Presented to the Calgary Women’s Literary Club by Sandra Ens, March 19, 2024
The advice to writers – “Write what you know” – is often simplified and misinterpreted to mean that an author can only write about her or his own experience and to do otherwise risks being accused of appropriation, cultural or otherwise. How, then, can author write crime fiction, science fiction, historical fiction authentically? Conversely, when an author does write what she or he knows, it is often misinterpreted as autobiography. Think of Alice Munro, or Elena Ferrante, or Sheila Heti, or Zadie Smith. While these and many authors write from their own experience, and write about what they know, their stories and novels need not be considered to be autobiographical.
Zadie Smith has written six novels and five of them are set in NW London, specifically Willesden, where she was born and grew up. Often, the stories feature mixed-race marriages and mixed-race children, which is her own story and that of many people in her neighbourhood. In an essay in Changing My Mind, “Accidental Hero”, she writes about her father and notes how she drew on his experiences to develop the character of Archie in her first novel, White Teeth. Yet while her characters and situations are similar to her own, these are not autobiography. None of these is about her, but they are obviously written in her voice and her style. In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel (in Brick, A Literary Journal, Issue 85, https://brickmag.com/in-conversation-with-zadie-smith/) she says: “A style is something you can’t help but have. It’s like your skin. It’s not something you can go out and buy, it’s just the way you express yourself. It is implicit in everything you do. When I was starting and I began to meet writers for the first time, it struck me very forcibly that they were like their books. It doesn’t mean that the book is autobiographical—in fact entirely the opposite is usually the case—but something in the voice of the person, something in the sensibility is inextricably tied to the way they write.”
Reading her six novels in quick succession, (rather than over the 20-some years they were published) I was struck by how different they are. Each is unique. Smith experiments with narrative voice, sometimes using a first-person perspective, sometimes third person, and in NW, four narrators each with a distinct voice. Her novel On Beauty is a (somewhat) retelling of Howards End by EM Forster, a writer she greatly admires. The first-person narrator of Swing Time shares her interests and some of her experiences, but is not a retelling of her own life. Her most recent novel, Fraud, is a historical novel, and all the characters in it are real people.
Her novels and short stories are easy to read. The characters are recognizable and believable, the plots are intricate and interesting, and the humour is entertaining. Her essays build on an experience and reveal the significance of it. But do not read them lightly. Make note of pages, because you will find yourself returning to a turn of phrase, an idea, a paragraph, an exact description of an experience familiar to you, and you will want to think about again.
Reading Zadie Smith is a lesson in the art of writing.