JC
There have been tons of articles on Zadie Smith lately, with the publication of her third novel, On Beauty. In this article, she talks about how she arrives at creating her characters. What did she know about Judaism when she wrote her second novel, The Autograph Man? Not much she admits, but she called people up and asked questions…made sure that what she was writing made sense. One thing she *does* know about however, is mixed families. She talks a bit about her own, and her experience growing up mixed.

The multiracial marriages and families in Smith’s novels come naturally to her. Her father, now 79, is white and spent most of his career at a direct-mail paper company. Her mother, about 50, is Jamaican and a youth counselor in London.

Her parents divorced when Smith was about 12, but she remains close to both - she describes her father as “charming” - as well as to her two younger brothers, both hip-hop musicians. “My mother . . . came to London to go to school, dropped out, became a youth worker. She met my father at a party. Then she gave up work for nine years while I was a kid.”

In north London, Smith had no sense of being different. “In my area, there were many, many mixed-race kids. . . . I think that’s positive. I don’t think of myself as the ‘other.’ I think of myself as central.”