I promise I’ll stop writing about Zadie Smith soon. It’s just that I’m making my way through her book of essays right now, Dead and Alive, and with nearly every one I read, I fall more in love with her. Whenever I see prompts or ice-breakers like, “If you could hang out with any one famous person, dead or alive, who would it be?”, every person I think of I’m like, but do I really feel connected to that person? What would spending time with them actually be like? Would we have anything to say to each other?

After reading this book, I think it’d be Zadie Smith, even though I’d be super intimidated and fangirly and wouldn’t know what to talk about, and I’d make it all weird and awkward because I’m not her equal. But if I could manage to be cool — maybe we could listen to hip-hop or go dancing to break the ice and then talk — I think she would be super fun to hang out with.

She adores fiction. She adores reading it. She adores writing it. She adores “the way it lies to tell the truth.” And she believes in its ability to truly immerse us in different points of view in a way that social media and the absolute glut of online news sources do not:

[The internet] seems to be a place of diverse views but the deeper truth is it’s all taking place on the identical platforms with identical aesthetics and in the end an identical motive: profit. It’s such a narrow version of ’the real’. I just have to open Mieko Kawakami or Thackeray or Dostoevsky or Bambara and I’m in a completely alternative perspective, unsponsored, uncontrolled, unmediated by anything apart from language. It’s not an important vision of reality because two million people upvoted it. It’s important because I am communing with it and being transformed by it.

I want to read all of these people! Previous to this paragraph, she had referenced several other writers and philosophers I’ve never read in response to a question about her sharp, fresh, and natural style. All I could think was, “Where does she find the time?!”

When I got older and read philosphers like Wittgenstein and Russell and Fanon — or the essays of Virginia Woolf — it occurred to me that there are few thoughts so complex that they can’t be expressed in clear, accessible prose. It’s a discipline.

She makes me want to quit my job and spend all my time reading. I know this is not possible. So the alternative is to keep myself healthy and live a very long life, if for no other reason than to be able to read as much as possible before I die.