She Contains Multitudes

With her new essay collection, Feel Free, author Zadie Smith solidifies her status as an essential chronicler of American life.

- Keziah Weir

Zadie Smith has an almost unsettling lack of pretense. As she sits down across from me at Lafayette restaurant in Manhattan’s NoHo—her choice; she lives nearby—there’s no attempt at small talk, no forced laughter to fill space. She’s reserved. Blunt, even. We’re here to discuss her new essay collection, Feel Free (Penguin Press), but about doing interviews, she says, “No offense—I don’t think anybody relishes it.”

What’s disconcerting about this situation for me, as a fan, is that to read Smith’s writing is not only to feel as though you know her, but also as though she knows you. She doesn’t use social media, yet Instagram abounds with more than 18,000 posts hashtagged #zadiesmith by her ardent admirers: reposts of glamorous photo shoots; shots of her novels nestled beside mugs of coffee. Mention Smith’s name in a group conversation, and at least one person—often young, usually female—will reverently breathe a variation of “Oh, I love her.”

Feel Free is Smith’s seventh book since she burst onto the literary scene at the age of 24. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), set in the racially diverse North London in which she grew up, sold an unheard-of 42,000 copies in its first print run. Her subsequent novels—The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), NW (2012), and Swing Time (2016), plus a novella and an essay collection—won awards including the Orange Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.