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Intimations

Six Essays

Read by Zadie Smith
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“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

“While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential . . .’” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020

“Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air

A New York Times Bestseller

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time.

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next.

The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.

Peonies

 

Just before I left New York, I found myself in an unexpected position: clinging to the bars of the Jefferson Market Garden, looking in. A moment before, I'd been on the run as usual, intending to exploit two minutes of time I'd carved out of the forty-five-minute increments into which, back then, I divided my days. Each block of time packed tight and leveled off precisely, like a child prepping a sandcastle. Two "free" minutes meant a macchiato. (In an ideal, cashless world, if nobody spoke to me.) In those days, the sharp end of my spade was primed against chatty baristas, overly friendly mothers, needy students, curious readers-anyone I considered a threat to the program. Oh, I was very well defended. But this was a sneak attack . . . by horticulture. Tulips. Springing up in a little city garden, from a triangle of soil where three roads met. Not a very sophisticated flower-a child could draw it-and these were garish: pink with orange highlights. Even as I was peering in at them I wished they were peonies.

 

City born, city bred, I wasn't aware of having an especially keen interest in flowers-at least no interest strong enough to forgo coffee. But my fingers were curled around those iron bars. I wasn't letting go. Nor was I alone. Either side of Jefferson stood two other women, both around my age, staring through the

bars. The day was cold, bright, blue. Not a cloud between the World Trade and the old seven-digit painted phone number for Bigelow's. We all had somewhere to be. But some powerful instinct had drawn us here,

and the predatory way we were ogling those tulips put me in mind of Nabokov, describing the supposed genesis of Lolita: "As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." I've always been interested in that quote-without believing a word of it. (Something inspired Lolita. I'm certain no primates were involved.) The scientist offers the piece of charcoal expecting or hoping for a transcendent revelation about this ape, but the revelation turns out to be one of contingency, of a certain set of circumstances-of things as they happen to be. The ape is caged in by its nature, by its instincts, and by its circumstance. (Which of these takes the primary role is for zoologists to debate.) So it goes. I didn't need a Freudian to tell me that three middle-aged women, teetering at the brink of peri-menopause, had been drawn to a gaudy symbol of fertility and renewal in the middle of a barren concrete metropolis . . . and, indeed, when we three spotted each other there were shamefaced smiles all round. But in my case the shame was not what it would have once been, back in the day-back when I first read Lolita, as a young woman. At that time, the cage of my circumstance, in my mind, was my gender. Not its actuality-I

liked my body well enough. What I didn't like was what I thought it signified: that I was tied to my "nature," to my animal body-to the whole simian realm of instinct-and far more elementally so than, say, my brothers. I had "cycles." They did not. I was to pay attention to "clocks." They needn't. There were special words for me, lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence. I might become a spinster. I might become a crone. I might be a babe or a MILF or "childless." My brothers, no matter what else might befall them, would remain men. And in the end of it all, if I was lucky, I would become that most piteous of things, an old lady, whom I already understood was a figure everybody felt free to patronize, even children.

 

"(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"-I used to listen to that song and try to imagine its counterpart. You could make someone feel like a "real" man-no doubt its own kind of cage-but never a natural one. A man was a man was a man.

He bent nature to his will. He did not submit to it, except in death. Submission to nature was to be my realm, but I wanted no part of that, and so I would refuse to keep any track whatsoever of my menstrual cycle, preferring to cry on Monday and find out the (supposed) reason for my tears on Tuesday. Yes, much better this than to properly prepare for a blue Monday or believe it in any way inevitable. My moods were my own. They had no reflection in nature. I refused to countenance the idea that anything about me might have a cyclic, monthly motion. And if I had children one day, I would have them "on my own timeline," irrespective of how the bells were tolling on all those dreaded clocks in the women's magazines. Of "broodiness" I would hear nothing: I was not a hen. And if, when I was in my twenties, any bold Freudian had dared to suggest that my apartment-filled as it was with furry cushions and furry rugs and furry bolsters, furry throws and furry footstools-in any sense implied a sublimated desire for animal company, or that I was subconsciously feathering my nest in expectation of new life, well, I would have shown that impertinent Freudian the door. I was a woman, but not that kind of woman. "Internalized misogyny," I suppose they'd call all of the above now. I have no better term. But at the hot core of it there was an obsession with control, common among my people (writers).

 

Writing is routinely described as "creative"-this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I've never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience-mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious-rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance. Which can be a handsome, and sometimes even a useful, activity-on the page. But, in my experience, turns out to be a pretty hopeless practice for real life. In real life, submission and resistance have no predetermined shape. Even more befuddling, to a writer like me, is that the values normally associated with those words on a page-submission, negative; resistance, positive-cannot be relied upon out in the field. Sometimes it is right to submit to love, and wrong to resist affection. Sometimes it is wrong to resist disease and right to submit to the inevitable. And vice versa. Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and-if you experience enough of them-will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch your breath . . . it just keeps coming at you.

 

Now, more than ever-to use a popular narrative mold-I know that. It happens that the day I was drawn to those tulips was a few days before the global humbling began-one that arrived equally for men and women both-but in my own shallow puddle of experience it's these dumb tulips that served as a tiny, early preview of what I now feel every moment of every day, that is, the complex and ambivalent nature of "submission." If only it were possible to simply state these feelings without insisting on them, without making an argument or a dogma out of them! This type of woman and that type of woman-just so many life rings thrown to a drowning Heraclitus. Each one a different form of fiction. Is it possible to be as flexible on the page-as shamelessly self-forgiving and ever changing-as we are in life? We can't seem to find the way. Instead, to write is to swim in an ocean of hypocrisies, moment by moment. We know we are deluded, but the strange thing is that this delusion is necessary, if only temporarily, to create the mold in the first place, the one into which you pour everything you can't give shape to in life. This is all better said by Kierkegaard, in a parable:

 

"The Dog Kennel by the Palace"

 

To what shall we compare the relation between the thinker's system and his actual existence?

 

A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history etc.-and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter's lodge. If one were to take the liberty of calling his attention to this by a single word, he would be offended. For he has no fear of being under a delusion, if only he can get the system completed . . . by means of the delusion.

 

They were tulips. I wanted them to be peonies. In my story, they are, they will be, they were and will forever be peonies-for, when I am writing, space and time itself bend to my will! Through the medium of tenses! In real life, the dog kennel is where I make my home. When I was a kid, I thought I'd rather be a brain in a jar than a "natural woman." I have turned out to be some odd combination of both, from moment to moment, and with no control over when and where or why those moments occur. Whether the "natural" part of my womanhood is an essential biological fact or an expression (as de Beauvoir argued) of an acculturation so deep it looks very much like roots growing out of the bulb, at this point in my life I confess I don't know and I don't care. I am not a scientist or a sociologist. I'm a novelist. Who can admit, late in the day, during this strange and overwhelming season of death that collides, outside my window, with the emergence of dandelions, that spring sometimes rises in me, too, and the moon may occasionally tug at my moods, and if I hear a strange baby cry some part of me still leaps to attention-to submission. And once in a while a vulgar strain of spring flower will circumvent a long-trained and self-consciously strict downtown aesthetic. Just before an unprecedented April arrives and makes a nonsense of every line.

“Lean and powerful—the collection is less than 100 pages—like pencil sketches that capture a scene or a figure in a few brief masterly strokes. When we do look back on this period, these are among the essays we will turn to . . . These essays explore, wonder, argue and prod. The pleasure of reading them lies not in receiving experience in a finished mold, but in joining Ms. Smith as she takes our shared bewilderment and begins to pour.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

“While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential’—as well as on banana bread, pedicures, and tulips.” O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020
 
“There are six essays in [Smith’s] new collection, which capture the pandemic moment we’ve been living in with a clarity that only Zadie Smith could unearth in the middle of a pandemic. Even when she’s pushing you to see your own complicity, it’s comforting to have her voice helping you make sense of the world.” GOOP

“Zadie Smith has always been at least as phenomenal an essayist as she is a novelist. This slim, flash-published volume of reflections on life under quarantine rides the waves of dread, loneliness, community, loss and self-refection we all went through—and still are.” —Los Angeles Times 

“Smith’s slim volume is a balm during an anxious year. We have learned the meaning of essential, and Smith’s prose is correspondingly stripped down. Clear. Precise. Orderly . . . An indispensable snapshot of a time when we were all scrambling to put our thoughts in order. I for one, am thankful to Smith for offering us hers.” —Tracey Baptiste, Washington Post
 
“A slender and moving compendium . . . [W]hat unites these quietly cerebral vignettes is a pervasive interest in and empathy for the lives of others.” —Matthew Adams, Seattle Times

“One of our finest living writers has already produced what may be the first definitive chronicle of an era she dubs ‘the global humbling.’ In a series of essays both personal and political, Zadie Smith turns her sharp gaze to everything from a bouquet of peonies to the death of George Floyd, with disarming insight into her own shifting perspectives as woman, writer, mother, and citizen of the world. ‘The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art,’ she suggests at one point, too modestly; we may not have asked for Intimations, but this slim, resonant collection still feels like a gift.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
 
Intimations is the third and slimmest of [Smith’s] essay collections, at 100 pages, but its psychic heft is substantial. In six essays that feel as intimate as a long walk with an old friend, Smith takes on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including police brutality and economic injustice. The book is grounded in inquiry far more often than in certainty, however, and the collection is one that probes, exploring everything from the relationship between privilege and suffering to the nature of isolation and what it means to be confined with the people we love.” —Ericka Taylor, NPR.org
 
“[Smith] is a spectacular essayist . . . who has written searchingly about race and culture, identity and place and family. Such issues continue to infuse the present, although their salience is complicated by the ways the virus has eroded collective trust . . . This is the essential job of the essayist: to explore not our innocence but our complicity. I want to say this works because Smith doesn’t take herself too seriously, but that’s not accurate. More to the point, she is willing to expose the tangle of feelings the pandemic has provoked. And this may seem a small thing, but it’s essential: I never doubt her voice on the page.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
 
Intimations feels less like a precise attempt to document the COVID-19 era than a more abstract meditation on time: who is given it, who has it taken from them, and what its sudden presence or absence can lead to. 'Time is how you spend your love,' Smith wrote in her 2005 novel On Beauty—quoting a poem by her own husband, Nick Laird—and Intimations functions impressively as a document of the mixed blessing of time as well as a searing excoriation of a society that has always apportioned it unevenly.” —Emma Specter, Vogue.com
 
“These days, I find in [Smith’s] work what I once found in Paley and Baldwina clarifying lucidity wedded to big-hearted moral awareness. These virtues shine through her powerful new collection, Intimations: Six Essays, which she began at the onset of the pandemic and finished shortly after Floyd's killing. Although only 100 pages, it made me think more than most books five times that length. There's something worth quoting on virtually every page . . . Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air
 
Intimations, [Smith’s] slender new collection (less than 100 pages) of ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness. This cast of mind doesn’t mean that Smith avoids moral stances. In Intimations, she speaks clearly and forcefully about the murder of George Floyd and the legacy of slavery and the systemic sins revealed by Covid-19 . . . But despite these jabs, Smith remains unmistakably noncombative. This spirit appears born not of a fear of confrontation but a genuine perplexity (of a searching, brilliant kind) at the nature of experience and people, including herself. . . . Smith’s gifts as a novelist animate her essays . . . In Zadie Smith’s universe—meaning, for my money, the one we’re all living in—complexity is king.” —John Williams, The New York Times
 
“Slender, solacing . . . To read Zadie Smith is to recognize how few writers seem to genuinely love human beings the way she does, with such infinite curiosity and attention, even when they are behaving monstrously. Or, for that matter, how few are able to do justice to what, for want of a better term, we’ll call common decency.” —Laura Miller, Slate 

“What a treat, then, that Zadie Smith has presented us with this jewel of a book, six essays all written at the beginning of lockdown, each generous, reliably insightful explorations of things like suffering, productivity, and love; all reminders of the kind of art people are capable of, even in the most dire of times.” Refinery29
 
“Incisive and insightful . . . Smith is at her perceptive and precise best in this slim but thematically weighty volume of personal and civil reckoning.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There will be innumerable books to come about life in the pandemic, but Zadie Smith is who we want to read right now . . . This will be essential reading for us now, and when we look back in the years to come.” —Town & Country, Best Books to Read This July

“[Smith] writes with the immediacy of a house on fire, illuminating the tumult we are collectively experiencing . . . A sharply honed, obsidian collection glowing with Smith’s insights and eloquence.” Booklist

“An incisive collection . . . In just under 100 pages, Smith intimately captures the profundity of our current historical moment. Quietly powerful, deftly crafted essays bear witness to the contagion of suffering.” Kirkus (starred review)
© Ben Bailey-Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives. View titles by Zadie Smith

About

“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

“While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential . . .’” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020

“Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air

A New York Times Bestseller

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time.

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next.

The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.

Excerpt

Peonies

 

Just before I left New York, I found myself in an unexpected position: clinging to the bars of the Jefferson Market Garden, looking in. A moment before, I'd been on the run as usual, intending to exploit two minutes of time I'd carved out of the forty-five-minute increments into which, back then, I divided my days. Each block of time packed tight and leveled off precisely, like a child prepping a sandcastle. Two "free" minutes meant a macchiato. (In an ideal, cashless world, if nobody spoke to me.) In those days, the sharp end of my spade was primed against chatty baristas, overly friendly mothers, needy students, curious readers-anyone I considered a threat to the program. Oh, I was very well defended. But this was a sneak attack . . . by horticulture. Tulips. Springing up in a little city garden, from a triangle of soil where three roads met. Not a very sophisticated flower-a child could draw it-and these were garish: pink with orange highlights. Even as I was peering in at them I wished they were peonies.

 

City born, city bred, I wasn't aware of having an especially keen interest in flowers-at least no interest strong enough to forgo coffee. But my fingers were curled around those iron bars. I wasn't letting go. Nor was I alone. Either side of Jefferson stood two other women, both around my age, staring through the

bars. The day was cold, bright, blue. Not a cloud between the World Trade and the old seven-digit painted phone number for Bigelow's. We all had somewhere to be. But some powerful instinct had drawn us here,

and the predatory way we were ogling those tulips put me in mind of Nabokov, describing the supposed genesis of Lolita: "As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." I've always been interested in that quote-without believing a word of it. (Something inspired Lolita. I'm certain no primates were involved.) The scientist offers the piece of charcoal expecting or hoping for a transcendent revelation about this ape, but the revelation turns out to be one of contingency, of a certain set of circumstances-of things as they happen to be. The ape is caged in by its nature, by its instincts, and by its circumstance. (Which of these takes the primary role is for zoologists to debate.) So it goes. I didn't need a Freudian to tell me that three middle-aged women, teetering at the brink of peri-menopause, had been drawn to a gaudy symbol of fertility and renewal in the middle of a barren concrete metropolis . . . and, indeed, when we three spotted each other there were shamefaced smiles all round. But in my case the shame was not what it would have once been, back in the day-back when I first read Lolita, as a young woman. At that time, the cage of my circumstance, in my mind, was my gender. Not its actuality-I

liked my body well enough. What I didn't like was what I thought it signified: that I was tied to my "nature," to my animal body-to the whole simian realm of instinct-and far more elementally so than, say, my brothers. I had "cycles." They did not. I was to pay attention to "clocks." They needn't. There were special words for me, lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence. I might become a spinster. I might become a crone. I might be a babe or a MILF or "childless." My brothers, no matter what else might befall them, would remain men. And in the end of it all, if I was lucky, I would become that most piteous of things, an old lady, whom I already understood was a figure everybody felt free to patronize, even children.

 

"(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"-I used to listen to that song and try to imagine its counterpart. You could make someone feel like a "real" man-no doubt its own kind of cage-but never a natural one. A man was a man was a man.

He bent nature to his will. He did not submit to it, except in death. Submission to nature was to be my realm, but I wanted no part of that, and so I would refuse to keep any track whatsoever of my menstrual cycle, preferring to cry on Monday and find out the (supposed) reason for my tears on Tuesday. Yes, much better this than to properly prepare for a blue Monday or believe it in any way inevitable. My moods were my own. They had no reflection in nature. I refused to countenance the idea that anything about me might have a cyclic, monthly motion. And if I had children one day, I would have them "on my own timeline," irrespective of how the bells were tolling on all those dreaded clocks in the women's magazines. Of "broodiness" I would hear nothing: I was not a hen. And if, when I was in my twenties, any bold Freudian had dared to suggest that my apartment-filled as it was with furry cushions and furry rugs and furry bolsters, furry throws and furry footstools-in any sense implied a sublimated desire for animal company, or that I was subconsciously feathering my nest in expectation of new life, well, I would have shown that impertinent Freudian the door. I was a woman, but not that kind of woman. "Internalized misogyny," I suppose they'd call all of the above now. I have no better term. But at the hot core of it there was an obsession with control, common among my people (writers).

 

Writing is routinely described as "creative"-this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I've never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience-mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious-rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance. Which can be a handsome, and sometimes even a useful, activity-on the page. But, in my experience, turns out to be a pretty hopeless practice for real life. In real life, submission and resistance have no predetermined shape. Even more befuddling, to a writer like me, is that the values normally associated with those words on a page-submission, negative; resistance, positive-cannot be relied upon out in the field. Sometimes it is right to submit to love, and wrong to resist affection. Sometimes it is wrong to resist disease and right to submit to the inevitable. And vice versa. Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and-if you experience enough of them-will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch your breath . . . it just keeps coming at you.

 

Now, more than ever-to use a popular narrative mold-I know that. It happens that the day I was drawn to those tulips was a few days before the global humbling began-one that arrived equally for men and women both-but in my own shallow puddle of experience it's these dumb tulips that served as a tiny, early preview of what I now feel every moment of every day, that is, the complex and ambivalent nature of "submission." If only it were possible to simply state these feelings without insisting on them, without making an argument or a dogma out of them! This type of woman and that type of woman-just so many life rings thrown to a drowning Heraclitus. Each one a different form of fiction. Is it possible to be as flexible on the page-as shamelessly self-forgiving and ever changing-as we are in life? We can't seem to find the way. Instead, to write is to swim in an ocean of hypocrisies, moment by moment. We know we are deluded, but the strange thing is that this delusion is necessary, if only temporarily, to create the mold in the first place, the one into which you pour everything you can't give shape to in life. This is all better said by Kierkegaard, in a parable:

 

"The Dog Kennel by the Palace"

 

To what shall we compare the relation between the thinker's system and his actual existence?

 

A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history etc.-and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter's lodge. If one were to take the liberty of calling his attention to this by a single word, he would be offended. For he has no fear of being under a delusion, if only he can get the system completed . . . by means of the delusion.

 

They were tulips. I wanted them to be peonies. In my story, they are, they will be, they were and will forever be peonies-for, when I am writing, space and time itself bend to my will! Through the medium of tenses! In real life, the dog kennel is where I make my home. When I was a kid, I thought I'd rather be a brain in a jar than a "natural woman." I have turned out to be some odd combination of both, from moment to moment, and with no control over when and where or why those moments occur. Whether the "natural" part of my womanhood is an essential biological fact or an expression (as de Beauvoir argued) of an acculturation so deep it looks very much like roots growing out of the bulb, at this point in my life I confess I don't know and I don't care. I am not a scientist or a sociologist. I'm a novelist. Who can admit, late in the day, during this strange and overwhelming season of death that collides, outside my window, with the emergence of dandelions, that spring sometimes rises in me, too, and the moon may occasionally tug at my moods, and if I hear a strange baby cry some part of me still leaps to attention-to submission. And once in a while a vulgar strain of spring flower will circumvent a long-trained and self-consciously strict downtown aesthetic. Just before an unprecedented April arrives and makes a nonsense of every line.

Reviews

“Lean and powerful—the collection is less than 100 pages—like pencil sketches that capture a scene or a figure in a few brief masterly strokes. When we do look back on this period, these are among the essays we will turn to . . . These essays explore, wonder, argue and prod. The pleasure of reading them lies not in receiving experience in a finished mold, but in joining Ms. Smith as she takes our shared bewilderment and begins to pour.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

“While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential’—as well as on banana bread, pedicures, and tulips.” O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020
 
“There are six essays in [Smith’s] new collection, which capture the pandemic moment we’ve been living in with a clarity that only Zadie Smith could unearth in the middle of a pandemic. Even when she’s pushing you to see your own complicity, it’s comforting to have her voice helping you make sense of the world.” GOOP

“Zadie Smith has always been at least as phenomenal an essayist as she is a novelist. This slim, flash-published volume of reflections on life under quarantine rides the waves of dread, loneliness, community, loss and self-refection we all went through—and still are.” —Los Angeles Times 

“Smith’s slim volume is a balm during an anxious year. We have learned the meaning of essential, and Smith’s prose is correspondingly stripped down. Clear. Precise. Orderly . . . An indispensable snapshot of a time when we were all scrambling to put our thoughts in order. I for one, am thankful to Smith for offering us hers.” —Tracey Baptiste, Washington Post
 
“A slender and moving compendium . . . [W]hat unites these quietly cerebral vignettes is a pervasive interest in and empathy for the lives of others.” —Matthew Adams, Seattle Times

“One of our finest living writers has already produced what may be the first definitive chronicle of an era she dubs ‘the global humbling.’ In a series of essays both personal and political, Zadie Smith turns her sharp gaze to everything from a bouquet of peonies to the death of George Floyd, with disarming insight into her own shifting perspectives as woman, writer, mother, and citizen of the world. ‘The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art,’ she suggests at one point, too modestly; we may not have asked for Intimations, but this slim, resonant collection still feels like a gift.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
 
Intimations is the third and slimmest of [Smith’s] essay collections, at 100 pages, but its psychic heft is substantial. In six essays that feel as intimate as a long walk with an old friend, Smith takes on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including police brutality and economic injustice. The book is grounded in inquiry far more often than in certainty, however, and the collection is one that probes, exploring everything from the relationship between privilege and suffering to the nature of isolation and what it means to be confined with the people we love.” —Ericka Taylor, NPR.org
 
“[Smith] is a spectacular essayist . . . who has written searchingly about race and culture, identity and place and family. Such issues continue to infuse the present, although their salience is complicated by the ways the virus has eroded collective trust . . . This is the essential job of the essayist: to explore not our innocence but our complicity. I want to say this works because Smith doesn’t take herself too seriously, but that’s not accurate. More to the point, she is willing to expose the tangle of feelings the pandemic has provoked. And this may seem a small thing, but it’s essential: I never doubt her voice on the page.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
 
Intimations feels less like a precise attempt to document the COVID-19 era than a more abstract meditation on time: who is given it, who has it taken from them, and what its sudden presence or absence can lead to. 'Time is how you spend your love,' Smith wrote in her 2005 novel On Beauty—quoting a poem by her own husband, Nick Laird—and Intimations functions impressively as a document of the mixed blessing of time as well as a searing excoriation of a society that has always apportioned it unevenly.” —Emma Specter, Vogue.com
 
“These days, I find in [Smith’s] work what I once found in Paley and Baldwina clarifying lucidity wedded to big-hearted moral awareness. These virtues shine through her powerful new collection, Intimations: Six Essays, which she began at the onset of the pandemic and finished shortly after Floyd's killing. Although only 100 pages, it made me think more than most books five times that length. There's something worth quoting on virtually every page . . . Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air
 
Intimations, [Smith’s] slender new collection (less than 100 pages) of ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness. This cast of mind doesn’t mean that Smith avoids moral stances. In Intimations, she speaks clearly and forcefully about the murder of George Floyd and the legacy of slavery and the systemic sins revealed by Covid-19 . . . But despite these jabs, Smith remains unmistakably noncombative. This spirit appears born not of a fear of confrontation but a genuine perplexity (of a searching, brilliant kind) at the nature of experience and people, including herself. . . . Smith’s gifts as a novelist animate her essays . . . In Zadie Smith’s universe—meaning, for my money, the one we’re all living in—complexity is king.” —John Williams, The New York Times
 
“Slender, solacing . . . To read Zadie Smith is to recognize how few writers seem to genuinely love human beings the way she does, with such infinite curiosity and attention, even when they are behaving monstrously. Or, for that matter, how few are able to do justice to what, for want of a better term, we’ll call common decency.” —Laura Miller, Slate 

“What a treat, then, that Zadie Smith has presented us with this jewel of a book, six essays all written at the beginning of lockdown, each generous, reliably insightful explorations of things like suffering, productivity, and love; all reminders of the kind of art people are capable of, even in the most dire of times.” Refinery29
 
“Incisive and insightful . . . Smith is at her perceptive and precise best in this slim but thematically weighty volume of personal and civil reckoning.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There will be innumerable books to come about life in the pandemic, but Zadie Smith is who we want to read right now . . . This will be essential reading for us now, and when we look back in the years to come.” —Town & Country, Best Books to Read This July

“[Smith] writes with the immediacy of a house on fire, illuminating the tumult we are collectively experiencing . . . A sharply honed, obsidian collection glowing with Smith’s insights and eloquence.” Booklist

“An incisive collection . . . In just under 100 pages, Smith intimately captures the profundity of our current historical moment. Quietly powerful, deftly crafted essays bear witness to the contagion of suffering.” Kirkus (starred review)

Author

© Ben Bailey-Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives. View titles by Zadie Smith