In a 2016 interview with actor Lena Dunham, Zadie Smith explained why she doesn't own a smartphone and isn't active on social media: "I just don't have enough years left to spend a large proportion of them inside an iPhone," says the 42-year-old British writer. She'd rather spend time on things that give her, as they say on the internet, "the feels" – "Intellectual, emotional, philosophical, religious, existential feels," she says.
Feel Free was published earlier this year.
Smith's prodigious cultural consumption and output is no secret to anyone who has read her essays, which are as bracing as her fiction. Her reflections in recent years on literature, film, visual art, music, race and class are gathered in a new book, Feel Free. In an essay on Joni Mitchell, Smith muses: "How can this person possibly love as many things as she appears to love?" Many would ask Smith the same question.
On the one hand, her wide-ranging fascination is infectious and you find yourself down rabbit holes tunnelled by her interests. She considers the rap of Jay-Z as generously and carefully as she does the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer; the gaze of an old woman in an 18th-century German portrait is dissected with the same verve she uses to analyse the gaze of Justin Bieber fans.
Her essays are often totally devastating. Smith wittily extols the virtues of public libraries while knocking you flat with a contemplation of mortality or grief. The writing triggers a thirst to read, see, listen and do more. To live life to the brim and to feel – as they say on the internet – all the feels.
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