A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I want you to think back to when you were 19 years old. Hold that person in your imagination for a minute. What motivated you back then? What goals did you have? How did that version of you spend time? At 19, I was in college in Tacoma, Wash., taking a class called Physics for Poets, muddling through my first existential crisis about religion, and hanging around my boyfriend's house watching him smoke a lot of pot.
Zadie Smith may have had a few parallel experiences, but when she was 19 she was also writing a bestselling novel called White Teeth. A few years passed, and in 2000, when Zadie was 24, White Teeth was released into the world. It was an instant hit and won a bunch of literary awards.
Early success like that can be a blessing and a curse. Lots of doors open, but walking through them comes with all kinds of pressure. Zadie Smith put all that aside and just kept writing. There was On Beauty and Swing Time and several others. Her most recent novel is called The Fraud. But it's White Teeth that's back in the spotlight, because there's a new edition, marking 25 years since it first came out.
It's a story about identity and belonging, race and privilege, and the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to our lives. And it's just as relevant today as it was 25 years ago.
This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.
Question 1: What period of your life do you often daydream about?
Zadie Smith: I really had a wonderful time in New York in my early 30s. It was a wonderful period in my life and I daydream about that a lot, particularly spring in New York. It's such a joy. I just met so many interesting people. It was extraordinary for me to be there. Despite all the dramas of my adolescence, I do think about that period a lot because it's my feeling about teenagers, that they are the purest of people.
Rachel Martin: This is when you were teaching [teenagers] at NYU, right?
Smith: That's not the part [I daydream about]. To be fair, it was more the evening activities.
I know [teenagers are] ridiculous a lot of the time, and I was, for sure, ridiculous. But they're like philosophers, they're experiencing things for the first time, they take them to heart, both their politics and their existential lives are taken so personally. So to me, that's when my life seemed most real or something. It stays with you with clarity — both the sadnesses of it and the pains of it, but they were so acute. So I think I return to that period a lot. I guess I write about it a lot, too.
Martin: It makes sense. You're trying to figure yourself out and everything is just heightened and you have a lot of new ideas.
Smith: Everything is heightened. It's so extreme. I was never bored then. The world seemed so much to me and so present.
Martin: Are you bored now?
Smith: It's different. I'm not easily bored because I can get a lot out of just looking at anything. I get a lot out of just observing the world. And I'm understimulated; if you remember how life felt in 1987, that's where I'm at. It's a slower pace. And so you're more in things. You can get me crying at a blossom or just a kid's face in the street or hearing two people argue in the subway. That's my stimulation, and that's everywhere and continual.
Question 2: What emotion do you understand better than all the others?
Smith: Regret. I think that's the one I know very well. I think people's lives are so profoundly shot through with regret. They don't talk about it very often, particularly in America. It's like a failure.
Martin: Oh, it's like a four-letter word. And when people bring up the idea of regret, you don't admit it because it's made you who you are, etc., etc.
Smith: I'm always hearing people on television saying, "No regrets! Sorry, not sorry!" I'm like, wow, dude, I am so sorry. I am so filled with regret. It must be amazing never to feel sorry. So yeah, regret is something that I really understand. If only for the simple and selfish fact that you get one life, and I'm so hungry for a life that I could live it like 10 times. And once, it's a tough deal.
Martin: May I ask if you're willing to share a thing that you wish you had done differently or that had gone differently?
Smith: Honestly, I just wish I was less selfish. Writing is a very selfish thing to have done with your time and it takes up all the time. I wish I had done a bit less of it or thought about what else I could have done in that time. Because it's all I did, I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. Which is great, but there are a lot of other things in life that you can do apart from that.
Martin: It's the bummer about time. That it's bound.
Smith: Yeah, but it's cool. Once I realized it, I took steps to do other things now. I'm out in my community. I'm volunteering. I'm engaged. And it feels so much better than sitting at a desk just writing.
Martin: Well, it's also lonely, I imagine. Just what that work is.
Smith: It is a little bit lonely. During COVID, when everybody was freaking out, I took it kind of personally because it's like, wait, so the thing you hate is my life?
You hate my life, but I've been living my life and to you, it's the worst thing imaginable to be sequestered at home. I literally do that every day. So, I did take it a little bit personally, but it was a wake-up call. I was like, this is not normal. People don't enjoy this, this thing that you do every day.
Question 3: Is time a positive or negative force in your life?
Smith: I mean, time, anyone who's ever read me knows that this is my No. 1 topic. Time — it's a complete obsession, and I take it personally, but also I know that a world without limits would be an intolerable world.
I know it philosophically and it's a common sense matter. I'm always amazed at these longevity tech bros on the other side of your country who are trying to live forever. For what? They don't seem to know why they want to live forever. That concept is wild. I find it really hard getting older. It's really hard and melancholy.
Martin: Tell me why.
Smith: Because I loved being young and I'm really gonna miss it.
I'm sure you get over it. When I meet women, particularly in their later 50s and their 60s, there's a lot of joy returns, but I think the moment of transition is melancholic for sure.
I've always felt there wasn't enough time, and I've always kept extraordinarily busy thinking that I could beat time, but you can't beat it, and it has to be accepted. All of those traditions from the Buddhists, to various Indigenous faiths, to the Unitarians, anyone who understands that time is here not to be battled but to be accepted is my hero.
I did grow up in the Anglo-American world where time is to be defeated by superheroes in capes. Do you remember that image of Christopher Reeve spinning, going around the world as fast as possible? That is the archetypal image of my generation. Like, yeah, we can beat this or go back to the future.
Martin: If not through fantasy, like a time machine, we can beat it through productivity.
Smith: Yeah, productivity or interventions or treatment. But none of that is going to work. So my thing is to try and reach acceptance, but without pretending that it's easy.
I'm aware of it even as a kind of indulgence. But for me personally, I would like to accept time and also love it. I would like to love being an old woman and hopefully a wise old woman, like in a fairy story.
Martin: You mentioned intentionally trying to slow down, and I have most definitely made changes in my life to try to do that. I do think it helps. It gives me some ownership over it. I'm intentionally trying to literally walk slower through the world.
Smith: Yeah. When I left New York, for the first few weeks in London, I was still walking like a New Yorker. And people would be like, what the hell is wrong with you?
Martin: People there aren't as aggro about moving through the world as they are in New York.
Smith: It's extreme here, but also I'm so grateful for it because, as you've probably noticed, I'm prone to melancholy, and in New York, I didn't even have time to be melancholic. It just kicked my ass for 15 years every single day and I got a lot done. But life is not just about getting things done. Life is for living. It's not just for endless productivity and work. And I don't want to not have lived my life. I have loved writing these books, but there's more to life than that.
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