After 17 years abroad, Zadie Smith has returned to her literary stomping ground of north London. She talks about fame, therapy and finding inspiration for her new historical novel on her doorstep
– touch down for a visit. Many of her characters escape only to come back eventually, just as she did, leaving New York during the pandemic with her husband, the Northern Irish poet Nick Laird, and their two children. “If you stay away too long, you just miss too much,” she says.
“That piece was a bit of an exaggeration,” she confesses. “Sometimes I write pieces to avoid doing interviews.” Smith hates giving interviews. Back in 2013 she saidthat her father was most proud when she appeared in the Guardian, because he considered it a “posh” paper: “He loved it,” she said. “I always dreaded it.”
The novel is based on the life of the prolific, but now largely forgotten, 19th-century novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who used to drink here with Dickens, and is buried in Kensal Rise Cemetery just opposite. Smith discovered his grave, and that of his housekeeper and possibly his lover Eliza Touchet, during her lockdown walks. She passed his former home, now in a council block called Ainsworth House on Kilburn Lane, on her bike on the way here.
The word “slavery” is barely mentioned, but it is the backdrop to everything in the novel, as Eliza, an abolitionist, follows the uprisings in Jamaica from Kensal Rise. “It is the unseen thing – that everybody is either looking at, fighting against or trying to ignore,” Smith explains. She wanted the book to show how people are able “to live on top of a monstrosity”. Again there are urgent contemporary parallels.
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