“Love and the Imagination Are Not

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Gendered Things”: An Interview with
Ali Smith

TORY  YOU N G

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She read English Literature at the
University of Aberdeen and won the annual Lucy Fellowship for the best degree.
This enabled her to move to Cambridge to study for a PhD, where she has lived
ever since. While at the University of Cambridge, she wrote plays and poetry and
was “warned repeatedly about being too creative” in her interdisciplinary study of
Irish and American authors of prose and fiction (Smith, Shire 78). She published her
poetry in small journals, and although one of her plays, The Seer, was performed
throughout Scotland in 2006, Smith has become most widely known as an author
of prose. She has published four collections of short stories, Free Love and Other
Stories (1995), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999), The Whole Story and Other
Stories (2003), and The First Person and Other Stories (2008) – the titles of the last
three signaling the ludic, metafictional character of her prose – and seven novels:
Like (1997), Hotel World (2001), The Accidental (2005), Girl Meets Boy (2007), There
But For The (2011), Artful (2012), and How To Be Both (2014). In 2013 she published
her most explicitly autobiographical work, Shire, and a picture-book for children, a
retelling of Antigone from a crow’s perspective. Her stories and journalism feature
regularly in magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar,
Prospect, The Times, and The Scotsman.

131    Contemporary Women’s Writing  9:1   March 2015. doi:10.1093/cwwrit/vpu029

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 Smith’s work has received widespread critical acclaim and increasing scholarly
attention: Free Love and Other Stories won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of
the Year (1995), and the Scottish Arts Council Book Award (1995); in 2001, Hotel
World was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange Prizes for Fiction, winning the
Scottish Arts Council Book and Encore Book Awards; The Accidental was shortlisted
for the Man Booker (2005), James Tait Black Memorial (2006), Orange (2006),
and Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year (2006) Prizes for Fiction, winning the
Whitbread Novel Award (2005); Girl Meets Boy reached the shortlist for the Clare

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Maclean Prize in 2008; There But For The was shortlisted for the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize (for fiction) and awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in
2012; in 2013 the inaugural Goldsmith’s Prize shortlist included Artful; in 2014, How
to Be Both was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Goldsmith’s Prize.
Monica Germanà and Emily Horton held the first conference devoted to her work
in September 2013, in London (http://alismith21cf.wordpress.com), simultaneously
launching their edited collection, Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives.
Smith is known for her formal experimentation. As Julia Breitbach describes, her
work is recognized not only for her “self-reflective wit in foregrounding and recasting
literary conventions, genres and traditions” but also “for its meticulous attention to
how language is a constitutive force, rather than a transparent medium, in the building
and shaping of contemporary realities and identities” (Breitbach 115). The Accidental,
for example, draws attention to the constructed nature of stories in giving each of
the six characters a section within three larger parts titled “The Beginning,” “The
Middle,” and “The End.” In The First Person and Other Stories, “The First Person,” “The
Second Person,” and “The Third Person” are stories narrated from the perspective
their titles suggest. In Smith’s fictions, the telling of stories of love and loss is thus
emphasized. Her novels increasingly test the boundary between criticism and
creativity until Artful (2012), based on a series of four lectures given at St. Anne’s
College, Oxford, fractured it entirely. “On Time,” “On Form,” “On Edge,” and “On
Offer and On Reflection” are presented as the essays of a recently dead academic.
The academic’s grieving lover has found the essays on his/her desk, and his/her
thoughts and experience of reading them provide the narrative framework. Themes
of death and grief, as well as ghosts, recur in Smith’s works. In her foreword to
Germanà and Horton’s recent critical collection, Marina Warner identifies Smith as
belonging to a tradition of writers, including Margaret Atwood, for whom communing
with and reanimating the dead impels narrative (vii). Exploration of bereavement
occurs not at the expense of playfulness; How to Be Both, about a teenage girl whose
mother has suddenly died, is printed in two editions: one with this contemporary
story first, followed by the narrative of a Renaissance artist, in the other, with the
stories reversed.
In a redress to Paulo Coelho’s claim that “writers go wrong when they focus
on form, not content,” Smith speaks of “style” as having the power to “dismantle
authority”; the act of reading a book is “at once individual and communal” in the
shared reception and understanding of the voices and experiences transmitted

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 1 This keynote speech at the within.1 Her literary experimentation and concern with narrative style are not
Edinburgh World Writers’
Conference, 2012 can be
aims in themselves but are animated by an ethical desire: the humane concern
read or watched at www. for the expression of a range of emotions and marginalized voices, often those of
edinburghworldwriters
conference.org/style-
children and adolescents, such as Brooke, the young daughter of immigrants in There
vs-content/ali-smith/. But For The; Claire, the grieving sister of Sara in Hotel World; the grieving daughter
George in How to Be Both; and Anthea, the queer eco-activist in Girl Meets Boy. This
2007 story, part of a series of rewritten myths published by Canongate, offers a
contemporary retelling of the Iphis and Ianthe story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Here

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the conventional story of “girl meets boy” is revivified from the opening line, “Let
me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says” (Smith, Girl 3), dismantling
the heteronormative authority of the familiar story. Allusions to Ovid, to myths, to
writers including Joyce, Mansfield, and Woolf, and to film occur throughout Smith’s
work, and not just in those texts that explicitly signal a source (such as Antigone).
The title of Artful comes partly from the “artful dodger” of both Dickens’s novel
Oliver Twist and Carol Reed’s 1968 film Oliver! Smith’s The Accidental is at times
narrated by Amber, a convincingly real figure within the novel, a stranger entering
the lives of each member of a family to profound and positive effect (like Mary
Poppins), but who also has a fantastical presence as Alhambra, born of film:

Meanwhile my father was the matchmaker and my mother could fly using
only her umbrella. When I was a child I ran the Grand National on my
horse. They didn’t know I was a girl until I fainted and they unbuttoned my
jockey shirt. But anything was possible. We had a flying floating car. (104)

The democracy of voices praised by critics inheres not only in the characters
represented in her fiction but also through these allusions to a diverse range
of cultural forms. The recognition of these films and other intertexts affords a
communal experience. Within her texts, the voices of marginalized figures speak, but
there are other ways in which Smith brings back from the past words borrowed from
other places, particularly from her favorite writers. Smith promotes them through
the almost countless introductions and forewords to editions that she has written
for Giorgio Bassani, Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter, Tove Jansson, Katherine
Mansfield, Carson McCullers, Muriel Spark, and Margaret Tait, among others. Smith
describes Jansson’s Sculptor’s Daughter “as an aesthetic primer; it teaches its reader,
both primally and with sophistication, about art and the uses of art, it is all about
art’s own versatility” (xiii). This could be a description of her own far-from-didactic
works. Nonetheless, their genre-defying forms and their concern with language and
humanity teach us how to be and how to live, but they also show us what to read.

TY: What are your early memories of reading and writing? What was
the relationship between the two for you?

AS: I think I’m in an interesting position being at the back of a large family, being
quite far at the back as well. My closest brother to me in age was seven years old

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when I was born. I was, as my mother always said, their “surprise.” So I grew up in
a family that was that much ahead of me and I think I was aware of the “that-much-
ahead” of me all the time. I think that’s why as a child I refused to read children’s
books, or books for children, and I learned to read very early. My father swore that
I learned from reading the TV pages in the paper, but I remember learning from
the labels of the 45s we had. I recognized the words from the titles of the songs,
I remember working out “I Feel Fine” and “She’s a Woman” on either side of the
vinyl. But I wouldn’t read anything that was supposed to be for children, so I read

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things which were way ahead of me. I didn’t read Tove Jansson’s Moomin books,
or things like Little Women, until I was in my forties. But I remember, when I was
small, loving reading, and loving knowing and working out the shapes of words and
what they meant. Reading and writing? I just don’t see a space between them to be
honest, but I remember the sheer joy of being something like seven or eight and
we were given a project at school where we had to make something rhyme. We
were given two lines of a poem, as an exercise, and we had to make up the rest of
the poem, we had to make up the bit at the front and the bit at the end; the lines
had to be in the middle. They were:

Isabel Isabel didn’t care

Isabel reached out for what was there.

So we had to make up a poem that would lead to these lines and a couple which would
finish them off and I remember doing that with immense delight. In fact, I made up a
whole cycle of poems featuring these lines, a book of them, and sent it to my sister.

TY: Can you remember the poem?

AS:
One day when she was climbing the garden ladder
Isabel was met by a deadly adder
The adder’s skin was wet and weedy
and it looked at Isabel with eyes that were greedy
“Hello Isabel” the adder hissed
“I’m afraid you are going to be sadly missed”
Isabel Isabel didn’t care
Isabel reached out for what was there
She struck out with one of the rungs of the ladder
And left a much wiser – and deader – adder.
Who knew that was even still in my head? Rhyme is memory.

TY: Did you read or had you read poetry as a child?

AS: I remember one of my sisters, Anne, when I was about ten or eleven and
we were in Whitby on our holidays, buying me The World of Christopher Robin

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(When We Were Very Young / Now We Are Six), which of course I loved. I also had a
collection of Lear and Carroll, A Book of Nonsense. Recently I was reading Carroll’s
poems in an edition edited by Gillian Beer, the first collected edition of Carroll’s
poems there’s ever been and, as Gillian points out, it’s collected, not complete,
because new poems keep popping up all over the place, penciled by him into the
fronts of books, or in letters and things. Reading them now was revelatory –
I knew these poems off by heart but I hadn’t ever known they were by Carroll,
because Alice didn’t figure very largely in my childhood at all. In fact, I didn’t read

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Alice in Wonderland until I was in my thirties. But the poems, I knew. They went
straight into my system.

TY: You have published some poetry . . .

AS: The first thing I ever published was poetry, in student magazines, in The
Scotsman, then in periodicals. The first sizeable check I ever got from anyone for
writing anything was for a sequence of poems. (I bought a leather jacket with
it that lasted me several winters and is still in the shed, I use it for gardening.)
But I was a pretty terrible poet really. I wrote about three good poems out of
hundreds of not very good poems. I’d like to be a better poet.

TY: Did you always want to study literature at university?

AS: Yes, I did but I didn’t think I was going to get away with it. I thought that
I was going to have to have a profession. My parents put my brothers and sisters
and me through tertiary education, something they themselves had never had. And
they did it with a huge generosity that I don’t think I properly understood until
I was beyond it. My brothers and sisters were going into various occupations, one
sister was a teacher, one sister was a doctor, and I was supposed to be a lawyer,
which I refused by dint of just staying still as a stone and not shifting when it came
to what I wanted to do, until I managed, by stealth of stony will, to get to do
English.

TY: And then you got a scholarship to do a PhD at Cambridge. What

was that on?

AS: The importance of ordinariness and reality in three modernist writers:

James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, via texts by them and
others written between 1922 and 1923. Specific, but it wasn’t specific enough
for Cambridge. It really wasn’t allowed, not permitted, to do prose and poetry
together, and it really wasn’t allowed to go across an ocean in the one thesis and
look at both Irish and American writing. So I kept getting castigated for being “too
creative.” Not that my thesis was any good.
I did my first degree at Aberdeen, where I wrote an MLitt on the notion of The
Transfiguration of the Commonplace, an enduring metaphor for Scottish writing

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 2 The Kailyard School
(1888–1896) – from kale
yard, kitchen garden —
comprised of fiction by
William Robertson Nicholl,
J.M. Barrie (under the
pseudonym Gavin Ogilvy),
and John Watson (as Ian
McLaren), which depicted
the lives of ordinary men
and women who were
poverty stricken but pious,
with great sentimentality.
in general I’d say, and particularly relevant for Scottish fiction of the twentieth
century, a title lifted from the thesis Sandy Stranger writes in Spark’s The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie, and it was an overview of fiction from the Kailyard School2
onwards, up to where we were in the mid-1980s.
TY: Do you feel that you are a Scottish writer?
AS: I don’t feel I’m an anything writer. I am Scottish, and I know that coming
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from that place – and reading, growing up into the literature that has come from
the place in my own lifetime and the century before, the centuries which formed
the Scotland in which I lived – it has formed me. I’m not going to apply it to my
own work because I can’t. But what a gift of voice, voice that can come from
anywhere, a gift of the natural and the supernatural coexisting, of the gothic
and the comic coexisting, of form which can take any shape it likes, of a sense
of the strength of the outsider, in the margins – that’s the place where voice
forms story, that’s where voice forms and is aesthetically urgent, aesthetically
both heard and unheard, from off to the side. Also the gift of the versatility
of possibility; what we write can be anything, take any form. The writing that
I happened to be reading as I was coming into adulthood was a gift. I couldn’t
have been luckier.
TY: Was there an emphasis on Scottish writing at school or
university?
AS: No. But there was the Modern Scottish Literature Paper in 1982–3, and
the most contemporary writer on that paper was, I think, William McIlvanney
(who was then doing social realist symbolist left-wing novels and beginning to
write crime novels featuring a detective called Laidlaw; I think Laidlaw is the
source of all the detective fiction that’s come out of Scotland since the 1980s).
Apart from that everyone we studied was dead, except Spark, George Mackay
Brown, and Gordon Williams. The course didn’t feature any of the writers
who were about to change things radically in Scottish writing. But while I was
studying at Aberdeen, three of those writers, Alasdair Gray, Jim Kelman, and
Liz Lochhead, came up and gave readings at the local arts center. I remember
those readings having the kind of vibrancy that splits the sky open with light.
TY: Did you study a lot of literary theory?
AS: No. No, I absolutely hated it. I managed to avoid theory I think almost
completely, and of course that was one of the reasons I couldn’t keep being an
academic because I just wasn’t interested in it at all. I’d rather go and read a
Dickens novel I hadn’t read. There’s loads of books I haven’t read yet and I’d much
rather read them than theory.
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 TY: In “True Short Story” you refer to the absence of women writers
on the curriculum and in discussions at Cambridge.

AS: A lot of “True Short Story” is autobiographical. Kasia’s a real person, and
in that story we’re real people and how we met is true. I borrowed the story’s
opening riff from something in the news at the time. I’ve been alive long enough
to inherit the knowledge of the ways in which people get sidelined, forms get
sidelined.

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TY: The opening riff?

AS: The opening bit in the café where the older man says to the younger man
that the novel is like a flabby old whore and the short story is a slim nymph, a
goddess, came from a statement made by Alex Linklater in Prospect magazine.
He was talking about the inaugural National Short Story Award and competition;
in his speech he said that the short story was this nubile form compared to the
novel. He used these terms and, because I was writing a commissioned story
for Prospect at the time, this story, I cheekily used his quotes at the opening of
the story and let the story develop from there, imagined calling up Kasia, who’s
my friend, and a short story expert and scholar and writer herself, and imagined
us having this conversation. Although it didn’t really happen in a café, my friend
really was fighting to get a cancer drug, Herceptin, and managed in the end to get
it made available for lots and lots of people. So the things kind of fused together.
That story’s an interesting one because I think it revealed to me properly what the
short story is about: brevity, the shortness of life and the good lasting quality of
the moment.

TY: In Artful you consider the distinction between novels and short
stories, suggesting that short stories “can be partial” (29), but aren’t
partiality and incompletion also a thematic concern of your novels too?

AS: Yes, partialness or incompleteness as form in itself. But I think the

difference between the forms is really about chronology. The novel has to adhere
to chronology, to the clock, the social time to which it belongs and the notion of
consequential time one way or another, whereas the short story doesn’t. I think
that’s because the short story is so much about the shortness of time that it can
do anything it likes. It can go absolutely anywhere within that spatial notion of
time, the completed circle or cycle where we live and then we die; within that
anything can happen and it gives a particular resonance to the form.
The novel is helplessly social as a construct. Formally, it’s about time and
about society in a way that the short story can be but doesn’t have to be. The
short story can, formally, leave those things behind. But the novel will, by nature,
express something social. Not just the English, the British novel, I’m also talking
about the Scottish novel here and the Welsh and the Irish novel, too. It’s going

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to be about class and it’s going to be about the ways in which our country or
countries have formed themselves. The novel will be about social things where
the story will be about brevity and about mortality. The novel will be about those
things too but there’s a continuance in the novel that there can’t be in the story.
I’m thinking of Woolf here, who can, once she has plotted a chronology, do
absolutely anything she likes. And I’m trying to think of any novel that has escaped
time and I don’t think there is one, because if it did it wouldn’t be a novel. It would
probably be a poem or a story; it would be something else. Novels adhere to time

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one way or another.

TY: Is that connected to a modernist moment of being or epiphany?

AS: I don’t know. The modernists were fascinated by the present, immensely
aware of the pressure of time. I also think they were immensely aware of the
necessity, finally, to find a way to express in art a kind of actuality of things. So
George Eliot can do something which is symbolic and social at the same time.
When Dorothea and her sister are sitting at the very beginning of Middlemarch
looking at the jewels and commenting on them, it is obviously part of the story
and the reality of the story. At the same time, it’s a symbol, it’s symbolic of
something larger, something more and else. When Alec D’Urberville smokes
his cigar at Tess and it glows red at the end, you know it’s a phallic symbol, and
that’s the point. But when Bloom in Ulysses goes to the cupboard and there’s a
jar of Plumtree’s Potted Meat and it’s empty, it’s just an empty jar. Then again
of course it’s not because Joyce is so fantastic that the advert for Plumtree’s
Potted Meat – “What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete. With
it an abode of bliss” (61) – shows up the ways in which those huge symbols
attached to trivial everyday things cheat us, work us, make us feel, so that we’ll
buy something. Plus, there’s a deeper reference and understanding in it of the
threat to the abode of bliss for Bloom, as he comes home to the empty jar,
Molly in the bed, and scraps of Plumtree’s Potted Meat in there too from her
afternoon sex with Blazes Boylan. At the same time, it’s an empty threat –
Molly’s soliloquy follows, full of the love of Bloom. And at the same time as all
of the above, it’s just a jar, in a cupboard. It stands for a jar in a cupboard and
a jar’s real interaction with the everyday happenings it’s part of, because that’s
what life is like.

TY: In Artful you examine Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

to consider the involvement of the reader. Could the headless body be
read as a symbol of the text?

AS: The thing about Rilke’s Torso is that in that poem, in a way, there is nothing
but the head, nothing but the gaze. The thing that is not there is looking at us.
The absence is the presence. It’s the absent eyes, the absent face, the imagined,
that the headless torso makes happen. I think probably in all great art there is

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something missing, which means that we have to exist to understand it. Our
existence and our communion with it, our conversation or dialogue with it doubly
means that we exist in it and it also exists. In that dialogue something more than
both happens.

TY: There are many deployments of “you” narrators in your stories;

you are very explicit about inviting the reader in and making the reader
aware of their relationship with your stories.

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AS: I think reading is active. It’s not passive; as Angela Carter said about The
Great Gatsby, “you lie back and have it done to you”! I don’t know that I agree with
what she thinks about Gatsby, but it’s nicely said. But I’m talking about the process,
an active process, a process that involves you, or works to involve you.

TY: So there’s a relationship that goes outside the text but within
the stories the “you” is often a character. In Girl Meets Boy, Midge
wondering if her sister is gay, notes that “songs that had the word you
instead of a man or a woman” (which Anthea “always liked”) are “the
giveaway” of homosexuality (53), but in fact the use of “you” can, and
your use of “you” often does, completely avoid the markers of gender
and sexuality.

AS: For sure. I’m gay and I remember being in my teens and listening for the
markers that meant things were open, rather than the always more claustrophobic
or excluding feeling that came off the markers for things that were fixed or closed.
It was a sensitivity close to the surface for me. It’ll be different for other people,
although I tend to think we all want and need some kind of access to a free
identity. So I know the force, the power of the open second person you just from
being alive, really.
I also think that I’m very lucky to have been brought up reading Lewis Grassic
Gibbon, who in A Scots Quair makes the “you” such a malleable literary force. You
can do absolutely anything with the second person; it can be “you,” Tory, it can
be me talking about myself, it can be any self, talking about him or herself, and it
can be something which is a larger collective, more than one person, and all at the
same time. It’s immensely versatile as a tool.

TY: Many “you” fictions actually are closed in terms of gender though
(I’m thinking, for example, of Lorrie Moore’s “How to” stories, which
are always about a man and a woman), unlike the use of “you” in your
writing.

AS: It’s almost always open gender for me in those uses of “you and I” or “you
and me.” It’s almost always open in what I do and I take great care with that. It’s
always interesting to me to see the preconceptions that people will bring to the

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fictions, and that’s up to them. That’s fine, but as long as it’s possible for us all to
enter whatever the story is. Love and the imagination are not gendered things,
although gender obviously has an effect on them.

TY: Feminist narratologists have suggested that where gender

markings are absent, we search the texts for clues as to identity,
but I feel that in your stories, such as “May,” the absence of gender
markings is so successful that we don’t even realize we are identifying

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with the characters regardless of sex and instead focusing on the
emotions of love and intimacy.

AS: I like that reading of it. That’s a perfect achievement, for fiction to be able
to do that. I hope that’s true. If we’re talking about the novel again as a social
mode, that just made me think of the child in There But For The who knows that a
child in a book will be a white child unless her race is demarcated, commented on,
made explicit. So many things are about preconception. Language and our relation
to it are all about preconception and, if we start to think about that, then all sorts
of things can open which can otherwise look or stay closed.

TY: You’ve been praised for your ability to capture a child’s voice and
you use a child’s point of view in The Accidental and There But For The. Is
this a way of exploring preconceptions and closed mindsets?

AS: I suppose so, but you could say the same about my adult characters, too.
I think it’s also that readers at the moment are fashionably – or maybe it’s deeper,
maybe it’s part of the psychology of the time – drawn to the child voice in literature.
You just have to look at the number of books which have children on the cover,
or biographies/autobiographies which have photos of their writers as children on
the cover. It’s an interesting time, right now, when it comes to the concept of child
– a time of overwhelming information or knowing, but a time which romanticizes
innocence, a time of the revelation and shock of 1970s’ abuse, simultaneous with
a childhood more openly and graphically sexualized than ever before. I think that’s
why readers and critics are so drawn, right now, to the complexities inherent in
that particular kind of voice, and childhood is something we all have in common,
and something romanticized more than ever – though it’s a time of coming to
terms with, understanding for the first time rights, wrongs, powers, powerlessness.
I like how close-up to language kids are, at the coalface of language and how things
mean. I suppose there’s an immediacy, a prenarrated state, in kids, that has gone,
disappeared, or has been weakened, by adulthood. That interests me. Where does it
go? Does it go? Does it have to go?

TY: When teaching “May” I found that some readers think that the
narrator who falls in love with a tree is a man because “he” considers

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going to Homebase to buy a drill, while others read “her” as a woman
because if “she” was a man, “she” would already have a drill!

AS: It’s all about power tools, see? Funnily enough, I’m told that a lot of readers
of that story have already decided that if someone loves a tree, it would be a
woman. And the person who would be quietly, doggedly waiting for the other
person to come back would be a man. To me these responses, to a story that has
no gender demarcation at all, are really telling about the ways in which we read.

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Of course, that story is all about the ways in which you read romance and the
unexpectedness of love, the ways in which it will take us, regardless of what we
are, in whatever form it chooses. It’s about the telling. Which is also why it’s told
from two perspectives, so that perspective itself will shift.

TY: Every story has two sides.

AS: Or more. Every story is many-sided.

TY: Can you explain why you use the device of a switch in the middle
from one narrator to the other partner so often?

AS: The Other Stories and Other Stories collection has lots of “you and me”
stories; I think they actually alternate through the book. I got to the end of that
book and thought: there is another place to go with the “you” and the “me,” and
it has to do with proper dialogue. Push it further and it has to be something that
allows both to speak.
I’m interested that Artful came out in that form and it’s the first continuous
piece of fiction that uses the “you and me” form. Because all the novels – and
I think that Artful is a kind of novel (although it’s not necessarily a novel; there’s
something about all the other forms in it which pulls it away from that) – haven’t
been first person; they’ve all been third person.

TY: With some “you”?

AS: And only the occasional “I.” Like Alhambra, the most fictional person of all,
and the ghost in Hotel World, who no longer exists, and the sister, who says none
of what she “says” out loud to anyone.

TY: That leads me to a question about “meant” and “meaning” in

your novels. Alhambra in The Accidental says “Everything is meant” (3),
and I wonder if she stands for the author and that the story is already
written, “meant,” in the past tense, with an intention?

AS: If Alhambra says it, then it’s probably fictional. The notion of meaning
comes where the randomness of life meets the meaning of story. Randomness

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3 Although Smith eschewed
the study of literary theory
at the university, a first-year
course on linguistics was
influential.
in itself looks meaningless but, as soon as we start to look at it, we will find or
make or it will reveal patterns – something about the making of narrative and the
openness of random life and what happens when they come together.
TY: So again, your concern is with the telling of the story?
AS: It’s also about the nature of the word, the Saussurean nature of the word:
the random signifier when it meets the signified.3 It’s about that interest in the
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space between the two. Michelangelo: the point at which there’s a gap between
the two fingers, between Adam and God, on the Sistine Chapel, that’s where the
energy is. But looking at it you don’t know whether it’s a crack in the ceiling or
whether it’s an actual lightning bolt going between the human and the beyond.
The place in between is loaded with power and energy and sheer chance and the
notions of both brokenness and contact, something about the fact that contact is
about to happen. The relationship between the reader and the writer, or the book
and the reader, could be called a leap of faith in a way. There’s a point at which
there’s a jump to be made across the space.
TY: I think people sometimes miss the humor and the politics in your
work.
AS: I don’t care about the reception of my work. I don’t care.
TY: Do you feel that you are a political writer?
AS: I don’t feel that I am an “anything” writer, I don’t really feel like a writer,
whatever that feels like. But I know that I am very politically informed, and formed. It’s
not up to me to talk about what I do, because if I thought about it to such an extent
that it got in the way of what I was doing then I would have wrecked what I do. If I sit
down thinking I’ve got a political axe, then I will write grinding rubbish, basically.
I will talk about the reception of a different writer, Sylvia Plath, who is never
considered a political writer, although the politics in her work is immense. If you
look at the first line of The Bell Jar, “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they
electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
There is no more political sentence in the whole of writing than that first sentence.
Why The Bell Jar is written off as a nonpolitical text, as a kind of hysterical text, as
an autobiographical text is very interesting. A fiftieth-anniversary of The Bell Jar was
published. Faber is a great publisher but the fiftieth-anniversary edition has got a
kind of Sex and the City cover and no introduction by anybody to place this book in
the canon in a way which would highlight its importance, between The Member of
the Wedding by Carson McCullers and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jazz and Paradise
(actually all Morrison’s writing). There is a line connecting these works, a deeply
political and questioning line that crosses all sorts of things: history, gender, power,
sexuality, race, class, war. There’s a very good new biography of Plath, Mad Girl’s
142    Contemporary Women’s Writing  9:1   March 2015
Tory Young  •  An Interview with Ali Smith
Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted by Andrew Wilson; it’s the least judgmental
of any of the works I’ve yet read about Plath. It doesn’t take sides. It simply looks
at her early life and points out the relative poverty in which she was brought up,
how she and her mother shared a bed because there was no room in their very
small house up until she was in her twenties, how there was no money at all, and
meanwhile she’s at Smith and keeping up an Ivy League mask on one dollar left
in her bank account. How to survive? She had an incredible shining intelligence,
way beyond the average: where will you find a space for that? An incredibly

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desirous nature; where will you place that, given the 1940s’ and 1950s’ constraints
on women? And the combination of these three things – poverty, intelligence,
unpermitted desire – with a roaring politics, postwar politics, and contemporary
attention to the things like the Korean War and the build-up to Vietnam. A couple
of times you can see Wilson, the biographer, gets annoyed with her, but his book is
almost completely judgment-free, and it heightens all these issues which have been
there all along but never made visible to us. Instead, Plath has been given to us via
Hughes who decided how to edit her, and we’ve inherited that editing habit one
way or another when it comes to her.
So, I don’t care about my own reception but I’m quite interested in the histories
of reception.

TY: Do you choose your covers?

AS: I like books as objects and I’ve always been lucky enough to be able to put
a piece of contemporary art on the cover, which simply reminds the eye and the
mind to go beyond the book into all the arts, or to allow the book (as object) to
cite itself as something equally informed by all the other arts.

TY: The cover of the hardback of The Accidental is. . . .

AS: . . . a Derek Jarman painting. Something that is broken and whole at the
same time in mosaic form, and looks like a map, and looks like a mask.

TY: These are all images that you have come up with?

AS: Yes, we had real trouble with the cover of There But For The, and Simon,
my editor, found the Hockney picture and sent me several possible versions, and
the armchair was, we thought, the right one. The Whiteread door, used on the
hardback, I had found and loved, and the Jarman for The Accidental. It all started,
lucky for me in a way, with the proof of Hotel World: Hamish Hamilton at that
point, who I hadn’t been published by before, gave it a cover which looked like an
Ian Rankin thriller on the proof, a photo of a shoogly hotel corridor, it looked like
it was a gothic/realist crime thriller. But booksellers given the proof said, “We
can’t sell this book with this cover,” and at that point I had found a really gorgeous
Sophie Calle picture of a bed which had a piece of string tied around the bedstead,

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Tory Young  •  An Interview with Ali Smith
sumptuous and at the same time really cheap. She has a really beautiful book of
photographs she took in a hotel she was working in. So Penguin simply shifted
their focus, very fast because they didn’t have much time, to something very pink,
cheap, beautiful, striking and mysterious, and a piece of artwork for the cover of
Hotel World. It worked well, it fell right, it landed on its feet.

TY: What is the significance of the recurring motif of books as objects

in your fictions, for example in “Text for the Day”?

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AS: That’s an explicit reference to Sherwood Anderson, who wrote Winesburg,
Ohio, which is the first ever connected collection of short stories, about a town, and
people, characters that recur between the stories. It’s a wonderful collection. But in
his life, I always remembered – there’s a story about how Anderson would up and
leave his wife and kids and go round ripping the pages out of books and throwing
them away over his shoulder as he went. I don’t know whether it’s apocryphal but
I’ve always known it about him. It seems to me something you can do with the story
as a form is to let it fly as you move, let it fly as you go.

TY: You can’t do that with an e-reader though. . . .

AS: You cannot. It’s an interesting thing about the Kindle; a Kindle won’t
degenerate like a book. And we need things to wear with us, really. You’ll just
always remember the time you had your Kindle, you’ll not remember the actual
thing you had or read on your Kindle, not really. There’s something about a
book as object, and time, again, something to do with mortality and something
to do with memory. Books are objects in which these very important human
things come to rest, so that if you do take Oliver Twist off the shelf and it’s the
copy you had thirty years ago, then the resonance of all of that time will be in
that object even if you haven’t picked it up for thirty years. And the other thing
about books is that they are organic in the way that the Kindle and e-readers
are never going to be. I don’t have a problem with e-readers. I think any way that
anybody reads or finds to read is great. But there’s something about books that
makes them a repository of meaning for us as human beings in time. It is partly
that the spine of a book comes from the spine of an animal. So when they made
books first and they made the shape of a book first, it comes from cutting the
leather off the back of an animal, which is why book spines are called spines,
because that fold is where the spine of the animal was, in the leather cover
of the book. Book covers were skins but they also have something of a wing
movement when we turn the page to a page to a page. There’s something about
flight in it but at the same time something really visceral – bones and skin – at
the same time as it’s made of a tree and paper, and we can hold it in our hands,
and it’s all about how we open and how we progress through openness rather
than the pressing of a button.

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 There’s another thing about reading on the page and reading on the screen,
and the difference between the two, which is that when we look at a screen and
we look at pixels we pick up only a third of the information that we pick up when
we look at ink on paper. The human eye presumably will adapt to pixels, but at
the moment, that’s why it’s much, much harder to read an email and take the
information from it than it is to read a letter, where something more concrete
passes between the brain, the eye, and the thing read.

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TY: Are you worried about surveillance, the prevalence of CCTV and
the constant recordings of everyday life now?

AS: I think it’s Vonnegut who says somewhere that that is now what people
believe, that the god who is watching us watches our absolute every move and is
recording absolutely everything about our lives so that it will all be answerable
in the end. We have such a heightened sense of our own importance, which, up
against any reality must mean heading for . . . a fall. It’s bound to. It has to become
a terrible new knowledge of our own fallibility. I remember thinking that when
I was working on There But For The that in cameras and surveillance there’s a
revelation of a mad state (or State). It’s like being stalked by some mad jealous
person. That’s what the State’s like all the time, watching all the moves. And always
watching just too late to do anything about anything. So it has no use.

TY: Do you think that authors have a responsibility to engage with

social media?

AS: Authors have no responsibility to anything but the story. We have no

responsibility to any public and we have no responsibility to anything other than
the story with which we’re engaged at the moment of writing. There’s nothing
else; that’s it. We don’t owe anything else. As far as I’m concerned, the only
authority is the story.

TY: So you’re not going to get yourself a website and a Twitter

account?

AS: No, I can’t. I’m too visible as it is. I don’t like not being able just to be. I don’t
like having to be a person in the public eye as a writer. It’s so much more the job
to be able to be sensually invisible so that you are sensually there, you can hear
freely, and see freely, and touch and feel freely so that you can then understand
how to transfer this into language and through into form. Visibility does nothing
but get in the way. Even in your own room by yourself you have to not be there
to actually write something. The thing that is visible is the story and you have to
not see the desk or the computer or any of those things; you have to only see the
thing you’re working on.

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 TY: In your short stories, there is often a phone call that doesn’t
reach the recipient but goes through to the answerphone. . . .

AS: That’s like life, isn’t it? More and more means of communication and less
and less actual communication. Someone has texted me several times while
we’ve been in the room, but I haven’t replied, and, if someone had phoned,
I would let it slip into answerphone even though I’ve got my phone right next
to me. Now, in the old days, we’d have been running through to answer a

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phone. The phone was a point of great excitement in our house when I was
a child.

TY: And it was always in the hall. . . .

AS: It was in a public position because it was about the outside world. Now we
bring our intimacy into the buses and trains that we’re on and we shout out loud
into little machines as if we’re in a room by ourselves or we don’t answer it at all.
It’s funny that we have so many means of communication and, yet, I sense a crisis
of loneliness in so many people right across culture.

TY: You write many introductions for other writers’ work. I think
this generosity extends to your use of epigrams and intertexts, in that
literary “borrowings” are not an act of theft but a gift for the reader,
directing her to other stories and writers.

AS: First of all, I think no book exists without all the other books. It’s a communal
act to write a book. It comes back to the idea that there is a point where this
is about exchange, so that that as a reader you will be asked to be there, to be
present, to give as much as you take. This makes me think of Chris Ofili’s 2012
4 Victoria Miro Gallery, exhibition “To Take and To Give.”4 This is part of Ofili’s series of works based
6 October through 10
on Ovid, who is the source of exchange in stories, of a kind of fluidity through
November 2012.
metamorphosis, where things are given all the time that you might want or you
might not want, and you have to learn to accept, to accept change, the larger part
of the word exchange. I hadn’t thought about that before, the relationship between
change and exchange, pushing us forward all the time. But Chris Ofili, who had been
working on the Ovid pictures by Titian, did this fantastic picture called “To take and
to give”; it is the biggest painting I have ever seen in my life. It took up most of the
wall of one side of the Victoria Miro upstairs gallery. It’s a picture of fertility and
nature and myth, and the sacred, and the profane, and all of the things together, all
the ways in which the spiritual and the material elements of the world are forced
into a kind of cycle, and it’s such a joyful and changing cycle. It’s called “to take and
to give” because you have to be able to take as well. And as a reader you have to be
open to taking what the book offers you and also you have to give back. The book
will give to match your giving.

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 TY: In Artful you claim that reading will involve transformation for
the reader.

AS: I think it is Cynthia Ozick who says that, that a novel will change you, a
really good novel; you will be changed when you finish reading it. You will start
green, she says, and by the end of the novel you will know, in a way that you did
not know at the beginning. So there is something about transformation in art and
transformation in literature that again goes back to Ovid and the nature of story –

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which is the nature of survival, really.

TY: So the resistance of readers can be a resistance to change then?

AS: I’m sure it is. But I believe firmly, and I think this about the novel as a form,
it is a revolutionary form. Although it has its comfortable conventions, it forces
forward all the time and partly it forces forward because things do change and
because society changes and because it reflects that, but partly it shows us the
ways in which it is possible for the given shape of things to change. So there’s
that as well at the back of this rolling force of all the books that have ever been
written, rolling forward, forward, forward to produce the next books, to produce
the next books, to produce the next books.
Books would not exist without the books that came before them, and, if we’re going
to work with books, we acknowledge that and move with the rhythm of it. We look
for that rhythm. So some of the best things I’ve ever done have been to work on other
writers, so closely that something in me will change, and that’s how knowledge works.

TY: How does money affect the writing life?

AS: It’s a very insecure position. Money comes and goes. You get what looks
like a very big advance and it has to last for years and years and years. So you feel
intermittently rich – for a couple of months.

TY: Do you feel there’s any pressure on what you write?

AS: No, I think money’s a good pressure. It’s an exchange. “I will give you a
book if you give me this money, so that I can write the next book.” That’s what
happens between you and a publisher, a really material exchange.

TY: The deadlines are helpful then? Would you carry on writing if you
won the lottery?

AS: It works well as a life, actually. If I won, I’d give it all – the money – away.

Anglia Ruskin University

tory.young@anglia.ac.uk

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Tory Young  •  An Interview with Ali Smith
Works by Ali Smith

Smith, Ali. The Accidental. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005. Print.

———. Antigone. London: Pushkin Children’s Books, 2013. Print.
———. Artful. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012. Print.
———. The First Person and Other Stories. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008. Print.
———. Free Love and Other Stories. London: Virago, 1995. Print.
———. Girl Meets Boy. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Print.

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———. Hotel World. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001. Print.
———. How To Be Both. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014. Print.
———. Like. London: Virago, 1997. Print.
———. Other Stories and Other Stories. London: Granta, 1999. Print.
———. Shire. Framlingham: Full Circle Editions, 2013. Print.
———. The Seer. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Print.
———. There But For The. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011. Print.
———. The Whole Story and Other Stories. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. Print.

Works Cited

Breitbach, Julia. Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic
Discourses in Novels after 2000. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Print.
Germanà, Monica and Emily Horton, eds. Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives.
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Print.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London:
Penguin, 1986. Print.
Smith, Ali. Introduction. Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir. By Tove Jansson.
London: Sort of Books, 2013. Print.
Warner, Marina. Foreword. Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Monica
Germanà and Emily Horton. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. vii–ix. Print.
Wilson, Andrew. Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted. London: Simon
and Schuster, 2013. Print.

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