📝 Zadie Smith’s Writing Routine

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Zadie Smith’s rise was meteoric. At twenty-five, she published White Teeth, a sprawling, polyphonic debut that captured the anxious, electric energy of multicultural London and announced the arrival of a major literary voice. Critics compared her to Dickens, Rushdie, and Forster. Readers fell hard for her wit and warmth, the acrobatic sentences, the sense of a mind in motion.

But for Smith, success arrived with a built-in ambivalence. “It’s the hope that you might write something different,” she said in an NPR interview, “and then often the realization that you’re writing something the same.” Over the next two decades, she would publish novels, essays, and short stories that continually challenged expectations—especially her own. Writing, for Smith, is not a vocation or a compulsion. It’s a slow, exacting negotiation between instinct and skepticism, between possibility and doubt.

Born in northwest London to a Jamaican mother and English father, Smith grew up in a working-class household where books were plentiful but not curated. On her mother’s shelves were C.S. Lewis, social work texts, and a book called The Breast—“that I thought highly erotic, but was probably a medical textbook of some kind,” she recalled in an interview with West 10th. As a child, she was drawn to Edmund from The Chronicles of Narnia. “He was a poisonous little liar—and so was I,” she said.

At Cambridge, Smith studied English literature and began writing fiction on the side. By the time she graduated, White Teeth had sparked a bidding war. Its success was both thrilling and destabilizing. “I was working when everybody else was getting drunk,” she told The Rumpus. “That might have something to do with it.” She has described early success as both a gift and a distortion: “I did miss out on a certain amount of mindlessness. I think that’s why I’ve always been so attached to alcohol—it gives me what I can’t get in the rest of my life.”

Her next novels—The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time—each took formal and stylistic risks, shifting voice, structure, and perspective. “I’m just trying to make things out of words that feel fresh to me at the time,” she told Elle India. “Necessary, at the time.” Some books, like NW, emerged from an urgency to document what was happening around her, especially the unrest and social inequalities of post-financial-crisis London. “I was watching the Occupy kids march past my window all fall,” she said in a Goodreads interview. “Despite the difficulties, it was very exciting to write this book at this moment.”

Smith is deeply skeptical of the idea that fiction should preach. Her work resists didacticism, instead layering irony and empathy in ways that ask readers to look again. “Novels are the revelation of other minds,” she told Elle. “I mean that other minds are real, as real as your own. That’s essential at all times, but especially when other-blindness is as strong as it is at this moment.”

Though she’s often asked about race, identity, and politics, Smith bristles at the idea of novels as platforms for ideology. “You cannot be entirely self-defined,” she said in the same interview. “You are also defined by the effect of your actions and behaviours on others.” In NW, when a character declares, “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me,” Smith intended it as critique, not celebration. “I don’t believe people are entirely self-created,” she said. “That would work in a world of one, but we don’t live in a world of one.”

She lives now in New York with her husband, the poet and novelist Nick Laird, and their two children. They often work side by side at the NYU library, Smith facing a wall, Laird in an office or a nearby desk. “I have absolutely given up on the idea of peace and quiet as being necessary to writing,” she said. “I work in the time I have.”

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