Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” (post 2): Author on her traumatized characters, confusion about women, and feeling that “somebody else wrote” this novel.

From a 2002 interview (1):

“Zadie Smith is living the fairy-tale story dreamed of by young (and aged) writers everywhere.  Her first novel, White Teeth, received a rumored 250,000 pound advance based on only two chapters and a plot-synopsis; the completed novel (of epic proportions) was written while completing a BA at Cambridge University; her literary debut has been hailed a formidable achievement by none other than Salman Rushdie, with whom she recently completed a New York book tour; rave reviews have appeared in the British and the North American Press alike; and all of this has been achieved by the ripe old age of 24…

ZS: …If you take the whole of human history as a body or as a person then there are events within that which are like trauma, like childhood trauma…And likewise the characters in the book are [traumatized]…

Multiple personality originates as a way to cope with childhood trauma.

ZS: …I don’t write women very well and I don’t really enjoy writing about them particularly. At the moment, maybe that will change at some point. I find them quite confusing as a group of people. I think a lot of the women in White Teeth are failures more or less in terms of rounded portrayals of people and that is kind of a shame…

Why would a woman not enjoy writing about women, and find them confusing? Is Zadie (the author changed her name from Sadie) a transgender personality?

ZS: …all the difficulties with the end of the book, about the end being too fast, and all the rest of it, are just me not being able to — not having the kind of hardware in my brain — to deal with the software — I couldn’t resolve a lot of the issues that the book brought up. In the end I kind of threw up my hands and so do all of the characters really…

She speaks like some kind of bystander in the writing of this novel; as if “the book” wrote itself and “the characters” had minds of their own; as if the book were software (written by whom?) (an alternate personality) that was downloaded into her brain (her regular personality), but which had been too much for it. The interview concludes:

Interviewer: Anything else you’d like to add about White Teeth?

ZS: …The book to me is not a dead thing, but it doesn’t feel like mine. When people ask me about it I feel like “Oooh, What should I say”. I can’t think what to say about it. It feels like somebody else wrote it. And that’s the honest to god truth, it’s not a kind of pose. When I’m reading it aloud sometimes I’m kind of impressed — this is good stuff — but I can’t remember much about the writing of it or how it came about…”

The personality being interviewed does not identify with, and has amnesia for, the work of the alternate personality who did most of the writing. "And," psychologically speaking, "that's the honest to god truth."

1. Kathleen O’Grady. “White Teeth: A Conversation with Author Zadie Smith,” in Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal, Vol. 27.1 (Fall 2002): 105-111. http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/ogrady/zsmith2004.htm