people

Ali Smith3:52

She said to the room, How many people here speak Gaelic? One guy right down at the front shouted, Me. That was it, in the whole room. Then she taught us all a Gallic song, and everybody in that room that night sang a Gaelic song.

Speaker 44:07

On the shade of light.

Speaker 44:11

Kopuskia kristes fatori.

Speaker 44:26

Bongo Shay in your name

Speaker 44:30

Top and scalbo tool is shall be gate

Speaker 44:35

Bye.

Presenter4:36

After eight

Presenter4:39

That was Julie Filas singing Blackbird in Gaelic there. Tell me, Ali Smith, you said the Gaelic word for that song is long due. Right. Thank you for that. Your books, of course, have won numerous literary awards. You've won The Whitbread, you've won the Saltar, you've been nominated for the Booker three times. Explain to us the I can only imagine it's a kind of specific torture once you are nominated, because you don't ask to be nominated. And then.

Ali Smith4:46

Glondue

Speaker 44:46

Yeah.

Ali Smith4:47

Rice

Ali Smith4:47

But that's it.

Presenter5:04

You find yourself on these short lists and suddenly do you begin to care?

Ali Smith5:08

No, it's nothing to do with the book. It's like if you went into a a department store and someone was really nice to you, you know, when you bought something and someone was really nice to you and you you say goodbye and you felt better and you went out, that's nice, it lasts that much and you're and it just it happens over there, like three miles away and you can see something happening in the distance. As it gets closer and if and depending on how much noise is around the thing, it's a bit like having a brass band playing reasonably close to your ear, you just have to ignore it.

Ali Smith5:33

But there's a kind of acknowledgement of the random, there's an acknowledgement of a kind of communal here we go, so what about it and it it really does feel random and it's nothing to do with the actual process of writing the book.

Presenter5:45

Writing the book. And the process of writing the book, then, you've said before that you're never sure if something's going to be a novel or if it's going to be a short story. Now, that seems very curious to me.

Ali Smith5:54

It depends what you're working on. The thing about a novel is that it's rather like a giant hoover. It just hoovers up everything that comes through you, but the forms are really different. So, for instance, if I'm working in the novel form, again, it takes a great space of time and it wakes you in the middle of the night and you never stop thinking about it, you're never not accompanied by it. Short stories are shorter. Because they're shorter, they tend to be harder in a way. The end of the process of putting together a book of short stories, I have found I felt much worse than at the end of finishing a novel. You mean physical? You just feel tired, you just feel and also it's you have you know, the story presses itself up against mortality in a way that the novel presses itself up against society and continuance and sequence and consequence. And the story can be about all sorts of societal and sequential and consequential things too, but its form is short. And the novel's form, even if it's a short novel, is the novel form and it does something else.

Presenter6:49

And you say when you're writing a novel it is never not with you. Are you able to be reading anybody else's literature at the same time as writing, or is your whole head taken up with?

Ali Smith6:58

No, no, I love reading. I mean, I you know, I couldn't not read. Um but when when in the middle of a novel I don't work on it at the weekends and you know, I keep a pile of books and I choose randomly from that pile and just read whatever comes to the top.

Presenter7:00

Right.

Ali Smith7:10

Tell me about your next piece of news.

Presenter7:11

Mm-hmm.

Ali Smith7:12

Oh, okay. Oh, to choose a Dusty Springfield track. How difficult was that? But Dusty is definitely, definitely coming with me to the island. And I'd looked over the whole range of all the brilliant years, the Dusty Springfield years, and I thought I'll just start at the beginning with I Only Want to Be With You, partly because nineteen sixty three

Presenter7:12

Okay

Ali Smith7:29

At this point, I'm kind of coming alive, and oh, what a joy to be coming alive to this.

Speaker 47:36

I don't know what it is that makes me love you so. I only know I never wanna let you go. Cause you started something, but could you see? That ever since we met, you had a hold on me. It happens to be true.

Speaker 47:58

No matter where you go or what you do. Now wanna spend each formal love a day with you. All of what has happened, just walk in.

Presenter8:08

That was Dusty Springfield, and I only want to be with you. So you were born Allie Smith in Inverness in the early sixties. As I said in the introduction, you were the last of five, and there was a big space between you and your siblings.

Ali Smith8:22

It it was big for my mum and dad. It was seven years. You know, they had had their family, really my two sisters and my two brothers, pretty much straight away after they got married. And then there was, you know, seven years and then there was a Christmas.

Presenter8:31

Right, I do. And how did you make your presence felt then in a group of five?

Ali Smith8:32

Uh

Ali Smith8:36

I can imagine there would be a more perfect way to grow up, both only child and part of a a very kind of glorious social structure.

Presenter8:42

I've seen a rather blurry family photograph in which I'm particularly interested right now in your mother. Can you bring her into focus for me?

Ali Smith8:49

She was beautiful. What shall I say? She was very proper and contained. She'd been born in the north of Ireland on the very north coast in Limavaddy, and she was the eighth child in a family of nine. And she'd come across after her father died with a couple of her siblings to work. So she'd got herself a job at the age of 14 on the buses going up and down the Murray Firth Coast in the late 30s, early 40s. She did that, then she joined the WAF.

Presenter9:12

And leaving school at fourteen, not uncommon, of course, for many, many people of that generation. Could she have stayed on? Was she a bright girl at school?

Ali Smith9:15

Yeah.

Ali Smith9:18

Both my folks were incredibly bright, intelligent people who had had to leave school early because of deaths of fathers. They had that in common. They also had in common that they had been awarded scholarships that they could not take up.

Presenter9:30

And were stories part of your childhood did your mother when you was here a lot?

Ali Smith9:33

Oh my goodness. On a Saturday night out came my mother's real uh glorious nature. Uh we we all had our baths on a Saturday night. I'm the small one. I get bathed. I get s I sit on her knees, she's wrapped me in a towel and then suddenly she just turns into another character. She kind of mm she's kind of, you know, doing a kind of humming noise and then suddenly she becomes.

Presenter9:52

He's kind of evoking the spirits.

Ali Smith9:53

She just was such a a fantastic actress. She just turned into another person.

Ali Smith9:59

She would turn into one of two witches who were called Gertie and Bella. She would turn into a woman from the Scottish Islands and she would make a monologue which sounded like a kind of eulogy and a prayer. If she didn't turn into the characters, which was terrifying enough when you were seven or eight years old, she would start singing these Victorian songs about dead orphans just to make me cry. It reminds me of Dickens or something. She would suddenly sing: two little orphans, a boy and a girl, sat by the old church door. And of course, the orphans are going to die, you know, of course.

Presenter10:27

Of course.

Ali Smith10:28

And I would just be in tears. She was such a playful Funny person who went through life with that playfulness.

Presenter10:37

There are many reasons why it's wonderful to have a mother who's playful, but for you this idea that within us all are stories and imaginations and things that we let out from time to time, how useful for the beginnings of Ali Smith.

Ali Smith10:39

Look.

Ali Smith10:47

Of Ali Smith. I know how much that means to me now. If I have an Irish literary heritage, it's come through my mum in that form, my God.

Presenter10:54

Let's have some more music. You're starting to tell me about this.

Ali Smith10:56

Tell me about this. My third is Sylvie Vartin. She's singing Paramour Parpetier. I loved French songs when I was in my teens. And this one reminds me of me and my friend Julie going off to Paris on um Magic Bus, which cost like, I don't know, ten quid or five quid to go to Paris and Amsterdam. We ran out of money, we sat down in the mouth of one of the metros and I played the mouth organ, Mr Tambourine Man, and Julie sat there looking beautiful and people gave us enough money to afford a hamburger.

Ali Smith11:24

And we came back, and in my rucksack were a bunch of records, which were mostly bent out of shape because they were in my rucksack, and this was one of them.

Speaker 411:34

On Jet Pal

Speaker 411:36

I've your genius

Speaker 411:40

Oh look at

Speaker 411:42

On this wife in the world.

Speaker 411:47

Oh god.

Speaker 411:49

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Speaker 411:53

Do you blah blah

Speaker 411:55

Do it brought the shame

Speaker 411:58

La la la move on.

Speaker 412:02

Ah picture.

Presenter12:05

Paramour Parpitier, sung there by Sylvie Vartin. Let me ask you, Ellie Smith, about this uh idea of you well, I believe it's true, you could read by the age of three.

Ali Smith12:14

I don't know if it's true. There was a story that my dad told, which was that one night he said, What's on T V and I told him what was on T V by reading it off the T V pages and they realized I could read and that I had learned to read, he said, via the singles, you know, the forty fives that we had in a in a record bag because if I knew the name of the song I could see what the word was and that I'd also have taught myself from the T V programme because on the T V pages.

Presenter12:29

So we had

Presenter12:36

Cause I

Presenter12:37

Intriguing. I had thought that quite obviously that must have been a concerted effort by your parents to teach you to read.

Ali Smith12:42

Not at all, not at all, no.

Presenter12:43

You've explained a little bit about your dad's circumstances. Just tell me a little bit more about him as a person.

Ali Smith12:46

Just took it.

Ali Smith12:48

He was born in Newark, in Nottinghamshire, and like my mum he had been a clever boy whose dad died young. His dad had been in the First World War and was gassed a couple of times, gassed once, then went back to war and got gassed again. So he died young and my dad had to come out of school and work. The war happened and he joined the Navy, became an electrician. And when he came out, he got a job up at the hydroelectric dams being constructed in the Highlands. And he'd met my mum before that. They met when he was wiring up a WAF station. And he was in the locker rooms of the WAF station with his mate. And they were putting up wires along the tops of the lockers. And his mate said, let's go through the lockers. When they got to one locker where everything

Presenter13:16

Yeah.

Ali Smith13:27

my father used to say, was pristinely folded and beautifully arranged, and my father said, Whose is this?

Ali Smith13:35

I'm going to find that girl. I'm going to marry that girl. Anyway, he did meet my mum and he met her by chance. She was coming out of the shower. She had a towel around her head. And he took her out that night to the pub. And his mum had died quite recently. And he had in his pocket his mother's engagement ring in a box. He just had it. He just had it about his person. And so he got it out and he showed my mum. He said, Look at this. He says, This belonged to my mum and I just got it. And she just died. Anyway, everybody around him in the pub went, look at them, they're getting engaged, they're getting engaged.

Ali Smith14:03

And they looked at each other.

Ali Smith14:05

And that was it. So they went up and they worked up and down Scotland on the dams and then settled in Inverness, where he opened his own electrical contractors business and shop. And he was one of the main electrical contractors for the Highlands. I mean he wired m most of the houses up and down Lochness.

Presenter14:21

Did he ever see the monster?

Ali Smith14:22

Oh, he did see the monster? Yes, he did see.

Presenter14:25

You're saying that with almost a straight face, yes.

Ali Smith14:26

My dad swore by it. My dad was a great storyteller, but he wasn't generally a liar about his stories. You know, there's a difference between lies and stories.

Presenter14:33

We understand the world when we're young through the prism of our families. Did you know writers? Did you realize that was a job? Did you think I want?

Ali Smith14:40

Uh

Presenter14:40

Uh

Ali Smith14:40

No, absolutely not. There was one point I was sitting upstairs in my dad's shop and he called me downstairs and said, This is Alan Campbell MacLean and you know, he wrote The Hill of the Red Fox. And I shook this lovely man's hand and met his wife and my dad had wired his house. And I got in the car to go home. My father said to me, I thought you'd like to meet him.

Presenter14:58

Interesting.

Ali Smith14:59

Yeah, I know.

Presenter15:00

And they had you down obviously as somebody who was.

Presenter15:04

A smart girl

Ali Smith15:05

If they had, they never told me, because it wouldn't do to know if you were smart. Well, you know.

Presenter15:10

Yeah.

Ali Smith15:10

Exactly. Just, you know, don't get too smart for yourself.

Presenter15:10

Exactly.

Presenter15:13

So Alison, let's have your next track.

Ali Smith15:16

Tell me about this. So now I'm thinking sort of chronologically forward to going to Aberdeen University. When I think about that time, it wasn't even that far from home, it's only a hundred miles. No, I was going to ask you about that in a minute. It's like it's a world away. Off to the university to study English. And this song by Orange Juice brings back everything about the irony and the potential and the laughter and the...

Presenter15:25

Yeah.

Ali Smith15:39

Danciness of that time in the early 80s, up to the mid-80s, falling and laughing, orange juice.

Speaker 415:48

Very nice.

Speaker 415:52

Say could I say.

Speaker 415:54

I only see what I want to see.

Speaker 415:59

Avoid eye contact but of course.

Speaker 416:06

What could I do?

Speaker 416:08

To see a pine teeth smelling at me.

Presenter16:15

That was orange juice and falling and laughing. And I have to say, Ali Smith, there's a certain listener of a certain vintage who'll be very happy that you've chosen orange juice. You chose it because of your university years. And as you say, you left Inverness and you went all the way to Aberdeen. You know, it's only I mean, it's just over 100 miles away. It's really not very far. Still in the Highlands of Scotland. Did you think about choosing somewhere else?

Ali Smith16:35

No, I was always going to go to Aberdeen. My mum and dad were very, very concerned that we all went through tertiary education, that they made sure that we had all had the gift that they had not been able to have.

Presenter16:44

And it was, I suppose, that sort of golden time for education in terms of the funding and so on.

Ali Smith16:48

Oh, it was glorious. Do you know what? If you think about now, and I think I hear about the kids coming out, and they're coming out to in England, they're coming out to 53,000 now debt in terms of debt.

Presenter16:57

In terms of data.

Ali Smith16:59

I mean, none of us would have been able to go. It just wouldn't have happened for us. I cannot believe the what should we say, the window of opportunity that history just opened so that we could squeak through at that point when education was what it should be, which has nothing to do with money.

Presenter17:11

You were doing a PhD and you ch

Ali Smith17:14

I did complete it, but it was referred, which means that I had to change it if I wanted to complete it. So it went to examination in the year after my mother died, so I was finishing it as my mother died. Got two jobs on the back of its first chapter, and then went to Ma Viva and was told that the first chapter wasn't good enough and had to be changed. So then I thought, I just don't get this at all. So I stopped. At that point, my mum had died, and some of the pressure on me to get a job which was acceptable to particularly to my parents, who wanted me to be able to pay my way and to be all right in the world. So there'd been pressure on me, as it were, to stay in the studies I loved, which was language and literature. I love it. But after the death of my mother, and after that thing happening, I thought.

Presenter17:19

So what

Ali Smith17:54

Well, there are other lives in language and literature. Lucky for me, in a way, there was another little window I squeaked through there.

Presenter18:00

And as close as you were, and it's clear to hear you talking about your parents, to your mother, was there, as people sometimes can feel, a sense that the responsibility is over now that they're no longer there, that actually maybe I can go and live a life that would have been harder for me to live if if my mother had been here?

Ali Smith18:15

I'm sure that's true and in a way it sounds kind of heinous and at the same time everyone who's been in that situation will understand we know what the word liberation means. Liberation is the thing that happens after a war, you know, you come through it and you are in pieces. But you are differently free. My father was much more philosophical in the world. My mother was very practical. You know, you got a job, you had a wage, that was you sorted. My father was more philosophical and so after my mum died there was a point at which I was, as it were, liberated to go down a route which had not really been possible.

Presenter18:47

More to talk about in a moment. For now, Ali Smith, tell me about your next piece of music. We're going to hear your fifth.

Ali Smith18:48

For now.

Ali Smith18:50

We're going to hear your fifth. Actually, we're talking about my mum, and this is called Daphne. It's a track by the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, Stéphane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt. Sarah, my partner, her mum was called Daphne, so it makes me think of Sarah's mum also. But it really, really makes me think of my mum. When this track came out, 1938, my mum would have been 10 years old. This is the child she would have been. Also, I love the playful, bright lightness of this, and again, it makes me think of my mum.

Presenter19:44

That was Daphne, composed and performed by Stephan Grapelli and Django Reinhart. Ali Smith, in the late seventies and eighties, to be gay or lesbian was for a lot of people in their different ways and with their different perspectives an issue. You came from a Catholic background. You say your mother was in many ways a proper person. Was it ever an issue for you with your family?

Ali Smith20:05

It's funny thinking about it now. It's such a different world and yet it's absolutely the same world and we're all the same people and yet it's so different. Oh my god, the difference between then and now.

Ali Smith20:16

Small town, which then became a city, Inverness, beautiful town, living there and knowing that there is something that can't be said. And you know, you've got a real difficulty saying now, this, in a way, is the heart of every Henry James novel that was ever written. It's like a perfect gift, like the gift of metaphor to write any narrative at all. You can't live your life like that. So there's a point at which I come home, 1984, so I'm what, 22, 21, 22, and my mum says to me,

Ali Smith20:43

Is it true that you and your friend were seen holding hands at the theatre, down between the seats? And then she said, Tell me it isn't true.

Presenter20:52

Right.

Ali Smith20:53

And so I said, It isn't true, because she knew perfectly well, and I knew perfectly well that it was true, but she had wanted not to hear it.

Ali Smith21:02

My dad was very different and say ten years later I could feel him kind of frustrated with me for something and we'd never spoken out at all about my life as as a gay person and um and it surprised me. I realized actually he was frustrated because we hadn't and because he thought that everybody else in the family knew something that he didn't. So I did. I started just to tell him about my life and oh my goodness me, if we could be even more friends, we were.

Presenter21:25

You've written so beautifully in your book Shire. You give this description of a journey that you made with your father in his mini metro van, 1985. It's an October day, and you describe exquisitely travelling through the Grampians, the Highlands of Scotland, as you travel south and south and south. You are on your way to Cambridge.

Ali Smith21:45

We set off at six AM and I had got a place at Cambridge, which I hadn't even seen a picture of. I'd just been given a place. You know, I'd finished at Aberdeen and I'd applied willy nilly to several places and I got a place at Cambridge, which came in a letter from a woman called Heather Glenn, which made me think that it was a joke.

Ali Smith22:00

But it wasn't a joke, apparently. When I phoned up the number they said, you know, it was true. So we got in the car, mid October, and in my dad's Mini Metro van and packed with books and records, and we drove down the country. And as we drove down the country, the season changed.

Ali Smith22:15

So it had been autumn in the Highlands, a beautiful autumn oh, just the kind of heart breaking autumn where everything is misty and the mist is rising like a revelation. And as we came down the country it got warmer and warmer and sunnier and sunnier and we arrived in this city

Ali Smith22:28

Where people are wearing shorts and it's twenty-two or twenty-three degrees. And in fact, I understood for the first time why children in the Enid Blightton books wore sun hats.

Ali Smith22:38

Because before that I just thought, you know, they're making that stuff up. Why are they wearing a hat?

Presenter22:41

Oh yeah, they're gonna

Presenter22:45

Let's have your next piece of music, Ali Smith. What are you gonna hear? This is your sixth.

Ali Smith22:47

This is your sixth. Okay, my sixth. I love cinema. I love it. It's been a huge part of my life. And I also love the country, Greece. In times in my life when I've been in a rough way or I've been tired or I've really needed to change something, I've gone to Greece and Greece has really, truly helped with that.

Ali Smith23:02

A cinema in Greece come together for me in a memory of my Dad.

Ali Smith23:06

Precisely because I really associate cinema with my dad. Because as the electrician in Inverness, he wired up both the cinemas. Because he was the electrician, we had a free pass, so I got taken to see things several times. So, cinema has been a huge, huge part of my life. Now, when my dad died in 2009, you know, it was a depressing time, it was quite a deep darkness. I got out of that deep darkness, as it were, by in the middle of the night watching on YouTube.

Ali Smith23:30

Clips from 1960s films, which were Greek musicals, a genre which who knew existed. And there's a particular star about whom everybody knows in Greece. You go to Greece and you say her name, and it is like saying Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Catherine Hepburn. And somehow she picks up the traits and the senses of all of those actresses in what she does. She's incredibly versatile. Aliki Vuyuklaki. This is her singing a song called Tofega Raki, the little moon or the moon, from a film called Esopharina, which means the lady driver.

Presenter24:36

From the soundtrack to Esoph Arena that do you know what, Alex Smith? You speak Greek, I don't. I don't really speak Greek. Would you like to do the back announcement on this track? Because I'll only muck it up in your head. You'll be inwardly tutting as you hear me muck it up.

Ali Smith24:44

You'll be in

Ali Smith24:47

Do you want me to say this whole thing? Yes. I d I just know how to s how to say it. I speak it, you know, like five year old Greek. So it's Tofengeraki from the sound track to Esopharina, sung by Alekivo Yuklaki, composed by Erasimos Lavranos and Alekos Sakilarios.

Presenter25:00

Three cheers for that. Thank you very much. It's difficult, isn't it, to ask an author.

Presenter25:05

About writing, in the same way that it's difficult to ask a painter about painting, because it's all there, really, in the book. Do you feel frustrated when people ask you questions about writing?

Ali Smith25:14

Uh no, I remember when I asked people questions about writing and try and answer them as truthfully as I I can, but actually it's very hard to answer them truthfully because if you make conscious a process which

Ali Smith25:24

Is so joined to the unconscious, then you're stripping your unconscious of its power. There's that thing, number one. Number two, it's really hard to articulate what you're doing while you're doing it.

Presenter25:35

You spoke as we went in to that piece of Greek music about times when you were having a a rough time and you'd been tired. That happened not long after your mother died. She died relatively young. She was only in her early sixties when she died.

Ali Smith25:47

Yeah.

Presenter25:48

Were you writing productively at that time and did it sort of come to a halt?

Ali Smith25:51

No, no, no. She was only 61 and I was 27. I remember my dad saying to me,

Presenter25:51

Yeah.

Presenter25:52

Yeah.

Ali Smith25:55

You're lucky you had your mum so long.

Ali Smith25:58

I was coming out into that particular academic life that I had thought would be my life and was meant to be my life, and it grew to a halt. I was working at a university in Glasgow, and it was a bit like I hit a wall. It was like if you can imagine you hit a wall and you just kind of crumple up and your muscles don't work properly anymore, so I just took to my bed. It was partly diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, which I'm sure there's an element of, but do you know what? The people I know who've had chronic fatigue syndrome have had it much worse than anything that I experienced that year and the cycles after it. Very different.

Presenter26:28

Was it the exhaustion of extreme grief?

Ali Smith26:30

You know what, we treat grief incredibly lightly in this culture, and we mustn't. We have to know that, you know, grief isn't over in three weeks or three months' grief.

Ali Smith26:39

Is part of the bone structure of us and it takes the years that it takes. And it changes you. It actually transforms you. It's part of the transformative things that happen to us in our lives. So don't deny it, you know. But to give it a name, I have no idea what I'd call that, but what I'd call it now is the point at which one road stops, there was another road having had a rest.

Presenter26:46

Two.

Ali Smith27:03

I find myself on that other road.

Presenter27:05

Tell me about your seventh disc. What are we going to hear now, Allie Smith?

Ali Smith27:07

You're gonna hear my favourite song ever. It's been my favourite song since I was twelve years old. It was written by Yip Harberg. Most people don't know who Yip Yip Harberg is, but they do. They know him all through their body because he's the man who wrote

Ali Smith27:20

Somewhere Over the Rainbow. He wrote Brother Can You Spare a Dime. He wrote April in Paris and he wrote Say It's Only a Pepper Moon. I hold it close to my heart as well because it's the song which Sarah and I, when we first started to work together in theatre, I wrote a play and she directed a play. In fact, I wrote several plays and she directed several plays. We used this song as one of the intros to one of the plays we did. So we have it as a kind of agreement between us, this song. And the song is about agreement. It's about how a commerce between people becomes a faith and a belief and makes the world not.

Ali Smith27:53

two-dimensional.

Ali Smith27:54

Say it's only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea, but it wouldn't be make-believe, if you believed in me. Ella FitzGerald and the Delta Rhythm Boys.

Speaker 328:04

Say you told me your paper moon

Speaker 328:07

Sailing over a cardboard sea

Speaker 328:12

But it wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me.

Speaker 328:20

Yes, it's only a canvas sky Hanging over a muslin tree.

Speaker 328:28

But it wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me.

Presenter28:35

It's only a paper moon, Ella Fitzgerald and the Delta Rhythm Boys. We started today with a quote from you where you had said, you know, stories can change lives. We tell ourselves stories about our lives. We write our lives ourselves and we choose what to edit out and what to reinforce and when to repeat an experience and when to leave a paragraph behind. Exactly. In the process of

Presenter28:59

Writing for us. What have you learned about yourself throughout the decades, do you think?

Ali Smith29:03

I don't read my writing. You can't read your own writing. All you do is see the mistakes and the annoying things and hope that something's working and not know whether it is. But I am a reader and I feel like I've been made by a million books. I feel like any book I've ever written has been kind of drawn together from everything I've read. And I don't mean

Ali Smith29:20

just books. I also mean like the sides of pencils and the sides of buses and the things that catch the corner of the eye as we walk past them. We are made by what we read, we are made by what we take into ourselves. If there's anything at all in this body right now, then I'm going to thank all those books for it.

Presenter29:37

You're going to the islands. I know, I can't wait. The Solitudinous will be welcome, I I imagine. You're looking forward to that, aren't you?

Ali Smith29:43

I am. I hope it's warm there.

Presenter29:44

How would you pass your days? Are you somebody who would feel the need to, like your mother, sort of be neat, make order, get it spic and span? Or would you rather just let the whole place find itself and then live?

Ali Smith29:55

I'm gonna look for the creatures is what I'm gonna do, yeah. So once you find a creature then you're not alone.

Presenter29:57

That's what I'm gonna do, yeah, because

Ali Smith30:00

And also, I'm going to look and see what the plants are, because it's going to be really interesting to see where I am and what's growing there and what the traces of the year are in the place. I hope there's a beach.

Presenter30:10

I think there is. I can't promise anything to it.

Ali Smith30:11

'Cause if there's a beach I can actually do some work.

Presenter30:13

Tell me about your eighth disc, Annie Smith.

Ali Smith30:15

Okay, I will. Actually, it's about work for me, and it's glorious work. For the past five years, maybe, I've been listening to Beethoven. I love him in a way that surprises me, because for a lot of my life, I was kind of scared to go towards classical music. I thought I didn't know enough about it. And then I began to listen at the very beginning. I love listening to a piece of Beethoven every day.

Ali Smith30:36

And I listen to Beethoven, it just is like the gift of understanding of layeredness. So my last piece of music is the last movement from the first symphony, symphony number one, the adagio, the allegro motto.

Speaker 431:21

Dump dump dump dump boom boom

Presenter31:51

That was part of the final movement from Beethoven's Symphony No. One, performed by the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barrenboyne. It's time, then, Ali, for me to give you the books to my author, the Bible, the complete works of Shakspere, and what other book will you take along?

Ali Smith32:05

If I'm taking the Bible, can I take all the other holy books as well?

Presenter32:08

No, but you can choose which holy book you'd like to take if you don't want the Bible.

Ali Smith32:11

Why am I not allowed to take all the books?

Presenter32:13

Because no other castaway in our 75-year history has been allowed to do that, and I can't make an exception to that. There has to be a first.

Ali Smith32:17

There has to be a first. All the holy books are coming under my arm. That's just one choice. Which one would you like?

Presenter32:19

Well it's not D.

Ali Smith32:24

I can't answer it. I'm taking them all regardless. And Shakespeare, obviously. Right.

Presenter32:28

Just to be clear to people listening, you don't get to take them all. You can either take one or none.

Ali Smith32:32

I have big

Presenter32:32

Fuck.

Ali Smith32:33

Okay.

Presenter32:33

It'll be the Bible then. So what's your other book?

Ali Smith32:36

Oh, this is a one church room. My other book is going to be Ovid's Metamorphosis translated by Mary Innes, which was a a Penguin Classics translation from about fifty years ago, and it's a d absolute delight.

Speaker 432:41

Ah.

Presenter32:48

Right, that is yours then. Irlide a luxury.

Ali Smith32:50

I'm going to take the Palazzo Scifanoia, which is a really beautiful fourteen hundreds uh frescoed palace in Ferrara, which is the most beautiful, beautiful place I have ever been.

Presenter32:59

It gives me great joy to say I shall give you that to take with you to the islands. Which single disc? I think I know the one you're going to choose because you said it was your favourite. Which one will you save from the waves?

Ali Smith32:59

Yeah.

Ali Smith33:01

to take with you to the island.

Ali Smith33:08

You're wrong, I'm going to take Beethoven. Are you? Yes. That's a late late change? No, it's not a late move. No, if I take Beethoven, I'll get a lot of work done. It'll be nothing but inspiring.

Presenter33:08

Uh

Presenter33:17

It's yours, Ali Smith. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you, Chris.

Presenter34:01

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.

Speaker 334:35

This is the B B C.