Best Of: Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show
Episode: Best Of: Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones
Date: December 12, 2025
Host: Ezra Klein
Guest: Zadie Smith

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Episode Overview

Ezra Klein revisits a favorite wide-ranging conversation with novelist and essayist Zadie Smith, delving into her novel "The Fraud" as a lens for examining contemporary populism, the complexities of identity, the inadequacy of logic alone in political life, the effects of digital technology on selfhood, and the particular challenges of aging and loneliness. Drawing from British history, Smith’s personal experience of class mobility, and the realities of online life, they interrogate whether modern forces are fostering or flattening our inner and societal complexity.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Political Pressures and the Amorphous Self

Timestamps: 00:53–07:20

• Amorphous vs. Solid Selves:
  Smith reflects on how political events (Brexit, Trump 2016) demand people suppress personal ambiguity and crystallize into fixed roles—protesters, defenders, activists.
• Quote (Zadie Smith, 04:49):
  “For me, it’s a tension in my thought... if I had to, I would call myself a radical humanist, a socialist, but also an existentialist... The existentialist part means, I guess, that I think people are thrown into life, that I don’t believe in people having essences.”
• On Doubt and Certainty (Ezra Klein, 06:32):
  “There are times when both internally and externally, people view [internal conflict] as a kind of decadence.”
• Smith's Role as a Writer:
  She feels her role is to remind readers of personal wholeness, "to deal with people in their privacy as well as their public selves."

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2. The Tichborne Trial & Populism

Timestamps: 07:20–13:34

• Historical Case as Parable:
  Smith’s 19th-century novel is inspired by the Tichborne trial, where a working-class butcher claimed to be an aristocrat—paralleling populist movements that galvanize mass support despite factual fraudulence.
• Connection to O.J. Trial:
  Smith compares it to O.J. Simpson: “a larger truth was told around a lie”; the courts, institutionally racist, were put on trial by proxy.
• Motivations for Belief:
  The downtrodden supported Tichborne not for logic, but emotion—the courts were seen as inherently unjust to people like them.

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3. Intelligence, Blind Spots, and Class

Timestamps: 13:34–15:12

• Dual Characters:
  Comparing Sarah Ainsworth (working class, emotional intelligence) and Eliza Touchet (elite, intellectual), Smith notes multiple “ways to be intelligent”—street smarts, emotional acuity, practical knowledge.
• Quote (Zadie Smith, 13:34):
  “What we define as intelligence, we define it so partially. There are many, many contexts... I can go into and be a true fool, truly lost. And that’s important to know.”

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4. Emotion vs. Logic in Politics

Timestamps: 15:12–20:00

• Logic, Pathos, and Ethics:
  Smith seeks to balance emotion, logic, and ethics in life and writing, echoing Aristotle's framework.
• The Error of Dismissing Emotion:
  Both agree that the “facts don’t care about your feelings” view is reductive.
  Smith:
  “The facts don’t care about my feelings is a truly fascistic sentence... We are creatures of feeling, in part. To deny that is to deny a part of the kind of animal we are.” (18:05)

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5. The Wave and Retreat of “Wokeness”

Timestamps: 21:15–27:57

• Change on Campus:
  Smith observes discourse about “wokeness” is more pronounced in media than in her classrooms; she avoids binary “culture war” frames—“I don’t take the bait... it’s a circle jerk.”
• Hierarchical Reversal (Smith, 24:51):
  “People who thoughtlessly considered themselves at the center of history culture would be made to look at the world another way. That first hierarchical reversal is a revolution in thought, and it’s incredible.”
• Identity and the Universal (27:03):
  Smith:
  “Everybody had an identity apart from white people. They had no identity. They were the universal. So part of that turn is everybody saying, why don’t you try having an identity for once? See how you like it. And the answer was, nobody liked it.”

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6. The Containment of Identity

Timestamps: 27:57–33:56

• Multiplicity vs. Containment:
  Politics and language force a narrowing—both Klein and Smith mourn the violence done when many identities are made singular for political purposes.
• Containment (Smith, 33:07):
  “When I think of my identity, I think of myself as a black British woman... as a writer, a mother... many things. Those things are all me.”
  She strives in writing to “defend that fundamental sense... that we are, in the end, this person.”

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7. The Limits and Costs of the “Linguistic Turn”

Timestamps: 33:56–35:59

• Fighting for Language:
  Smith attributes a turn to linguistic activism to young people lacking material outlets for change—“they fought in the only place they knew where to fight, which was language.”
  But solely focusing on language is “wildly inefficient... nothing compared to decent wages, decent housing, health care…”

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8. Language, Identity, and Pain

Timestamps: 35:59–39:13

• Strictures of Language:
  Klein reflects on how standard labels (e.g., “Jewish,” “Zionism”) can contain and flatten lived complexity, a pain Smith shares:
  “At a certain point you get tired of being presented with this new idea of yourself, you know?”
• Self-Concept vs. Others’ Perceptions:
  Smith underscores the deep difficulty of reconciling your internal story with how you are seen, especially at the scale of collective identity.

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9. Digital Technology and Selfhood

Timestamps: 39:13–46:46

• On Social Media:
  Smith argues smartphones and platforms are “behavior modification systems” that structure both content and form of thought, making argument and attention shallow and binary.
  “Modification is my bread and butter... But the question becomes, who do you want to be modified by and to what degree? When I look at the people who have designed these things... this machinery is not worthy of them.” (39:13)
• The Totality of Capture (Smith, 43:16):
  “All mediums in the past have had partial capture. What blows my mind and what I think is the paradigm shift is this is total.”
• Living Without a Smartphone (Smith, 45:00):
  She tried one for three months, found the potential for addiction and exposure to others’ opinions (“crumbling half assed life presented as a TV show”) unbearable, and prefers rare travel snafus to “having my very consciousness colonized.”

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10. The Curation of Relationships and the Value of Depth

Timestamps: 53:05–55:49

• Social Breadth vs. Depth:
  The wish to know “everyone” fades, replaced by treasuring a handful of deep bonds.
  Smith:
  “If you truly loved and were truly loved by two people in your lifetime, you had every right to think yourself a Midas.” (53:05)

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11. Aging, Loneliness, and Gender

Timestamps: 57:14–66:16

• Aging as a Steeplechase (Read by Smith, 58:18):
  A passage tracking a woman’s sense of loneliness through the “stages” of aging—loss of beauty, menopause, invisibility.
• On Isolation:
  Smith: “I think there is a deep isolation in people... There will be moments when you will feel this isolation. I think it’s existential.” (59:23)
• Gender Differences:
  Aging is “monumentally” different for men and women, especially in relation to physical expectations, social connections, and cultural narratives of beauty.
• The Value of Privacy:
  Smith notes the importance of private bonds (her marriage), which provide freedom from performance and allow one to just “be”—suggesting that true freedom may lie in privacy as much as in self-expression.

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12. Generational Dynamics and Exclusion

Timestamps: 66:16–73:59

• Difficulty of Really Knowing Others:
  Despite a novelist’s skill for observation, Smith emphasizes the challenge and importance of genuine listening—“being able to sit in front of another human being and just listening... that is so hard.”
• Aging and Social Invisibility:
  Smith’s prose (read aloud) captures the “almost dizzying feeling of exclusion” in old age, compounded by losing roles or “decorativeness”—and notes the futility of generational warfare (e.g., “OK, boomer”), since all young people are fated to become old.
• On Generational Vanity:
  Smith quips that every generation believes they’ve “solved it,” only for the next to cringe at their predecessors’ self-certainty and tastes.

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13. Book Recommendations

Timestamp: 74:03

1. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann:
   A novel about a filmmaker’s complicity with Nazi Germany, paralleling the moral complexity of "The Fraud."
2. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz:
   A nuanced biography of Fanon, rescuing him from caricature and digging into his influence and contradictions.
3. The Diaries of Virginia Woolf (5 Vols):
   Smith extols their joy, brilliance, and candid humanity—her “Twitter” substitute, time spent soaking in Woolf’s mind.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “The facts don’t care about my feelings is a truly fascistic sentence... We are creatures of feeling, in part. To deny that is to deny a part of the kind of animal we are.” — Zadie Smith (18:05)
• “If you truly loved and were truly loved by two people in your lifetime, you had every right to think yourself a Midas.” — Zadie Smith, from "The Fraud" (53:05)
• “A private person, a person who is a mystery to the world and, what’s more important, to herself.” — Zadie Smith, on the kind of web she wants (49:20)
• “It’s a behavior modification system. It’s meant to do that. It’s really well designed. People aren’t terrible. The system is terrible.” — Zadie Smith (48:46)
• “Being poor is stressful, expensive, tiring, mentally exhausting. It’s a denuding of yourself... The primary concern.” — Zadie Smith (29:19)
• “Old, young is crazy... You are literally fighting the person you’re about to become.” — Zadie Smith (70:17)
• “You may not be to my taste, fair play. But as I heard Elizabeth Strout say somewhere, every person is a world.” — Zadie Smith (53:42)

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Conclusion

This sweeping episode explores what it means to maintain an interior life amid political, social, and technological forces pushing us into simplicity and performance. Zadie Smith’s wit and wisdom on class, identity, technology, aging, and art offer listeners a nuanced framework for holding onto both complexity and compassion in an era of binary debates and mass mediation.

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Transcript

[A]

This podcast is supported by GiveWell. When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? Many focus on low overhead, but what about real impact on people's lives? Over 150,000 donors have used GiveWell's research, collectively saving 300,000 lives and improving millions more. Make a tax deductible [e-mail] first time donors can have their donation matched up to $100 as long as matching funds last select podcast and Ezra Klein at checkout. I want to share today a favorite conversation from the recent past, even though it now doesn't feel all that recent. This is with the writer Zadie Smith. Her fiction is some of my favorite. She's an amazing writer of essays and we spoke in September 2024. So this is a conversation where a lot has changed since we recorded it. It is pre Trump reelection, pre vibe shift. But I think in some ways it's more interesting for and there's wisdom in what Smith says that I think is easier to forget now, or at least harder to hold on to. Hope you enjoy it. From new york times opinion this is the ezra klein show. Sometimes you stumble across a line in a book and you have this moment of yeah, that's exactly how that feels at that moment. Reading the introduction to Zadie Smith's 2018 book of essays, Feel Free, and she's talking about the political stakes of that period, particularly of 2016, Brexit in the UK, Donald Trump in America, and the way you could feel it changing people, she writes, quote, millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can't fight fire with air, but equally you can't fight for freedom. You've forgotten how to identify what Smith is describing there felt so familiar to me. I see it so often in myself, in people around me, and you rarely actually hear it talked about, that moment when politics seems to demand, or world events seem to demand, that we put aside our internal conflicts, our uncertainty, our many selves, and solidify into what the cause or the moment needs us to be. As if curiosity were a luxury, a decadence suited only to peacetime. Zadie Smith is, of course, a novelist, an essayist. She's been one of my favorite writers for years. If you've not read her back catalog like White Teeth and On Beauty and Swing Time, I almost envy you. But still, I was surprised when I finally read the Fraud, the book she released last year. I didn't expect this novel about a trial in 19th century London, which I knew it to be about, to be so resonant, so about 21st century America. But Smith has said that Trump and populism were front of her mind when she wrote it. And you can feel it in the book. You can feel it as she explores this weird thing that actually did happen, the Tichborne trial, this strange case in which a man who seemed to be a clear fraud, a butcher, was claiming to be the heir to a storied estate. And in his claim, he built this huge movement of passionate supporters who totally flummoxed the day's elites and institutions. Smith has moved to another time and another place to protect the ability to have that amorphous self, to explore something very current from more perspectives in the current moment sometimes allows, as always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com. Zadie Smith, welcome to the show.

[B]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

So, in your essay collection, Feel Free, you make this point that we have these amorphous identities that then, under political pressure, solidify. Tell me about that experience, that dynamic.

[B]

For me, it's a tension in my thought which I perhaps extrapolate to others, but I guess I don't often define myself. But if I had to, I would call myself a radical humanist, a socialist, but also an existentialist. And those three things combined are sometimes hard to think from. The existentialist part means, I guess, that I think people are thrown into life, that I don't believe in people having essences, essentially, and that leads to a certain kind of fiction, a certain kind of thought. But it also has a political angle, because if you think people are thrown into life, then the circumstances they're thrown into are of absolute significance. And I guess in 2016, the circumstances we were all about to be thrown into were my focus. Whereas in quieter or more peaceful times, the idea of what you're thrown into being, the beauty of the world, nature itself, your relations with other people, this kind of private, domestic world that had to be put to one side.

[A]

I found that interesting. And something you went on to say in that introduction was that you can't fight fire with air. I sort of took you to be saying, at least in part, that internal conflict is at times luxury, or if not a luxury, something that at certain moments you're forced to give up in order to achieve a goal. And I think I resonated to it. I mean, we're in an election year, and I do find both inside myself and then in the pressures that are upon me, there are times when people are very comfortable with you both having and expressing your doubt, your conflict, your, on the one hand, on the other.

[B]

Hand, your hashtag nuance.

[A]

Exactly. And then there are times when both internally and externally, people view that as a kind of decadence.

[B]

Yeah, that's absolutely the case. I guess what I feel is that given that a huge amount of people are very willing to suppress or ignore any kind of contradiction, ambivalence in themselves, there should be space, theoretically, for one or two people to remind people of their wholeness. And so when I'm writing, that's what I'm thinking about. I know I cannot perform the roles that other people play, but the role I play, which is far smaller but makes an attempt to deal with people in their privacy as well as in their public selves.

[A]

Tell me about the Tichborne case, which is at the heart of your book, the Fraud. How did you get interested in that?

[B]

I got interested in it through a strange pathway, because the man himself, this working class butcher who claimed to be an aristocrat, is buried in an unmarked grave right next to my house and has always been right next door to me, even when I lived in a housing estate, that housing estate looked over the graveyard where he's buried. So he's always been on my mind and he always interested me as an example of a kind of. The best way to put it is a kind of left wing populism. And the first time I started thinking about him was properly, was during the OJ trial when I was young, that it seemed to me another example of a case that, you know, fundamentally is not true. I mean, I don't want to. No spoilers to the younger public there, but in my view, OJ did do it. But the idea that a court case could express not a particular act of truth or justice, but a more generalized feeling about justice really interested me. And the fact that the OJ case, even though the subject of it there was a larger truth being told in that case, which was in that the courts were institutionally racist. America itself had run a court system that was institutionally racist. So that larger truth was told around a lie. That's what interested me and that's what interests me about Tichborne, too. It's not the way I personally would ever want justice to come about, but it's a recognition sometimes that when all other outlets seem blocked, populism rears its head.

[A]

Give me a bit more setup of the Tichborne case. You have this apparent butcher who is claiming to Be the heir to a great noble estate. But give me a bit more setup.

[B]

I mean, it's such a silly story, but basically, a man called Roger Tichborne. He was a Catholic, French speaking, Anglo French aristocrat. Went off on a boat, actually to Jamaica. And the boat sank. He was about 22. And his mother, who was completely obsessed with him. Refused to believe it. And put adverts out all over the world. First in England, then Britain, then Europe, then as far as Australia. Offering larger and larger rewards for the discovery of her son. Who she believed had been rescued from the shipwreck. And was somewhere. The reward got so large that inevitably pretenders would turn up. And this particular pretender was a working class man called Arthur Orton. He'd been a butcher. He had traveled away from England, ended up in Australia. And in Australia bumped into a black man, an ex slave, a Jamaican who had worked for this Tichborne family. He's called Bogle, Andrew Bogle. And these two men sail to England and claim that the butcher is the long lost son. And the mother says, yes, you are. And then promptly dies. And that started this enormous court case between the family, the Titchbornes, who obviously didn't want to give their property and money and lands to a stranger. And Titchbourne and Bogle, who steadfastly insisted they were telling the truth.

[A]

One of the core characters of the book is Sarah Ainsworth.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Who is she and why does she care so much about this trial?

[B]

She's one of my favorite characters. She is the second wife of a writer called Ainsworth, who's a character in the book. She is a uneducated woman, a working class woman, a smart woman. And someone who has a great instinct for a story. And it's a great soapy, tabloidy story. She's fascinated by it. And I think she sees in it some echo of her own situation. You know, as far as she's concerned, there is conspiracy against people like her. There's a conspiracy against this man who just wants what's owed to him. Of course, the central logic of her argument doesn't quite make sense. Because if he's a working class man being hard done by the courts. Then he can't possibly also be Sir Roger, a Catholic aristocrat. So, you know, even at the time, people like Sarah, there were hundreds of them. It was a huge movement supporting this man's attempt to get his lands. Were ridiculed in the press. The obvious illogic of the argument was displayed. But for people like Sarah, it wasn't a matter of logic, it was a matter of emotion. And there was again, a larger truth, which is that these courts do not give us any fair chance of justice. And in the 19th century in England, the court system explicitly was on the side of the upper classes. It was a genuine truth that to be a working class person in that court system, a working class child, for example, you were in serious danger. You know, if you stole a sheep, if you stole a bag of sugar, you could end up in Australia. So I think by the time the Tichborne case comes along, there is a great feeling of this system is as rational as it seems, as liberal as it seems, is not intended for us. So to me, she is someone who, unlike a lot of the liberal commentators, including her own husband, who has lived this experience of injustice in the courts and on the streets of England. So she's wrong, but she's also in some polish and right.

[A]

One of the things that emerges about her is that she has very little intellectual status at her own home. As you mentioned, she was the maid now turned wife to this much older novelist. The home is really run by Eliza Touchet, the novelist's very intellectual cousin, an abolitionist, a voracious reader, someone who can hold her own at a table of famous novelists. But when Sarah and Eliza begin attending the Tichborne trials, this sort of flips, and she often understands what is going on better than Eliza does. In some ways, I understood Eliza's a little bit more of a stand in for people, maybe more in your social class or I guess in mine, and what they get right and get wrong. So how did writing these two characters make you think about your own blind spots or make you think about the sort of different ways of understanding the world?

[B]

I mean, it's two things. I've been in both classes, right? I was born in one and raised in one. And then my education and my job put me in another. And I guess the fundamental lesson of that kind of movement is that what we define as intelligence, we define it so partially. Like I am so aware, without trying to sound falsely humble, or that I am a complete idiot about so many things, and yet I have this particular intelligence in a very, extremely narrow area, which is. Which has allowed me to make the life I've made. But if you ask me the most basic facts of the universe, or even the relationship between the sun and the moon, basic math, geography, I mean, there are just acres of ignorance in my life. No matter practical knowledge, to do things with your hands, to make things, or even how to Run a group, how to speak to people, how to relate to other. It's endless, the things that I'm not good at. There are many, many contexts in the world that I can go into and be a true fool, truly lost. And that's important to know. When you move through the world, this thing you call intellect, this thing that you value, this thing which may even be the basis of your kind of meritocratic existence, has limited use. And that there are many, many ways to be intelligent in this world. I mean, the most obvious that anyone from the class I was born in will tell you about is street smarts, which is one of the most essential values you can have in this world and gets increasingly lost as you move out of that class into others. So writing about the two of them, I was writing with respect, about two different kinds of ways of being in the world.

[A]

One of my favorite lines in the book comes at one of the trials after there was a spray of conspiracy theories about how the initial trial was rigged. And you write that quote. Mrs. Touchet did not recall an excess of aristocrats or Jesuits at the first trial and was quite certain she'd seen many a poor man. And what choice did government have but to accept the cost of cases imposed upon it? But such dry and inconvenient facts were of no consequence here in this ocean of feeling that had this sort of ring of recognition in a lot of both, like my reporting and just moments in my own life where the sort of dry facts seemed somehow to pale before the emotional structure of a thing.

[B]

Right. But again, I'm also not willing to submit entirely to feeling. You know, I guess my. My ideal. And this is not perfectly practiced in my own life and certainly not perfectly practiced in my work, but it's that kind of Aristotelian idea that you have logic, you have pathos, these things work together, and you have your will, that you have to combine these things every time you're moving through the world, every time you're making a decision, every time I'm writing something, I'm trying to balance the claims of those things. Sometimes the ethics of a situation are all that matters. Sometimes you have to cede to emotion, and sometimes logic is what's required. But the tricky thing about life is there's no guidebook to how exactly those three things should be balanced. It's something you have to enact every day of your life. It's work, you know, Let me see.

[A]

If this resonates for you, because something that made me think of was an experience I had some years ago. There was a rise of, I guess, an online intellectual movement known as the Rationalists. I knew a lot of those people. I moved in those circles for a bit. There was a period when I think it was. Ben Shapiro was very associated with this line. Facts don't care about your feelings. And I remember that period trying to think a lot about emotion and politics and recognizing Purdue over the coming couple of years. That emotion does point towards things. It doesn't tell you what is true. But this sort of practice that I saw people trying to do, of walling yourself off from emotion, of, in fact, distrusting information that comes wrapped in emotion, there was something that clicked for me at a certain point and like has always been true in me as a human being, that I trust emotion. I don't trust it as the end of the inquiry. But if people feel strongly about something, there is something there. There is a deep intelligence in people's emotional reactions that if. And if you keep seeing it point in a direction, I feel like you should bring curiosity to that. Where some people, I think, bring mistrust because of the very existence of the emotion. Right. It's hysterical, it's angry, it's outrageous.

[B]

The facts don't care about my feelings is a truly fascistic sentence. You know, to be honest, we are creatures of feeling, in part. So to deny that is to deny a part of the kind of animal we are in the world. I think you see plenty of that in Palo Alto and many other places. But to take it as a principle is extraordinary to me. Even in the hardest sciences, emotion plays some role, instinct plays some role, and it also dismisses huge areas of people's human experience, the entirety of religious experience, almost the entirety of emotive experience, experience of the natural world, philosophical experience. So for me, that movement is. It's just so distant from the way I think about humans and what they need. And I do think some of this obsession with rational argument, like, I really notice it when people are arguing about transgender issues or very intimate and complicated personal matters. Sometimes people will argue that with this fierce logic, as if all our experiences of identity or personal experience are run on these logical terms. But of course, it's not the case. So why should this particular area be subjected to absolute rationality? I would say that most of our experiences of ourselves are quite deeply irrational. Like, if you stop a couple in the street and say to them, why are you married? You are not going to get a rational answer from them. You're going to get some murmuring, sentimental, some partially logical, some apologetic, some unsure. But there's a large area of our intimate lives, some of our most serious decisions, which can't be presented to logic in that way. I think you have to allow people an area of self which doesn't submit to a mathematical program.

[A]

Foreign. This podcast is supported by GiveWell. When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? Many focus on low overhead, but what about real impact on people's lives? Over 150,000 donors have used GiveWell's research, collectively saving 300,000 lives and improving millions more. Make a tax deductible donation at GiveWell. First time donors can have their donation matched up to $100 as long as matching funds last. Select Podcast and Ezra Klein at Checkout.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

I Mean, so much of it happens at a meta level in newspapers and think pieces, I can't honestly say in my classrooms. I mean, I just don't even recognize the category, really. Like, the way I teach. I try and teach a unity. So, like, if I'm teaching Pride and Prejudice, this is not a battle between woke thought and unwoke thought. I'm only interested in truth. So to me, there is no friction and no battle between teaching the beauty and artistry of Austen's novels, discussing where Darcy's money comes from, which is most certainly the Caribbean, understanding the political situation in England in the 1810s, those things happen simultaneously. The working class movement, which is off to the side in that novel, the complacency of the middle classes in that novel, the artistry of Jane Austen. I don't take the bait. I don't accept the argument in the first place that I have two kinds of students who are in some kind of football game of ideas, and if one wins, the other loses. That's not how I teach literature. That's not how I think of history. That's not how I think of the relationship between black and white people. So I don't engage because I think it's a bait, and I think it's a circle jerk, and that what you're meant to do in response to it is move further and further to the right in response to this bogeyman.

[A]

But I knew a lot of people teaching on campus, and I'm not asking to take the bait of choosing a side in things that had a crudeness to them in a lot of different directions, but I do know a lot of people, and I think I felt it too. And I don't think it was just in newspapers. I mean, I think this was a genuine social movement and a genuine shift in ideologies and things people believed. And one thing that I. The people who taught have told me is that they feel like things shifted a lot in young people for a while, and now maybe they're shifting back. Or maybe. The other thing I believe is that a lot of the things got metabolized, and so things that people did not believe in 2012 now seem so normal in 2024 that we no longer call it something new. So I was going to ask about that. What of that sort of ideological wave has held right? What do you think is now just common wisdom? And so we've actually changed and what kind of left.

[B]

I mean, the thing which is satisfying for me was the first and initial hierarchical reversal. It's something that I dreamt about all my life that people who thoughtlessly considered themselves at the center of history culture. Would be made to look at the world another way. That first hierarchical reversal is a revolution in thought, and it's incredible. So I would not have been able to write this book without an incredible flowering of African diasporic thought. On the historical question, on the history of slavery, on what happened to the African diaspora. All of that just simply did not exist when I started writing. So I am in absolute debt to all of those writers who tried to centralize the idea of Africa as a major part of our collective human history. And of that story as fundamental to Europe and to the politics we're in now. That is all essential. So I'm excited that when I talk to students now, they don't just know one novel from Africa. They don't have some kind of vague sense of what happened in African history and in contemporary history in relation to Africa. But I did not come to create a hierarchical revolution and then have my thought suddenly calcify the way the previous version of thought was calcified. That's not what I believe in, and that's not what I'm here for. To become that person, to me would be death. So I can't take any role that's presented to me as my role. I have to keep thinking every day.

[A]

You were talking a minute ago about who gets to be seen as the center of history. And also maybe another way of putting that is who gets to be seen as not having identity. When we talked about identity politics in America, at least, one of my sort of endless arguments is that identity politics was strongest when it was least visible, right? When there was no conflict.

[B]

But that's what it was about. That's what the hierarchical reversal was about, that everybody had an identity apart from white people. They had no identity. They were the universal. They were human beings. And so part of that turn is everybody saying, why don't you try having an identity for once? See how you like it. And the answer was, nobody liked it. They didn't like it. But the lesson from that, for me, is that that straitjacket is something that nobody really wants. Sometimes it's needed politically. We absolutely need to gather in our identity group sometimes for our freedoms, for our civil rights. There's absolutely no doubt about that. But for that role to be the thing that is you existentially all the way down, that is something that I personally believe all human beings revolt from at some level.

[A]

I think this is one reason for me, that your language about amorphousness of ourselves and solidity of ourselves. Rung. So true. I wrote a book a couple years back about political polarization and one of the major arguments of the book or things I was writing about and observing was the way we often have. I mean, our identities are so manifold. There's so many things that are true about me. If you asked about identities, I hold. I'm Californian and I'm a father and I'm the son of an immigrant and you could just kind of go on and on and on down the sign. And then one of the things that politics or certain kinds of social dynamics do is force you to inhabit one or a small set of them at the end of the day. I always felt this was a thing that was like the core tension in the politics of Barack Obama that in his big speech that brought him to prominence in 2004, talks about how different we are in other contexts, that we worship an awesome God in blue states and we don't like people poking around our libraries in red states. He's always talking about how people are at the PTA meeting or on the soccer field. But then it's like the political, the hydraulic machinery of politics takes over and people are so complicated with so much overlap. Kind of click in to this final binary choice and it's a. It's a real. I mean, I'm not sure there's all that many other ways to do it, but it is a real violence done to the self.

[B]

I mean, I don't disagree with that, of course it's true, but. But the greater violence done to the self is oppression itself. Oppression is the thing that boxes you in, that forces you into a certain set of moves that makes you unable to explore this possibility of your non essential self. So I guess that's where I would differ from the more liberal view that the boxing in is first done economically, politically, structurally, that narrows your conception. And it's not just a philosophical narrowing. It's practical, like you do not have time to think. Being poor is stressful, expensive, tiring, mentally exhausting. It's a denuding of yourself. And that to me is the primary concern. The kind of political narrowing happens later and is partly a consequence of it. But it's those actual structural things in a person's life which make their area of movement sometimes unbearably narrow.

[A]

This feels to me like something you're exploring in the way you write about the Titchborn case. If the claimant wins, this sort of guy claiming to be Roger Titchborn Wins. In the Tichborne case, this movement he has behind him, Sarah in particular, they get nothing of his state. I mean, later on, there's some scams about investing in him, but for the most part, he wins and they get nothing. But there is some kind of transference, and this happens a lot in movements. And Sarah says in this great quote, we all feel for poor Sir Roger and vice versa. He's for us, and we're for him. I think a lot of liberals in America at least, find the Trump movement both sort of disconcerting and confusing, because in many ways it's like, what is he going to give you? This is a guy who, if he had his way, would have taken away your health care, would cut Medicaid. I mean, he wasn't able to do all the things he tried to do, but a lot of them would have been very bad for many of the people who support him. But what he is promising to do, and I think actually does do in a much more true way than people sometimes give him credit for, is his victory is a loss in status and power for many institutions. So for Sarah, what kind of oppression is being combated here? And what kind of victory does she win if the claimant wins?

[B]

I think that's absolutely the problem with this populism, that she has no personal gain. Though in the case of the Titchbournes, and I would say it's similar in O.J. actually, the court system itself was shamed by this public movement, so you could call that a symbolic victory, but it was important. And maybe that's something that populist movies can do, this kind of very slight turning round of a large ship that's been pointing in a particular direction. But for someone like Bogle, you know, this is a novel in which there are many, many different versions of being boxed in. Some of them are slight, you know, about class, or very minor gradations of class, or about careers or egos. Some of them are larger. Like Mrs. Touchet is boxed in pretty much by her gender and her class. She finds it really hard to live the kind of life she wants to live in 1830s in England. But all of this pales in comparison to the reality of being a slave, which is the absolute nadir of no movement, no freedom, no choice, no self. So to me, it's not about choosing one particular oppression or playing them off against each other, but it's also being aware that there are gradations of these things.

[A]

You have a fascinating line on this where you say that very stable notions of identity can create a kind of containment around people. What do you mean by containment?

[B]

I mean, when I think of my identity, I think of myself as a black British woman. I think of myself as a writer, a mother, a friend, occasional drug taker, dancer, clubber, many things. Those things are all me. That probably best described by your name. So what I'm trying to do when I'm writing is to try and defend that fundamental sense that we are, in the end, this person. I am a Zaydie, you are an Ezra. I really think there's a way that you can acknowledge that truth about yourself and still do your political work and still participate in struggle, but still know that humans are essentially uncontainable by these terms entirely.

[A]

There's some connection here with language. And I was always struck how many fights it could have been materialist ended up. Language ended up being about language. Right. Like the oftentimes the demands were about how we spoke about each other. Right. The backlash ended up being termed free speech, which I always thought was not accurate, but nevertheless. And I guess the question is, what do you win and what do you lose when you sort of wrap yourself in language? I heard you say on a podcast that it's possible there are wild freedoms, sexual, personal and existential, that come with having no language at all for what you feel and what you do. And so it struck me that you maybe have some ambivalence there.

[B]

I don't blame anyone for the linguistic turn. It was a linguistic turn mostly on the part of young people. But how can you blame them given that they had no money, really, no tools, very little physical material freedoms in the world? It seems natural to me that they fought in the only place they knew where to fight, which was language. The actual means of production are out of their hands. They were enveloped by this technological revolution which basically kind of owned them. It doesn't surprise me that the battleground ended up being language, because language is the thing that it's. It's right in front of you. You can do something about it. You can't really do anything about late capitalism or you didn't feel like you could in 2012. You felt trapped. So it doesn't surprise me. But, yeah, it's wildly inefficient. It's not good enough. I'm always happy that people use quote, unquote, right words around me and others, but it's nothing compared to decent wages, decent housing, health care, human rights. It's nothing compared to that. So it's not that I think it's Worthless. But to have it so wildly overburdened with meaning and power seems to me a kind of trick that was played on us.

[A]

I guess I also wonder though, or I guess something I have been struggling with myself is what happens when you have the words. And I guess I'll be honest about what's on my mind here, which is I was saying earlier that in different periods different identities come to the fore. And for sort of obvious reasons, in the last year I've been thinking a lot about Jewish identity and feeling a lot of conflict around Jewish identity. Certainly feeling a lot of conflict around what the word Zionism means. Right. There's a weird term for people who support that state that hearkens back to a very particular ideology. And like, do I include myself in that or not? And on the one hand there's all this clear language, and on the other hand, for one of the first times for me, I've actually felt the strictures of that as the reality has become so much more complex and so much more painful, I think, than what some of the language allows. And so I guess it's made me think a little bit about that idea of containment that identities can be containing. But the identities end up instantiated in these couple of words. And it's like my identity as a Jewish person is very vast, but what somebody else hears in that is not that, that way. And so it's like that translation of like an amorphous identity. To use that term again to language is tough.

[B]

It's incredibly painful. And I mean, I think of my mother. Recently there's been new language for her in this country. So bame is a new term. And my mom, who's just turned 70, was like, personally I don't need any more, I don't need any more words. She's had a lot of words. You know, she grew up in Jamaica in the 50s. She's had a lot of words applied to her, some absolutely offensive, some more mollifying. But each time at a certain point you get tired of being presented with this new idea of yourself, you know. But as for narratives of national or ethno religious or personal identity, sometimes you really have to step back and look at the story that you've told yourself about your people. And it's one of the hardest things to do in the world. And what I spoke about earlier, in my view about staying open, listening to people, having to take on your self conception and how the way others have conceived you or experienced you are not the same. That's the most painful thing in the world. I don't know how that's done, but sometimes it has to be done. Sometimes at the intimate personality level and sometimes at the world's historical level. That's as tough as it comes.

[A]

You gesture did something a minute ago that I also think is important here, which is that all the things we're talking about have happened in a new and digital context. And it's a new and digital context that is largely instantiated in words and images. I mean, we define and describe ourselves in many more places through a couple words or an image, right? An avatar photo, a bio on our Facebook or X or TikTok or whatever page. And I don't think you have much presence on social media. My understanding is you don't even have a smartphone. How do you see the way that using language to define ourselves online constantly has changed the self definition of the people around you or the people you teach?

[B]

You know, I don't want to talk through emotional hysteria. I just talk about the facts. And the facts of this technology is that it was designed as and is intended to be a behavior modification system. That is the right term for it. When you wake up in the morning and you turn to your social app, you are being instructed on what the issue of the day is, what to be interested in. The news has always played some element in doing that, but this is total. So I might wake up in the morning and what interests me is an idea I've had, or what I see out my window, or what's happening locally in front of me, what's happening in my country. But the phone tells me exactly what to think about, where to think about it, and often how to think about it. And it's not even to me the content of those thoughts. Like there's a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics that expressed on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me it's the structure, it's not the content of what's on them, is it? It's structured in a certain way. That an argument is this long, that there are two sides to every debate, that they must be in fierce contest with each other, is actually structuring the way you think about thought. And I don't think anyone of my age who knows anyone they knew in 2008 thinks that that person has not been seriously modified in many different directions. But the fundamental modification is the same. And that's okay. All mediums modify you. Books modify you. TV modifies you, Radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th century village modifies you. But the question becomes, who do you want to be modified by and to what degree? That's my only question. And when I look at the people who have designed these things, what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be, the humans I know and love, this machinery is not worthy of them. That's the best way I can put it. And I speak as someone who grew up as an entirely TV addicted human. I love tv. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter. And when the Internet came, I was like, hallelujah, finally we've got a medium which isn't made by the man or centralized. We're just going to be like talking to each other, hang out with each other, peer to peer. It's going to be amazing. That is not the Internet that we have. That is not what occurred.

[A]

A couple years back, I got very into reading the media theorists from the rise of the television age, like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and there's these books on four arguments for the elimination of television. When I would critique what the Internet and social media were feeling like, to me, people would say, oh, everybody said this about television. And so I went back and I read these books and I had this sort of shock where I was like, oh, and they were right.

[B]

They were right.

[A]

Like the things they were saying television would do to us and do to our culture are right. I mean, there's just a straightforward argument in Neil Postman's great book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he says that the thing television is going to do to politics is make us believe politics should always be entertaining. And that's going to make politics a space dominated by entertainers. And here we literally are right with a reality television superstar running for president, having already been president once before, with his primary capacity being his mastery of the sort of television and attentional sphere. It's just this wild thing to realize. Oh, yeah, I mean, yeah, society kept spinning on. I mean, TV did not yet lead to everything collapsing in on itself. But the things people said would happen actually happen for better and for worse. And they saw it all coming and they described a world way less warped and deranged by all this than the one we actually live in. I mean, if you went back and told them what happened, I think they would look at you with their mouth again.

[B]

I mean, I think Neil Postman is a prophet and a genius and I give that book to everybody all the time. It blew my mind. Yeah, we are further along that path. But I just. It's about capture. Like, I think the thing with TV when I look at it now is that every medium captures people. All mediums in the past have had partial capture. What blows my mind and what I think is the paradigm shift is this is total. This is total. So when I get on a train in the morning and I look down a carriage and I can look down half a mile of carriage, there isn't a single person who is looking up from their phones. It's total. So that was my question. Like, what happens when it's everybody and it's not just a medium, but it's also the way you work, live, pay for the. Like, what happens when you enter into the medium and that's how your life is structured. And I have total faith that people can metabolize technology. And I also know that technology is a culture. And though I've missed most of it, I know that the Internet is a culture and it's joyful to so many people and it's been nothing but lulls and pleasure and there's been delight all over it, just as there was delight in television for me. But yeah, the political consequences are clear. And the effect on, I mean, it's so boring to say, but just the effect on people's ability to attend has been radical.

[A]

You don't have a smartphone, which is a potent choice. How would you be different? Or how do you believe you would be different? Like what modification of yourself are you trying to protect against if you did?

[B]

I just. It's sometimes funny to think about. I mean, I cannot imagine. I am so.

[A]

Have you ever had one?

[B]

I had one for three months in 2008 when it, when it came out. I am so influence. So other people's opinions matter to me as I'm sure they matter to everybody. The thought of being exposed to those opinions every second of every day, of having to present my crumbling half assed life to other people in some other form than it exists every day, like a TV show, like a media presentation every single day. I cannot imagine. I can imagine what my mind would be, what my books would be, what my relationships would be, what my relationship with my children would be. I mean, apart from anything else, I am an addictive person. So I would be on that thing nine hours a day, easy. I watch TV nine hours a day throughout the whole of the 80s. Like I would be what my kids call brain rot. I would be that person entirely.

[A]

The thing that I always wonder about with this. So I have a smartphone, but I don't have any social Media apps or. I don't really go on my social media, but. But I do look at it a lot, the phone and the thing that has always kept me there is the ability to get directions and to. Sometimes you need to order a car accompanied. Yeah, this is the thing. This is like somehow Steve Jobs sold everybody an iPhone, and then like Uber and GPS systems made a lot of us feel like we would die cold and hungry on a street corner someday if we didn't keep it in our pocket. That is actually how I feel about the phone. So I'm curious right now.

[B]

I get it.

[A]

I'm gonna be literal. How do you move through the world?

[B]

Until. Until last year, my husband also didn't have a smartphone. And so. So we were 47 or whatever and been doing this for a while. About once a year, there would be an absolute travel disaster. Like just we're at a party at 3 in the morning, there's no way to get home. Forget about it. Walk five miles. Like disaster once a year. And every time it happened, I would think that was bad. But is it as bad as having my very consciousness colonized every moment of the day? And I'd be like, no, definitely no competition. But travel wise, like, we all traveled before these things. I have an A to Z, which is the little guide to London. I. I plan where I'm going before I go, and then I just kind of go there. And that's kind of it. Though sometimes when I open an A to Z on a train, I see people literally laughing at me. Yeah, that happens.

[A]

The other thing that when you were saying this, you made me think about was not the modification of the self, but the modification of the way you see others. Sort of. One of the only social media sites I'll occasionally waste some time on is Instagram, because, I don't know, because it doesn't stress me out.

[B]

Yeah, it's less. I think that's fair.

[A]

But I saw somebody who posts a lot of stories and I thought I sort of, like, knew what was up with them to a degree, or at least like, knew the vibe of the life they're living, which looks great. And they were having such a hard time when I saw them. And I realized that my sense of them had diverged. Like, I had this sort of feeling that I was keeping up with them and my sense of them had diverged so totally from their experience. It's not only that I didn't know them anymore, or at least didn't know them in that moment, but I anti knew them. I Didn't even have the truth, that I didn't know what was going on. And it struck me as really sad. It made me think about how much time I spend. I mean, one reason I've left a lot of other platforms is I realized they were changing my. How I felt about other people. I was being exposed to parts of them that I don't like.

[B]

That's it.

[A]

Or didn't want.

[B]

But I think it's important to be a bit more forgiving. Like when they're being those people online, I see that too. People I love and I see them online. I'm like, who are you? This is not the same person. I. This is a different person. But it's really important to take the responsibility and the blame off individuals. It's a behavior modification system. It's meant to do that. It's really well designed. People aren't terrible. The system is terrible. You want to lift that off people, that sense of guilt or shame or. And make it more about anger, like anger towards the people who created this.

[A]

You wrote something about this that I really liked. In this older essay about the film the Social Network. You said, quote, I'm dreaming of a web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery to the world and which is more important to herself. And for some reason that really connected for me, that idea of mystery. That idea of mystery is something we actually might want to cultivate. I'm curious to hear you unpack that word. Not just what is unknown, but what space is offered by mystery.

[B]

Technologies aren't neutral, right? They are a philosophy and an ideology. They're not a neutral thing. So the technology of these algorithms is the idea that everything in the world can get classified. And that's not just a practical matter, that's a philosophy. That there's nothing in the world that cannot be organized, classified and labeled. And I don't believe that. I just don't believe that. But I also, I still dream of a peer to peer Internet. And there are interesting, like, clues as to the parts of the Internet which are genuinely joyful and fantastic of how we might go forward. Like, I really notice that music thrives on the Internet. I don't mean economically. I know that musicians are suffering everywhere. But in terms of the actual music that is being made by young people who are completely as online as you can be. To me, the music is sensational. Like, I've never heard such great hip hop, pop, all of it. I absolutely love it. So there's an interesting question, like, why would one medium be really energized by these algorithms? And other mediums, like, my medium really struggle. Right. Because it really makes it hard to read. The habit of reading starts to die more and more, and if you're not reading, you're not really writing at the level you need to be writing at, because reading is what makes writers. There's not really any way around that. So I've thought a lot about that. Like, why is contemporary music so excellent?

[A]

I have never had a better life in music than I have over the past four or five years.

[B]

Exactly. The music's sensational, the music's amazing.

[A]

But the ability to stumble into something wonderful and then begin to daisy chain off of that is. There's a stereotype that you don't keep finding new music as you get older. And I know that's true for a lot of people. And I have never found as much amazing, amazing new music as I have over these past couple years. And I do think it's the Internet, this ability. The algorithms are actually pretty good if you let them get to know you. So. Yeah. And I have the same thing you do, because I know a lot of these sites are bad for the musicians. I go to a lot of live shows, so I feel like I'm supporting the economy that way. And I sometimes will buy people stuff on bandcamp or something.

[B]

Listen, I'm the only person still paying for music. I'm a straight up. I buy it. But I think what it might be is that most other art forms need comprehension on the part of the artist of a kind of chronological history. Like, if you're going to write, it really, really helps to understand the development of the novel from, you know, the 1300s of creative writing till now. It's like eating a good diet just creates interesting work as you kind of digest all this stuff in order. Music, it really doesn't matter. And in fact, the more the hierarchy of years is just completely smashed apart, the more interesting the music gets. It's like the algorithm just produces weirder and weirder collections of influences.

[A]

You're saying that all these are behavioral modification devices, and they're also aspiration devices. Right. They're sort of telling you what you should value in life. And I think one of the things they're saying is you'd value having a lot of connections.

[B]

And.

[A]

And you write about something that happens in Eliza's thinking at the end of her life. And you say when she was young, she had wanted to know everyone, touch everyone, be Everyone go everywhere. Now, she thought that if you truly loved and were truly loved by two people in your lifetime, you had every right to think yourself a Midas. I've kind of felt that happen in my own life as I've gotten older. Right. The sort of broadness of what I cared about socially has collapsed into a depth of what I care about socially. But I'm curious where that thought came from for you and how you've experienced it.

[B]

It's absolutely personal. It's like one of the most personal lines in the book. I believe it. I think that's what a radical humanism means. It means you genuinely. You don't ever dismiss people. You don't ever think. Call them trash. You don't ever think that they are boring or limited. You think that they are infinite. They may not be to your taste, fair play. But as I heard Elizabeth Strout saying somewhere recently, you know, every person is a world. But the flip side of it is I also know that a good friend is a rare, rare thing that we don't get many in our lives. You can have acquaintances, you'll have a lot of them, but friendship is something else. And I mean, even today. This is maybe a silly example, but I was just going to the shops in my neighborhood, and I saw the father of an old school friend who is suddenly quite old and incapacitated. He's been put in a wheelchair for the first time, being pushed down the street by another school friend, like the younger sister of a friend of mine. So the younger sister is about in her late 30s, and this man is 80. And I just saw it and I thought, wow, wow, these bonds, right? These are not two people who are good friends, but they're people who lived in the same neighborhood their whole lives. And she has come to his service. She's not a relative, she's not the daughter. And I looked at both these people and thought, this is the kind of bind I want with people. And how do you get to that kind of connection with another person who's willing to sacrifice their time, their day, to do this thing? It's rare. I think it can be cultivated. But the way I used to conduct my life when I was young, which was just running around talking for five minutes to a thousand people at a party. That is not something that I want to do anymore. I think it's wild, fun. And I loved. I enjoyed it so much. And I love a party. I still love a party, but I've just become more aware of how difficult it is to. To have genuine relations with other humans. It's really hard and it takes time.

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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[A]

Of public lands is worth fighting for. Donate now while all gifts are matched@sierra club.org Ezra. This felt to me, or at least one thread of it, like a book about aging as much as it was about anything else. One of the things you're tracking in some of these parts of the book is this relationship between aging and loneliness, which is deeply true for a lot of people. I always think that I fear aging for sort of obvious health reasons, but I don't fear it for other reasons, except for how often I see aging become loneliness. And I was wondering if you could read a passage from the book, this passage of like in the Silence to the what strange lives women lead.

[B]

In the silence, Eliza was pricked on the sudden by an overwhelming and acute sense of loneliness, a severe revisionist feeling. It worked upon her cruelly, making her feel that loneliness was all she'd ever known, a consequence, perhaps, of what old women call the change, a special feminine form of delusion not to be trusted and yet apparently impossible to avoid. The change marked in the mind of Mrs. Touchet the final hurdle in the ladies Steeplechase, the humiliations of girlhood, the separating of the beautiful from the plain and the ugly, the terror of maidenhood, the trials of marriage or childbirth or their absence. The loss of that same beauty around which the whole system appears to revolve the change of life. What strange lives women lead.

[A]

Tell me why the connection for you in that sequence that steeplechase was with loneliness?

[B]

I think it is hard to go through these stages of life. You do feel lonely. And on the surface, I have the thing which is meant to not make you feel lonely, a family. But I think there is a deep isolation in people. I think you can have 20 kids and you can get married four times, or you can be part of a great massive chosen family of wonderful club kids or whatever it is. And there will be moments when you will feel this isolation. I think it's existential. I think it's a feeling of being lost in the world. Sometimes I think people are super frightened of it and anything to avoid feeling it. The phone is obviously one of the great comforts in that moment. You can pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. And I use, I would say, books in exactly that way. My family will often say to me, you know, even if I have a 30 second waiting period for something, the train's coming down the track, I've still got a book open. So that kind of avoidance I'm absolutely a part of, you know, And I wish I could meditate and I wish I could be present in the way that people are always recommending, particularly in New York. But I am also someone who needs constant mediation. So, yeah, I know all about that. Loneliness on the other side of it, I meditate.

[A]

I wouldn't say it solves this problem.

[B]

I assume it does. I like to think it does. And that one day I might get there.

[A]

Maybe if I were better at it. The inquiry in the book is more around the aging of Mrs. Duchet. In it, do you think aging is a different process for men from what you see in your own generation?

[B]

I mean, yeah. I mean, the difference is so monumental, it's hard to kind of. You might have actually rendered me speechless, which is kind of a hard thing, usually.

[A]

Well, you have to ask the questions in a naive, open way.

[B]

It's so fundamentally different. But these things, there's no. Again, because I don't think in essences, I'm always aware of it changing somewhat. So the physical pressure on men, boys, even in the realm of the physical, of the beautiful, has transformed from when I was young. So it may well be that they will be subject to what were traditionally coded as feminine anxieties around age. That could totally happen. Maybe it's already happening, but for me, absolutely. The loss of whatever beauty you had, whether it's small or large, has to be conceived of in some way. It has to be dealt with. Because I'm a writer, it's kind of always interesting process to watch. It's interesting to watch in myself, but it doesn't mean I don't feel it, you know? And maybe even more than that, just, I don't know, physical capacity, like, I love to run, I love to swim. Knowing that you'll never. Well, it's very unlikely. I don't like to say this in New York because I know New York has a very permanent belief that you can get faster forever. But watching these things slow down and it's strange, but I am trying to find the beauty in it as far as I can find it. And I think it's only recently that if you said to me, do you want to be 27 again? I think, on balance, I think I would say no, but that's very recent.

[A]

What about in terms of loneliness? I very much take your point in terms of the physical expectations. And you have an amazing passage in the book about the way mirrors operate on a time delay for women.

[B]

Oh, yeah. It's wild.

[A]

Always telling you how much. How beautiful you were five years ago.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Making you realize that.

[B]

I cannot believe. Yeah, sorry, go on.

[A]

But the loneliness I was thinking about, because one of the things that I want to say scares me about aging, but I think about with aging is how lonely many of the older men I know are in general. I find that the older women in my life are more just connected to other people. And I think that had to do with generational things. I think it a lot has to do with childcare, how much you did of it when you were young. So there's how much you can do when you are older. And that also decides the kinds of relationships you'll have with your grandkids or other children around you. But there is something that. It seems to me the scourge of aging for men is also a kind of deep loneliness that there also isn't much in the way of. I don't want to say sympathy for, but ways to talk about it just sort of happens and you bear it.

[B]

I have always felt sorry for men. The lack of social networks, the, you know, when you have small children, the kind of men who don't look after their small children or maybe don't get the opportunity to. That also does happen. Or never know what it is to walk into a playground and have literally no choice but to talk to a load of strangers because your child is talking to another child. It's like having a dog. But those kind of networks that traditionally women have been heavily involved with are an absolute advantage, you know, later in life. But again, there's no essential truth here, because it seems to me that younger men are having different friendships with each other, which hopefully will pay off later down the line. More intimate relationships, perhaps. But even when all those networks are in place, I still feel maybe I'm just a terrible pessimist. And also maybe I'm not good at making friends. That is a possibility. But I do often feel, sometimes, even when I'm in great company, how unbelievably difficult it is to know another human being. It's just so hard. And I think the one thing, you know, nobody ever has a good word to say about marriage, and I get it. But one thing marriage has offered me at least, is this place of intimacy where sometimes when you're out in the world, you can feel that, like a lot of your life is a performance. Even friendships that seem intimate sometimes have this performative aspect. When I retreat to the privacy of my marriage, and I don't mean marriage has to be the form in which you do this, but just any privilege, social thing that you have that is essentially private and intimate, that all goes away. And I am myself. I am absolutely myself. I'm sure Nick would say in a basically grotesque way, terribly dressed, not washed, but I'm myself, I'm free. And I think that's another way. Sometimes the discourse is a bit banal. It's got this kind of liberalized idea of freedom. So freedom is only getting to do whatever you want. And there's no conception of that. Sometimes there might be things that provide a different form of freedom that is actually quite valuable. And for me, privacy anywhere where you can go, where you're not on stage, where you're not having to keep up some kind of idea of yourself, where you can just be. That is freedom. And any form that gives you that is really valuable to me.

[A]

Do you think you've gotten better at knowing people deeply over time?

[B]

I mean, I talk too much. I've always talked too much. And to know people, you need to listen. I think I have the gift of a comic novelist, which is a problematic gift, where you. You see someone in the street and you can Guess a lot about them almost immediately, right? The paper they read, the ideas they hold, and. And you can write novels that way and you can also go through your life that way, making those smart ass guesses and being right in some broad way. But it's just not the whole story and it's not sufficient. Elizabeth Strout's In My Mind Today for some. I was just reading an interview with her. But her last novel is called Tell Me Anything. And there's a line of tell me everything maybe. And there's a line in the Fraud, which is basically the same sentence, tell me everything. And that to me is the key. Being able to sit in front of another human being and just listening, not projecting, not trying to make them agree with you, not trying to make them say what you want them to say, just listening to them. And that is so hard.

[A]

I was just thinking about that question of listening. And I do think listening is really, really hard. And I think getting other people to talk honestly is really, really hard. I'm gonna ask you to read one more passage because it connected to this one for me and was one of the ones that was a bit of a gut punch. This one's on page 395 and it's the sort of passage like Mrs. Touche to decorative.

[B]

Mrs. Touchet had been a third wheel for so much of her life. This was different. This was a desolate and almost dizzying feeling of exclusion. She felt an acute awareness of every part of her face and body, as if her own person had suddenly become estranged from her. As if she herself with the exotic item burst so suddenly onto the scene. Oh, but what nonsense. It was simply too hot. She was not as young as she once had been. Her thoughts were confused. When young, she had never understood why old women dithered so, why they led conversations down dead ends and almost always overstayed their welcome. She did not know then what it was to have no definition in the world, no role, and no reason to be no longer even decorative.

[A]

A lot of the book is about forms of exclusion of judgment that I think we recognize pretty well. That feel like they have a sort of a political valence. I sort of in many cases knew what sort of conversation to put them in. And towards the end of the book you begin talking about the sort of exclusion of aging and the way that it leads to a psychic feeling of being lost in the world. And we don't have good, not just politics for that, but language for that. I think, because for young people we fear it. It's like, to look at it too closely in the face is to admit it will come for you, too. But I'm curious just to hear you say a little bit more about that. That idea of losing definition and losing then the ability to be included, to be on the inside of something rather than the outside of it.

[B]

That paragraph is one of my favorite paragraphs, so thank you for choosing it. It's partly because what's happening there is that Mrs. Touchet, as a white lady, is for the first time in her life in a social situation with only black people, and she experiences herself as the exotic person. And I know from talking to white people that this sometimes happens, right? If they go to China or if they go to West Africa, they suddenly, for the first time in their lives, are like, oh, I'm the other in this context, suddenly. And I think that feeling is so interesting. Like, experientially, you need to hold onto it and know it and track all the feelings that it brings up in you. What I think about those kind of binary debates and arguments, black, white, young, old. When it comes to black and white, it makes complete sense to me because a black person is not in their lifetime going to become a white person, a white person not going to become a black person. There's this gap of experience, history, sometimes social power, all of those things. So it makes sense as a political dialectic. Old, young is crazy. It's crazy. The kind of discourse, a violent discourse that goes between old and young people is one of the most delusional things in contemporary discourse. You are literally fighting the person you're about to become. You're covering in contempt when you say, okay, boomer, or whatever it is. Do you not imagine that there will be a phrase for you very, very soon? It's such a strange war to begin because you're about to enter it as the victim of it, like, so soon, like, sooner than you can even begin to imagine.

[A]

I think you're totally right that the discourse of age has gotten very weird. And I also notice it in the other direction. I mean, I'm like, the most elder millennial, basically. I'm a very elder millennial. And one thing I find so funny about my own generation and. Or at least it's online discourse, I should say, is this desperation to be liked by the younger generations, right? You get all these, oh, God, they.

[B]

Hate you so much. It's so embarrassing.

[A]

And they should. Sometimes I'll see these articles going on. It's like, you're not supposed to use a crying face emoji anymore. Like, Gen Z doesn't do that. They use a tombstone. It's like, I'm not. They're supposed to have different things than me.

[B]

It's so important. Leave them alone.

[A]

We're not supposed to be the same. Leave them alike. They need to be able to create their own space. But there is this something about online discourse, and maybe it's a fear of the, okay, boomer thing happening, but made, I would say, specifically millennials gave them this sort of, like, panting desire for acceptance of, like, younger generations, which I felt was like, are we this? Are we this fragile and insecure?

[B]

But to be fair to them, I think it's been the same for every generation since the war. You know, once you get this level of mediation, youth is a premium, and everybody who becomes young, comes into their youth, thinks they're doing it in the ultimate way. I totally believe that Gen X thought, oh, well, this is it. This is how you be young. And we've solved it. Like, what is wrong with those sentimental 68. Peace and love. Like, we know what we're doing. Problem of men and women is solved. We're down. Like, we're done here. We absolutely believe that. And the millennials absolutely believe they had solved sex. Everything. They've solved everything. And I'm raising two kids of the younger generation. And I mean, you know, it's been widely reported everywhere. But, yes, the Generation Z find the millennials literally excruciating, even perhaps more excruciating than they find us, which is amazing. But to me, it doesn't have to be this kind of violent battle. Like, the thing I'm so moved by is my generation, because they're my time cohorts. They're my people. Like, I love everybody else, and good luck to you, But I'm talking when I'm writing foremost to the people I came up with when going through this life thing together. And I'm like, well, how you doing? This is how I'm doing. How's this striking you? This is how I'm talking to them, and I'm delighted if anyone younger or older listens in, but I am explicitly talking to my people. And those are the people who came through these years with me. They're meaningful to me.

[A]

And then always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

[B]

Well, right now I'm reading the Director, which is by my Austrian friend Daniel Kilman. It's a wonderful book about the filmmaker WG Pabst, who went back to Germany in the middle of the War and made movies all the way through the war. It's very like the Fraud. Like, he read the Fraud first because I hadn't read his in translation yet. And it's. And he said these books are the same. And reading it, I realized they are the same. They're about complicity and the complicity of art, particularly in horror, in his case the Holocaust, in my case, slavery. And it's also funny. And it's just a brilliant book. So I would recommend that I am reading another friend's book, Adam Schatz, on Fanon, who was the radical socialist psychiatrist. And that's a really, really great book about Fanon. I'm only halfway through, but it kind of rescues him from various, like, people who have claimed him or factions and kind of gives you the whole man, like the hero and also the human being. And I found it really moving. And the other thing I've read recently, which I keep on banging on about, is all of Virginia Woolf's diaries. There's five volumes. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but honestly, that woman is just a pleasure to be around. Like, just her mind is something I want to be around. So that's like my Twitter, I guess. From September to very recently, I'd spend an hour or so a day just hanging out, listening to her burble about whatever she was burbling about. And it was just joy.

[A]

Zadie Smith, thank you very much.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

This episode of the Israel Klein show was produced by Andy Galvin. Fact Checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amin Sahota and Afim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Pitting audio is Annie Roy Strasser.

[B]

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