Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009) is categorized into five sections: Reading,
Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering.
Reading is a series of essays on
Smith’s favourite authors. She begins with Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) who’s
novel Their Eyes were Watching God is described as “a beautiful novel about
soulfulness.” She says of E.M. Forster (1879-1970), who “made a career of
disingeneousness” but who was a “progressive among conservatives” that “there’s
magic and beauty in Forster, and weakness, and a little laziness, and some
stupidity. He’s like us.” Smith likes George Eliot (1819-1880) because “she was
a writer of ideas” and “she was on the border of the New” who pushed the
novel’s form to its limits. Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is described as “radical
invocation of the reader’s rights” while Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is a
“bold assertion of authorial privilege” who “believed in the butterfly qua
butterfly.” She liked the “elusive, allusive pleasure of the Nabokovian text.”
Of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), it is his “alienation from oneself, the conflicted
assimilation of migrants, losing one place without gaining another” that makes
him an “existential prophet.” Reading Joseph O’Neill’s (1964-) Netherland,
which took seven years to write is “to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting
sense of recognition” whereas Tom McCarthy’s (1969-) Remainder, which took
seven years to find a mainstream publisher, “clears away a little of the
deadwood, offering a glimpse of an alternative road down which the novel might,
with difficulty, travel forward. We could call this constructive deconstruction,
a quality that, for me, marks Remainder as one of the greatest English novels
of the past ten years.”
In
the section Being Smith writes about her craft as a writer, from her own
experiences. She’s a “Micro Manager” building a novel sentence by sentence
without “the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it.” She says some
writers don’t read when they are writing their novel, but for her, “My writing
desk is covered in open novels.”
In
Seeing she describes her admiration for movie legends Katharine Hepburn
(1907-2003) and Greta Garbo (1905-1990). Hepburn “remains my lodestar” for “she is a
woman behaving herself naturally, without fear, without shame and with the full
confidence of her abilities.” Garbo “had a relationship with light like no
other actress; wherever you directed it on her face, it created luminosity. She
needed no soft or diffuse lighting to disguise defects. There were no defects.”
In
Feelings Smith gets closer to home as she writes about her family,
specifically about her father Harvey and her brother Ben.
Remembering is about American novelist
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008). “When Wallace wrote he offered everything he
had to his readers, including the kitchen sink.”
The
title of her essays depicts her changing writing style and process over the
years. It is an interesting insight into the way reading shapes her writing,
and writing reflects her reading.
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