EO

What’s a version of yourself you worked hard to let go of?

ZS

The wounded child.

EO

Is there a style or posture you once relied on that now feels like a disguise?

ZS

All styles are postures and disguises. That’s what’s good about them. But your taste changes over the years—that’s all.

EO

When you enter a room, do you look for something to ground you—a corner, a rhythm, a line of sight?

ZS

I don’t think I’ve ever had a thought like that in my life. I am many things but not at all neurotic. Melancholia is my issue.

EO

When you taught, what grounded you? Did the act of teaching feel like improv?

ZS

No. I was teaching twentieth century literature. So the grounding was just the text in front of me. I’m not a fanciful or dramatic teacher. I only wanted my students to write good essays in grammatical English. Once that’s achieved, then we can go on flights of fancy, but it’s hard enough for all of us to achieve that. Without the initial bricks no castles or faery palaces are being built! My role was to ensure my students had decent bricks. Full stop. (Or “period,” as my students said.)

EO

How do you relate to time now—does it feel like something to manage, to submit to, or to shape?

ZS

I have to learn to submit. I’m still not very good at that. I’m still very bad at doing nothing or going with any flow or meditating or being still. But I accept myself that way. I’ve tried to change, but it’s bone deep, this need to fill time with productive activity. I don’t think I can change it now.

EO

How does friendship—being in relation to others outside of work or dialogue—shape your practice?

ZS

It’s everything to me. I am not the best daytime friend to have because of the amount of typing and reading I feel drawn to do. If you make me go to lunch I experience that as a personal attack. I’m a night person. An excellent martini drinker and clubber and partier and I always need people to do that with. Younger friends in particular are important to me—I like to hear what’s new as well as what’s old.

EO

What does faith mean to you now?

ZS

I don’t know how to answer that. You can’t write without the faith that you can write, so it’s something you have to daily generate. I admire faith in all its guises but this paltry writing faith is the one I have most access to.

EO

Where does London sit inside your life now?

ZS

I live here. I live in my old neighbourhood. I’m glad to be home.

EO

As a public intellectual, how do you navigate writing about politics and theories you’re called to respond to but that don’t naturally consume you?

ZS

I am not and never have been a public intellectual. I am a novelist and an occasional cultural critic. I write about whatever interests me and that is the beginning and the end of my practice. I don’t do think-tanks, I’m not a real academic, I don’t have policies, I don’t have a single line of argument I’m trying to push down anybody’s throat, and I never write about anything solely because it is expected that I should. I take my responsibilities very seriously, but they are self-designed, and wholly focused on writing itself. I write as I like, about things as I view them on a human scale, as and when they interest me, and all politics and theories that may arise from my writing, if and when they do, come from a place of personal conviction and interest, and nowhere else.

EO

What’s something you argued for that no longer feels worth defending?

ZS

I think the debates around representation in writing have become far more complex and attuned to human realities than they were ten years ago. I am happy if anything I wrote nudged them in this more realistic direction, but it’s a subject that bores me to tears now.

EO

Do you experience serendipity? How has it either structured or influenced your life?

ZS

Everything about my life is luck. My entire childhood and personal history was practically designed to create a novelist—everything I needed in terms of instinct, inspiration, and education appeared before me at the moment I needed it, despite the fact I came from nothing and had no money. It was all luck.

EO

In what kind of state do you find yourself when you’ve completed a novel? Are you undone or made whole again by the process of discovery and making?

ZS

Deeply irritable and unpleasant and perhaps actually anxious—especially now, in menopause. Angry and depressed. Things I never used to be, writing or not writing. But it’s especially bad now when not writing.

EO

What conditions feel necessary for you to get the work done?

ZS

Childcare is the only condition.

EO

Where is your intellectual home these days? Where are you writing from, and what feels most urgent to tend to?

ZS

The existentialists and the socialists and the mystics. My three homes.

EO

How does singing make your body feel now? Are you still able to locate yourself in the potential of a song?

ZS

I get very melancholy at the smallness of my present voice and how I’ve abused it over the years. All the cigarettes etc. I used to really be able to sing. Now it’s a tiny thing but I appreciate it so much more and try to preserve it.

EO

You’ve said that writing is itself an act of optimism. What, then, is the potential of the cynic?

ZS

A cynic can be a fabulous provocateur. But it’s a bloodless and sad activity in the end. Punk is not cynical. Revolution is not cynical. Nothing really radical is cynical.

EO

In 1996 you were 20 years old. Are there any cultural patterns that defined the 1990s from your perspective popping up again—any we should heed against?

ZS

There’s no comparison. Everything economically, socially, and practically was different. The best analogy for today is the robber baron period from the 1890s to the stock market crash. The good news from that shit show is that out of the ashes came FDR’s New Deal, and further down the line a civil rights revolution. I hope it doesn’t take that again.

EO

Where are we as a culture and as institutions post–George Floyd? The wave of so-called “reckoning” feels like it’s already receding—DEI programs dismantled, gestures withdrawn, the presence of Black thinkers and artists quietly thinned from public and institutional life. Do you think we’re witnessing another cycle of visibility and erasure, or are we being called to imagine a new intellectual home altogether?

ZS

A real reckoning in America would involve the entire country—Black, white, and neither—comprehending the entire history of the United States: its double character as a place of liberty and enslavement, opportunity and exploitation, promise and curse. Right now, that shared understanding seems very distant to me. At the same time, I have been so cheered to see the history of the African diaspora in America taken up by so many historians in granular detail for the first time. A lot of people now know what happened during Reconstruction, for example. It’s no longer the preserve of a few historians working in African American studies departments. And that’s a big deal—America’s history should be the preserve of all Americans.

EO

We live digital-first lives now, and our initial encounters with each other happen through the internet. Exhaustion and emotional fatigue feel constant by design. How do you stay grounded despite that reality, and what is the promise of the book within it? Can the book still reground us, change how we process time, hold questions, or stay with information differently?

ZS

I have a laptop. I do WhatsApp on my laptop. I don’t have a phone. That is the beginning and end of how I keep sane. The sly argument (made basically by tech conservatives) is that to do so represents unthinkable privilege. If you concede that part of the argument, you concede the whole thing. It is a human right not to be tied to a manipulative device every moment of the day. It is a human right to choose, at least in part, where your attention goes. When someone says to me, “But how dare you—an Uber Eats driver doesn’t get to choose!”, the correct socialist response is: “You’re right. And no one should be ordered up by a phone to arrive at someone’s door with no workers’ rights, no safety net, no union, and no protections.” The whole system is rotten from top to bottom.

EO

Who are you writing to and for these days?

ZS

Everyone, always. That is both an aesthetic, personal, and political principle. For all the people, all the time. I have a particular interest in the African diaspora and in a little country called ‘England.’ But from those two places, I travel widely.

EO

How has your intellectual project changed from the days of university and in the wake of White Teeth having been published twenty-five years ago?

ZS

My theory is that novelists are very limited people. They write the same novel over and over, like turning a multifaceted diamond to the light—to different lights. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. That’s what I’m still doing.

EO

What has the process and politics of publishing consistently taught you or told you about the world? How do you gather yourself after you’ve given these pieces away—after being on the frontlines, engaging and mainstaging challenging politics?

ZS

I know the frontlines of the internet are not the frontlines of reality. Reality is a far broader and more beautiful thing.

EO

Do you still locate yourself in the writing as a writer, or has writing become an exercise—a mode of production to arrive back at yourself, or to create new conditions or worlds for others to enter after you’ve passed through them?

ZS

I am a writer first, foremost, last and forever. I never wanted any other title and I won’t accept any other while I live.