Zadie Smith stopped by Late Night to discuss her new book, Dead and Alive: Essays, with Seth Meyers.
Smith’s collection, published Tuesday by Penguin Press, contains essays about art, politics, and writers including Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, and Toni Morrison. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a thoughtful, deft collection.”
“I’ve been trying to get you to do this for almost 12 years,” Meyers said, “and you have always made it clear you have no interest.”
“I love seeing you on the street,” Smith said. “I like to have a conversation outside of school. I just thought [talking] on television seemed unnecessary. But here we are.”
Meyers asked Smith about one essay in the collection that he described as “a love letter of sorts to New York City,” in which Smith describes seeing a wheel come off a baby stroller.
“Everybody comes [together] in that moment,” she said. “Everybody helps. They pick up, they get the baby, they get the carriage, but then if you try and say Thank you, they’re out of it. They don't want to have any discussions. They don’t want it to be elaborated.”
Meyers mentioned that in the book, Smith takes issue with advice sometimes given to aspiring authors: “Write what you know.”
“What you know is what’s close to you, for sure,” Smith said. “But part of what we [writers] do—and I think of us on a continuum with actors, comedians, [although] we’re low in the showbiz hierarchy—[we] hear voices, essentially. You want to repeat them, you want to make them, you’re curious about them. And if you have familiarity with them, that helps, but for me, it’s not everything.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
