Zadie Smith is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer who was born in England and currently resides in New York City. She has taught Creative Writing at New York University since 2010. The recipient of numerous awards, Smith’s writing takes on complex and deeply ingrained issues with precision, humor, and grace. Daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, Smith changed her name from Sadie to Zadie at the age of fourteen. She possessed many talents growing up, from jazz singing to acting. While attending Cambridge University, she settled on literature as her main pursuit. After publishing short stories in her university’s literary magazine, she was noticed by publishers; soon Smith found a literary agent to help publish her first novel, White Teeth, which came out in 2000. This novel was an immediate best-seller and won many awards, including the Guardian First Book Award. Its wide-reaching narrative spans centuries and generations, tracing the families of two friends as they navigate the challenges of family, race, culture, and the wider world, with the daughter of one family serving as a central character. It is known for its intricately woven storyline and the humorous yet unflinching manner with which it explores social, racial and cultural issues. 

In addition to her essays, Smith is well known for her short stories, which have been published in magazines such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many of her stories display a unique blend of metaphor and immediacy, balancing a playful sense of humor with fresh insights on current issues. In her story, “Now More Than Ever, “ she plays with the idea of social justice in a society obsessed with being in the right and willing to isolate their peers to avoid finding themselves on the wrong side of justice. It’s an interesting take on “call-out” culture, a phrase used to describe the trend of singling out wrongdoers publicly, often with the added aim of bringing positive attenion to oneself. In the story, the narrator replies to a student who asks her why she uses metaphor to express her beliefs about important social issues: why not just write about them directly, instead of hiding behind a literary device? The narrator responds by saying that certain topics are so raw they can only be presented as they are: police brutality, for example. But other topics are so low they do not deserve to be celebrated or highlighted by specific language. To me this calls to my mind the celebrity of murderers, particularly school-shooters, and how many believe the media partly responsible for their despicable fame and influence. The story shows a society obsessed with pointing the finger at others, one made up ironically of people who fail to see their own shortcomings. The narrator, at the end of the story, realizes that by befriending someone who is “beyond the pale”–a euphemism for falling out of society’s good graces–she too finds herself “canceled.” 

Recently, I was talking with an older relative of mine who was complaining about how certain songs from her past, which she insists were never perceived as harmful, have had their meanings twisted by a modern mindset bent on finding fault, obsessed with sniffing out and parading around every minor problematic detail. I tried to explain that acknowledging what was harmful about the past comes with the choice of how to react to it. In her story, Smith writes of the narrator’s realization that “the news was (is?) that the past is now also the present.” We could take this to mean that we should remember the past while filtering it through new eyes; that the past is a component and cause of the present, and thus directly reflected in it; even that the present is ephemeral and instantly passes us by. One wonders, then, if the past is subject to change as the present evolves—and if the present is molded as our interpretation of the past changes. Smith opens up these questions and more in her writing, aiming to show us that no person is without guilt, that we all do what we need to survive. However, this doesn’t mean we are released of the need of trying to be good.