Zadie Smith's heads up to young people: 'You are absolutely going to become old'

"Whenever she encounters a new piece of writing or art or film, author Zadie Smith asks herself: "Does this thing make me feel alive?" "It sounds like a very childish question, but ... that's really what it's about for me," Smith says. "Does it create some kind of flourishing within me?" Smith was 25 in 2000 when she published White Teeth, her critically acclaimed first novel."

"(Smith's mother, a Black woman from Jamaica, was 30 years younger than Smith's father, a white English man.) "I'm the product of a completely inappropriate relationship for sure," she says. Her mother was someone "who was only 20 years older than me, who'd come from a completely different world, a different island," while her father was someone "who went to see Casablanca in the cinema, who saw Ella Fitzgerald sing live.""

Zadie Smith measures art by whether it makes her feel alive and produces a sense of flourishing. She published White Teeth at 25 and released Dead and Alive at 50, a collection addressing middle age, climate change, and generational gaps between millennials and Generation X. She describes an obsession with time shaped by a thirty-year age gap between her parents and calls herself the product of an inappropriate relationship. She reports a permanent melancholy but a reduced fear of death compared with her twenties and feels fortunate about her life and work.

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