Sometimes you stumble across a line in a book and think, “Yeah, that’s exactly how that feels.” I had that moment reading the introduction to Zadie Smith’s 2018 book of essays,
“Feel Free.” She’s talking about the political stakes of that period — Brexit in Britain, Donald Trump here — and the way you could feel it changing people.
She writes: “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 a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.”
What Smith is describing felt so familiar. I see it so often in myself and people around me. And yet you rarely hear it talked about — that moment when politics feels like it demands we put aside our internal conflict, our uncertainty, and solidify ourselves into what the cause or the moment needs us to be, as if curiosity were a luxury or a decadence suited only to peacetime.
Smith is a novelist and an essayist; she’s been one of my favorite writers for years. If you’ve not read her back catalog, “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 to be so resonant with 21st-century America. But Smith has said Trump and populism were front of mind when she wrote it, and you can feel it in the book, as she explores the Tichborne trial, based on a real, very strange case in which a man who seemed to be a clear fraud claimed to be the heir to a storied estate, and built a huge movement of passionate supporters who utterly flummoxed the day’s elites. Smith has moved to another time and another place to protect the ability to have that amorphous self, to explore something current from more perspectives than the current moment sometimes allows.
Smith joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of part of our conversation. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.” Please note this episode contains strong language.
In the introduction to 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, that experience, that dynamic.
I think, 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 think people are thrown into life. 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 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.
Something you went on to say in that introduction was that you can’t fight fire with air. I took you to be saying, at least in part, that internal conflict is at times a luxury — or if not a luxury, something that at certain moments you’re forced to give up in order to achieve a goal. We’re in an election year. And I do find there are times when people are very comfortable with you both having and expressing your doubt, your conflict, on the one hand, and then there are times when both internally and externally people view that as a kind of decadence.
That’s absolutely the case. 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. 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.
Tell me about the Tichborne case, which is at the heart of your book “The Fraud.” How did you get interested in that?
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 left-wing populism.
The first time I started thinking about him properly was during the O.J. Simpson trial, when I was young. That was, it seemed to me, another example of a case that you know, fundamentally, is not true. No spoilers to the younger public there, but in my view, O.J. 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 in the O.J. case, even though the subject of it was a lie, there was a larger truth being told in that case, which was that the courts were institutionally racist, that 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 would ever want justice to come about, but it’s a recognition sometimes that when all other outlets seem blocked, populism rears its head
In 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.
It’s such a silly story. But a man called Roger Tichborne, who 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 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 Tichbornes, who obviously didn’t want to give their property and money and lands to a stranger, and Orton and Bogle who steadfastly insisted they were telling the truth.
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.
You write, “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 the sort of ring of recognition in a lot of both my reporting and just moments in my own life, where the dry facts seem somehow to pale before the emotional structure of a thing.
Right, but I’m also not willing to submit entirely to feeling. My ideal — and this is not perfectly practiced in my own life and certainly not perfectly practiced in my work — but it’s that Aristotelian idea: That you have logic, you have pathos. These things work together. And you have your will. You have to combine these things. 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.
That made me think of an experience I had some years ago. There was a rise of an online intellectual movement known as the rationalists. I think it was Ben Shapiro who was very associated with the line “facts don’t care about your feelings.” During that period, I remember trying to think a lot about emotion and politics, and recognizing particularly that emotion does point toward things. It doesn’t tell you what is true. But if people feel strongly about something, there is a deep intelligence in people’s emotional reactions. And if you keep seeing it point in a direction, I feel like you should bring curiosity to that.
“The facts don’t care about my feelings” is a truly fascistic sentence, 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, I really notice it when people are arguing about transgender issues or very intimate and complicated personal matters. Sometimes people will argue 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. 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 murmurings, some 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 that doesn’t submit to a mathematical program.
Fights over identity have been a big part of our politics in recent years. This all gets called “wokeness,” although I don’t love that term. But what has always shocked me, having lived through this period, is how powerfully that moral wave hit between, I guess I would call it 2015 and 2021, and then in the last couple of years, how rapidly it feels like it is ebbed. And I’m not saying that it hasn’t left quite a lot behind or changed us. But there has been this whiplash for me. And I’m curious what your experience of it has been.
So much of it happens at a meta level, in newspapers and think pieces. I can’t honestly say in my classrooms — I just don’t even recognize the category. If I’m teaching “Pride and Prejudice,” it’s not a battle between woke thought and unwoke thought. I’m only interested in truth.
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 that what you’re meant to do in response to it is move further and further to the right in response to this boogeyman.
I’m not asking you to take the bait of choosing a side. I don’t think this was happening just at newspapers. I think this was a genuine social movement and a genuine shift in ideologies and things people believed. One thing educators have told me is that they feel like things shifted a lot in young people for a while, and now they’re maybe shifting back. What of that ideological wave do you think has held? What is now just common wisdom? And what has left?
The thing which is satisfying for me was the first and initial hierarchical reversal. It’s something that I dreamed 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.
You were talking 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 —
But 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.
The lesson from that, for me, is that straitjacket is something that nobody really wants. Sometimes it’s needed politically. We absolutely need to gather in our identity groups 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.
You’ve written about how very stable notions of identity can create a kind of “containment” around people. What do you mean by that?
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. They’re 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 Zadie, 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.
There’s some connection here with language. And I was always struck by how many fights that could have been materialist ended up being about language. Oftentimes the demands were about how we spoke about each other — the backlash ended up being termed “free speech,” which I always thought was not accurate, but nevertheless. I guess the question is, what do you win and what do you lose when you wrap yourself in language? I heard you say on a podcast that it’s possible “there are wild freedoms — sexual, personal, existential — that come with having no language at all for what you feel and what you do.” And it struck me that you maybe have some ambivalence there.
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’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 it’s wildly inefficient. It’s not good enough. I’m always happy that people use the “right” words around me and others. But it’s nothing compared to decent wages, decent housing, health care, human rights. So it’s not that I think it’s worthless. But to have it so wildly overburdened with meaning and power is a kind of trick that was played on us.
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?
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 issue of the day is what to be interested in. The news has always played some element in doing that, but this is total. And it’s not even, to me, the content of those thoughts. There’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics expressed on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me, it’s the structure — that 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 — that 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.
And that’s OK. 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 talking to each other, hanging 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 couple of years back, I got very into reading Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, media theorists from the rise of the television age. And the things they were saying television would do to us and do to our culture are right. There’s 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 like here we literally are, with a reality television superstar running for president, having already been president once before. For better and for worse, 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. If you went back and told them what happened, I think they would look at you with their mouth agape.
I think Neil Postman is a prophet and a genius, and I give that book to everybody all the time. It blew my mind.
It’s about capture. 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. When I get on a train in the morning and I look down a carriage, there isn’t a single person who is looking up from their phones. So that was my question: What happens when it’s everybody? And it’s not just a medium, but it’s also the way you work, live. What happens when you enter into the medium and that’s how your life is structured?
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 L.O.L.s and pleasure and there’s been delight all over it, just as there was delight in television for me. But the political consequences are clear. It’s so boring to say, but just the effect on people’s ability to attend has been radical.
You don’t have a smartphone, which is a potent choice. What modification of yourself are you trying to protect against if you did?
It’s sometimes funny to think about. I mean, I cannot imagine.
Have you ever had one?
I had one for three months in 2008, when it came out. 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 life to other people in some other form than it exists every day, like a media presentation — I cannot imagine what my mind would be, what my books would be, what my relationships would be, what my relationship with my children would be.
Apart from anything else, I am an addictive person, so I would be on that thing nine hours a day. Easy. I watched TV nine hours a day throughout the whole of the ’80s. I would be what my kids call brain rot.
There’s the modification of the self but also the modification of the way you see others. One reason I’ve left a lot of platforms is I realized they were changing how I felt about other people. I was being exposed to parts of them that I didn’t like.
I think it’s important to be a bit more forgiving when they’re being those people online. I see that too — people I love, I see them online, and I’m like, who are you? This is not the same person I hang out with. 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, and make it more about anger — anger toward the people who created this.
In an older essay about the film “The Social Network,” you wrote: “I am 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.” That really connected for me, that idea of mystery as 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.
Technologies aren’t neutral. They are a philosophy and an ideology. 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 just don’t believe that. But I also still dream of a peer-to-peer internet. And there are interesting clues as to the parts of the internet which are genuinely joyful and fantastic, of how we might go forward.
You’re saying that all these are behavioral modification devices and they’re also aspiration devices. They’re telling you what you should value in life. And I think one of the things you’re saying is, you’d value having a lot of connections. You write in “The Fraud” about something that happens in the character Eliza’s thinking at the end of her life: “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’m curious where that thought came from for you, and how you’ve experienced it.
It’s one of the most personal lines in the book. I believe it. I think that’s what a radical humanism means. It means you don’t ever dismiss people. You don’t ever 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, every person is a world.
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, but friendship is something else.
Even today, 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. These bonds — 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.
How do you get to that kind of connection with another person? 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. I still love a party. But I’ve just become more aware of how difficult it is to have genuine relations with other humans. It’s really hard, and it takes time.
“The Fraud” felt to me like a book about aging as much as it was about anything else. One of the things you’re tracking is this relationship between aging and loneliness, which is deeply true for a lot of people. I was wondering if you could read a passage from the book.
“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 had ever known. A consequence, perhaps, of what old women called ‘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!”
Tell me why the connection for you in that sequence, that steeplechase, was with loneliness.
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. 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. And I use 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.
The inquiry in the book is more around the aging of Mrs. Touchet. Do you think aging is a different process for men from what you see in your own generation?
It’s so fundamentally different. I don’t think in essences, so I’m always aware of it changing somewhat. 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. And because I’m a writer, it’s interesting to watch in myself. But it doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.
And even more than that, physical capacity. I love to run. I love to swim. 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, it’s strange.
But I am trying to find the beauty in it, as far as I can find it. 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.
It seems to me the scourge of aging for men is also a kind of deep loneliness — and that there aren’t many ways to talk about it. It just sort of happens and you bear it.
I have always felt sorry for men. The lack of social networks. 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 — 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. But those kinds of networks that traditionally women have been heavily involved with are an absolute advantage 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.
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 like a lot of 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 social thing that you have that is essentially private and intimate — that all goes away. I am myself. I am absolutely 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 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 onstage, 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.
Do you think you’ve gotten better at knowing people deeply over time?
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 see someone in the street and you can guess a lot about them almost immediately. The paper they read, the ideas they hold. And you can write novels that way. And you can also go through your life that way, making those smartass 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. I was just reading an interview with her. Her last novel is called “Tell Me Everything.” 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.
I’m going to 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.
“Mrs. Touchet had been a third wheel for so much of her life. This was different. This was a desolate, an 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 were 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.”
Toward the end of the book, you begin talking about the 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, but language for that. Because for young people, we fear it. To look at it too closely in the face is to admit it will come for you too. I’m curious just to hear you say a little bit more about that idea of losing definition and losing the ability to be included, to be on the inside of something rather than the outside of it.
That paragraph is one of my favorite paragraphs. 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 is 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. The kind of 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, “OK, boomer” or whatever it is, do you not imagine that there will be a phrase for you very soon? It’s such a strange war to begin because you’re about to enter it as the victim of it so soon, like sooner than you can even begin to imagine.
I think you’re totally right that the discourse of age has gotten very weird. And I also noticed it in the other direction. I’m a very elder millennial, and one thing I find so funny about my own generation — or at least its online discourse, I should say — is this desperation to be liked by the younger generations.
Oh god, they hate you so much. It’s so embarrassing.
And they should. [Laughs] Sometimes I’ll see these articles — like, “You’re not supposed to use a crying face emoji anymore. Gen Z doesn’t do that. They use a tombstone.” It’s like, they’re supposed to have different things than me. We’re not supposed to be the same. But there’s something about online discourse — and maybe it’s a fear of the “OK boomer” thing happening — that gave millennials this panting desire for acceptance by younger generations. Like, are we this fragile and insecure?
But to be fair to them, it’s been the same for every generation since the war. Youth is a premium and everybody who becomes young and 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. What is wrong with those sentimental ’68 peace and love — we know what we’re doing. The problem of men and women is solved. We’re done here.
And the millennials absolutely believed they had solved sex — that they’ve solved everything. And I’m raising two kids of the younger generation, and 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. The thing I’m so moved by is my generation, because they’re my time cohorts. They’re my people. 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. We’re going through this life thing together, and I’m like, well, how are you doing? This is how I’m doing. How’s this striking you?
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.
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