Zadie Smith doesn’t have a phone

The other day a friend was complaining about Zadie Smith.

I was egging them on because it’s funny to complain about Zadie Smith.

They had just recently read her last book, what was it called? What was it about? I forget.

Anyway, here’s their complaint:

The way Zadie Smith writes about technology is always infuriatingly, bafflingly wrong.

It is the amount of wrong that is only possible for Zadie Smith to be.

Because Zadie Smith doesn’t have a phone.

There are very few people on this planet, even those “left behind by the digital divide,” who can afford to be as blissfully reclusive, as Luddite status, as Zadie Smith is. Because you know, she’s fucking Zadie Smith.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” my friend said.

“Zadie Smith insists on writing about phones. She writes about technology, incorrectly, all the time. Phones are in everything she writes, often prominently, but she simply has no idea how phones work. Why does she do this? Zadie Smith, you don’t have a phone, what are you doing?”

Zadie Smith is not alone.

This is an affliction in writing I see all the time when working with political candidates, nonprofits, activists — really anybody.

It is an ubiquitous issue because it gets at the heart of a very scary thing about writing:

Writing reveals when who we want to be is not the same as who we really are.

Yikes, right?!

When the things we keep writing about are “off,” it’s usually because we have gaps in our intuition about the topic.

Not intuition in the New Age cosmic sense, but the fundamental sense of understanding you gain through consistent immeasurable exposure to a particular set of ideas, people, circumstances.

The reason it is so off when Zadie Smith writes about smart phones is because having a smart phone makes it fucking impossible to imagine how your brain would work without one.

The gap in understanding is so large that on both sides, it’s hard to even perceive.

Until you read something Zadie Smith wrote and you’re like… “What the fuck?”

—

Sometimes it is worthwhile to go deep on the things you don’t understand, to make your heightened understanding of that topic into a discipline, esp when it is a gap related to a fundamental understanding of the world you do not share.

And especially especially when that gap is related to variant gradients of power and oppression.

Zadie Smith could take a “technology for beginners course,” get a fucking doctorate in information technology, digital media. (Whatever: I don’t know how you learn to text.)

But as my friend says: I don’t care what Zadie Smith has to say about smart phones!

Phones are not why anyone reads Zadie Smith.

Phones are irrelevant to what makes her work her work: her compelling, pretentious, meandering, incisive way of looking at the ways certain types of difference seeps into our relationships with each other. The depth of the experience of being Other on our sense of self and sense of the world.

“I just feel like if I’m going to read something Zadie Smith wrote, its bc of sentences like ‘Perhaps when your subject is human delusion you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it.’ Not bc of phones,” they said.

Similarly, when we write about things we know nothing about but refuse to explore on our own, we are doing a disservice to ourselves as writers and to whoever is reading what we’re putting in the world.

And it’s usually because of fear: there is something, whatever it is, that makes us feel like this topic is critical to being who we want to be in the world.

I don’t know Zadie Smith, but I can imagine she refuses to stop writing about phones because she thinks of herself as the People’s writer, someone who is deeply in touch with things like how a phone works.

But: she isn’t.

She doesn’t know.

She’s Zadie Smith. The “chaos in her brain” + Being Zadie Smith demand an allows her to forgo phones altogether.

So… yeah.

What do you keep writing about the way that Zadie Smith writes about phones? 

What do you have to admit to yourself is true about who you are in order to write about what actually makes your work distinct and meaningful?