An Interview with Zadie Smith 

West 10th: What kind of setting is most conducive for you to come up with ideas and write? For instance, do you enjoy isolation or public space? 

I’ve never written in a public space. But I don’t need any fancy private place either. I’m not interested in being in a beautiful room or having a view or any of that. I like to face a wall. 

West 10th: Which authors are you currently reading or have you recently read? 

All my reading is work these days. I just read some stories of Javier Marias, some essays of Thomas Bernhard, a book about Harlem, and a book about the Duchess of Devonshire – all because I’m reviewing them. The last book I picked up casually was Richard Yates by Tao Lin because I was curious about what my students were reading. 

West 10th: What were some of your early or unexpected literary influences? 

I remember the random things on my mother’s shelves. CS Lewis’ Narnia books. Our Bodies Ourselves. The illustrated children’s bible. Social work texts about autism – because she was trying to become a social worker at the time. A book called The Breast, that I thought highly erotic, but was probably a medical textbook of some kind. Grimm fairy tales. Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl. All of Roald Dahl, really. Tiger Eyes. And a true life photo-story from the 70’s called “Crash in the Jungle” – about a teenage girl who was the only survivor of an air crash. I read it when I was ten and thought I was the only person in the world who had read that book: years later I was gratified to discover Werner Herzog made a documentary about it. Better than that: he was meant to be on that plane!

West 10th: What was your favorite childhood fictional character? 

Probably Edmund, in Narnia. I empathized. He was a poisonous little liar – and so was I. 

West 10th: What piece of advice do you wish you’d gotten earlier as a writer? 

Read against your own grain. 

West 10th: How hard is it to walk the fine line between advising a student through criticism and restraining yourself to allow them their own choices? 

Not hard. I don’t find it to be a ‘fine line’, because I don’t recognize anything but sentences. I’m not criticizing somebody’s ‘choices’ because of a difference in taste. If I criticize it’s because the sentence is a) ungrammatical b) nonsensical c) pointless. All of which are relatively objective matters. In my experience, dealing with those three simple things takes up most of your time. Whether or not it is the right ‘choice’ for the father to disown the daughter or move to Atlanta and start an ostrich farm are, to me, ‘extra-literary’ questions. I get very bored by endless discussions of possible plots in class. Those matters are for each writer’s individual conscience. My job is to ensure that the sentences themselves are good. 

West 10th: What are your ideas of the best and worst possible writing workshops or classes? If you were to invent a new way to teach a writing workshop, what would it be like? Are there any unconventional methods you might use, or have used, in teaching? 

I never know if my ideas are conventional or not because I have no experience of writing workshops outside of my own. I use an old fashioned projector and put the stories up on a screen overhead. Then I edit them by hand, just as I’d edit my own work, line by line. Is that conventional?

West 10th: Has teaching writing affected your own writing process? If so, how? 

The writing workshop makes you a lot more self-conscious, a little more depressed. But perhaps also more honest about your own failures. The class in which I’m teaching other people’s novels – this is extremely useful to me. Re-reading is always useful, and re-reading intensely with twelve bright students (who are reading for the first time) is always a sort of personal transformation. I find new ways to do what I do. Of course, I hope the students find new ways to approach their own work, too. 

West 10th: Do you see a difference in the way literature is read or taught in the academic world as opposed to the world of creative writers? If so, how do you feel about the differences? 

I think we all know the differences. They’re obvious and too dull to trot out here – people bang on about them enough, don’t they? All I have to add to that debate is that the perfect compromise seems to me to always have an English department and a Creative writing department existing together in a state of exquisite tension – never one without the other. Either one alone gives a very lopsided view of the ‘Literature’. But together they give you the thing in the round: intellectual game and personal experience, historical phenomena and current excitement, cultural activity and individual obsession. 

West 10th: How would you sum up your own experience as a writer in college? 

When I was in college? Non-existent. I didn’t have any identity as a ‘creative writer’. I was an English student and proud to be one. I wrote a bit of fiction, but it was basically a private matter. You wrote, you tried to send it to the (very few) college outlets that took the stuff, but no one ever spoke to you about it and you never met anyone else who was doing it. I only came across the idea of a “community of writers” in America. 

Zadie Smith is a much beloved and internationally acclaimed writer. Her novels include White Teeth (2000), The Autograph Man (2002), and On Beauty (2005). She has contributed many short stories and essays to such journals as The Guardian and The New Yorker. She published a book of essays entitled Changing My Mind (2009) and edited an anthology of short stories entitled The Book of Other People (2007). She is the recipient of numerous awards including The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, The Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award, The Orange Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. We are lucky to have Zadie Smith as a senior faculty member of the NYU Creative Writing Department where her students appreciate her for all her care, wit, and knowledge.