A to Zadie

She has won prestigious literary awards such as the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award, been shortlisted for the Man Booker, but almost all profiles of Zadie Smith sooner or later breathlessly describe her looks.
Smith tries to shrug it off with a weary, rolling-her-eyes nonchalance. "I used to be 280 pounds. I am sure I will be again," she says."It's irrelevant to me."
But she admits it was not until she went on tour for her first novel, White Teeth, that she even realised she was "exotic". Growing up in working class London, daughter of a "radical feminist" Caribbean mother and white father, she was surrounded by people who looked just like her.
Her classmates were "one third white, one third black and one third brown". It was only when she started going to publishing parties that she suddenly "found herself surrounded by only white people and being called exotic".
Her latest book On Beauty, goes to the heart of that whiteness. Inspired in part by her year at Harvard as a Radcliffe fellow, it cuts through race and cultural politics in a very liberal but very white small New England university town.
Here Kiki, the Caribbean wife of the old-school liberal white British professor Howard never meets another person who looks like her except the Haitian woman who cleans their house. Smith chuckles and says that the book is a reflection of her own ambivalence about academia.
"I love academic life and wanted to be an academic," she confesses. "But I feel suffocated when I am in it." At Harvard she says she sometimes wanted to "tear off my clothes and run screaming through the streets". At the same time the intellectual vigour kept her engaged.
The problem she says is the benevolent liberal mindset. At its core it still thinks "everyone wants to be part of the white mainstream. But if you are with brown people you realise they actually want to be far away from that".
It's a realisation that is slowly dawning on a post-9/11 world. The huddled brown masses are not just knocking at the doors of the West, wanting their lives. They are creating alternative worlds, sometimes dangerous ones.
Long before there were subway bombers in Britain, Smith had written about the rise of fundamentalism among youth growing up in Britain in White Teeth.
She says she went to school with some of those kids who disappeared to Afghanistan and Pakistan for six months. "Much of White Teeth I think was the fictional version of my liberal education, full of all the fashionable arguments of the day," she says. "But I am proud of those bits about those kids."
Now she finds herself much more circumspect about labels and isms and fears that in her old age she could find herself becoming one of "those really bad-tempered right wing Catholic Caribbeans. It's totally possible".
So while many writers of her generation try to make sense of the changing world and the fate of multiculturalism, Zadie Smith says she sticks to the things that never cease to fascinate her— relationships, marriage, families.
Unlike writers who want to write about love and relationships which are all about choices, Smith is interested in "lack of choice and that is what family is. You are born into a household of freaks and have to get along".
As for marriage, she says "the miracle of men marrying women supersedes black marrying white. Minor skin difference is nothing compared to committing yourself for life to someone of a different gender".
She, herself is married to writer Nick Laird, whom she met at college when she was eighteen and describes as a "severe first reader" of her work.
But unlike many writers who kept their married lives in the closet away from the "work", ("imagine the poor children of those marriages") she thinks being married actually has deepened her work for it's an "education of the emotions and that's very good for writers".
In On Beauty though a long-standing marriage, a decades-long relationship suddenly unravels because of an affair as if whether you are liberal or conservative, the unforgivable sin is infidelity. "My husband says I always write to protect myself from real experience," she sighs.
"But the idea of being faithful—sexually, emotionally and spiritually—is amazingly profound. Marriage, as we understand it, is just a cheap tin version and it usually fails. But the idea behind it is incredibly beautiful."
Well, there you go. Zadie Smith just can't get away from that word—"beautiful". She laughs and says, "Very soon I will be old and ugly but I will still be writing. I write with my brain, not my face."