I finished another New Yorker article last week (hi Adam!), an essay by Zadie Smith. Roxane Gay linked to it in her (excellent) newsletter with the call to “drop everything” – which, of course, I had already done. The moment I picked up the issue from the floor by our mail slot, and saw Smith’s name in the table of contents, I put my bag down, got on the couch, and started reading.
The piece is about her journey toward writing a historical novel – something she swore that she would never do. She explores her past as a student and her viewpoint on historical novels, how, as a Brit, she wanted nothing to do with Charles Dickens and everything to do with avoiding him and yet, in her creative journey, he kept popping up. Oh, hi, Charles, she writes, a few times in the essay.
Which, the repetition of that line itself, struck me as stirring and brilliant and funny and frustrating and sympathetic. (Also! Using commas!!!) It made me want to jump for joy and scream out loud, all at the same time. Smith is one of my favorite writers to read for the words on the page, but also to surgically dissect them, turn them around, think through how she’s structured and built in order to get that response. She’s just that good. I don’t know how she does it.
When I was in high school, the senior year Honors English class (which I was not in, I’ll save that for another therapy session decaf draft) read White Teeth. It was a book. The only books that I saw students carrying around were the high school standards of To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, The Great Gatsby – of course, all excellent, and I love each of them for different reasons, but standard. White Teeth felt collegiate at a time when we were all sitting, waiting for colleges to say if they wanted us or not.
A number of my friends were in that class with my favorite English teacher. (Short story: he took books and art very seriously, and he was one of the first people to like my writing, and when everyone else thought he was mean I thought he was really smart and cool.) (Shorter story: he’s gay so of course I admired him but didn’t know why.) When he assigned that class White Teeth, I felt a simmer of envy. I was in another class, re-reading 1984 for a paper, and wanted to be in that world Zadie Smith brought to life, all of the London characters clashing on the page in a dreary, Rhode Island winter public school classroom.
I finally read White Teeth my freshman year of college one weekend when I was supposed to be studying for finals. I sat in my bed and finished it in two days. (Sign number one I should have been an English major – I was skipping studying to read.) Her voice blew me away; I had never read anything like it. The way she structured sentences, the language she chose, the characters she built – they all felt so new, and I couldn’t figure out how she did it, especially as a person only a few years older than me. (Smith wrote White Teeth when she was 21 years old.)
I felt that same awe reading her most recent essay on Dickens. (This is where Smith would drop that line Oh, hi, Charles.) There’s just so much brilliance in her ink. More than 20 years later, I’m still struck by her voice which feels fresh and so perfectly her at the same time. It hits that part of me that is still 17-years-old, sitting on the edge of something new, wanting to see the world, to be inspired, to be told that yes, you belong here, too.
I was walking through Hayes Valley last weekend and saw a poster with Smith’s face on it – she’s so gd chic – and raced across the street to see what it advertised. She’d doing a talk in San Francisco on September 22, I assume because that historical novel is coming out this fall. (Which, yay!) I was so excited (did I jump? I may have jumped) and was trying to figure out why that date of Sep 22 sounded familiar before realizing that it’s the day of my wedding. In a flash, I thought, is there a way I could get out of that? before quickly resigning that I would indeed be missing the event.
All of this lasted maybe 4 seconds – it was a wild journey.
I’m so excited for the wedding and marriage of course. But also, Zadie Smith! I’ve never seen her speak in person, or been in the same room with her other than when her name is on the page. But perhaps that enough for now. She’s hugely popular and endlessly talented; there will be other opportunities and other pieces to read. And when that book comes out, or the next essay floats through my mail, I’ll be there to welcome it. Oh, hi, Zadie.