samizdat

derica:

Ms. Smith wrote this piece expressly to be read aloud in Philadelphia, PA, July 26, 2001 @ Neal Pollack’s Timothy McSweeney’s Festival of Literature, Theater, and Music

I have just completed a book tour, which is somewhat like being on safari but without the attendant dangers of thick bush-land, extreme heat, guns, or wild animals. But book tours offer their own perils to the young writer. I have been on an American book tour before. Four things come out of an American book tour:

1. The writer gains 15 pounds.

2. The writer can find a minibar within five seconds of opening a door, irrespective of wood-paneling camouflage.

3. Any original thought the writer ever had – every pretty black mark she ever made on a piece of white paper – is replaced by the endlessly reoccurring phenomena of the writer’s own name rising up at them in embossed font on the front of a book they have come to despise.

4. The writer is reduced to embracing the only creative subject she has left: writing about writing and writers. And, if she is lucky, hair.

This. This. Zadie makes me fall in love with her over and over.

“I saw her on Charlie Rose! Zadie, she’s very friendly!  She’s got so much hair, up like this, like in a coil – she looks like a queen! I’d be innerested to know, you know, how she does that. I was very impressed, very. And really, Zadie, who are you to snub her?”