a review of sorts

"What is universal and timeless in literature is need—we continue to need novelists who seem to know and feel, and who move between these two modes of operation with wondrous fluidity. What is not universal or timeless, though, is form. Form, styles, structures—whatever word you prefer—should change like skirt lengths. They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion, of one form; we say, "This form here, this is what reality is like," and it pleases us to say that (especially if we're English) because it means we don't have to read anymore, or think, or feel." - Zadie Smith in her essay "Middlemarch and Everybody" in Changing My Mind

"Love is a kind of knowledge" - her, again, in Changing My Mind

Those are a few quotes that stuck out to me enough to get off the couch, open my laptop and type them up. To me, Zadie Smith is one of those authors that gets me. Or I get her. She grew up in England (and believe me, her work is so English), with a Jamaican mother and an English father (somewhat of the opposite of me). When I read her work, I read-read her work. I tag pages, I add stickies, I get the crisp white pages dirty, I re-read sentences, pages, chapters—the way purists insist reading should be.

The first essay, "Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful Mean?" was, by far, my fave. She put into words a lot of things I've struggled with: not forcing myself to identify with something (a book, a film, a person, etc.), just because it's "black," but also, not forcing myself to dis-identify with something, just because it's "black." You know? I really can't do it justice, which is why I didn't pull any quotes from this essay, because I would've ended up typing the entire chapter unconsciously.