Returning to the issue of political correctness, she reflected on her debut novel White Teeth, which had depicted characters from many backgrounds but, she said, had been given an easy ride by the white critics because “ were mostly brown. It’s a responsibility to be as open as you possibly can to the world as an aesthetic object.” “Then I had an epiphany, and suddenly realised that her voice was beautiful. “The reason for hating Joni Mitchell was that I didn’t listen to classical or ‘white’ music,” said Smith. In an essay in her collection, Feel Free, she investigated one such change in herself, when she fell in love with the music of Joni Mitchell, a singer she had despised when she was a mixed-race teenager growing up on a London housing estate. People are searching through social media. “We are being asked to be consistent as humans over great swathes of time. She went on to question the role of social media in policing personal development. The strange thing to me is the assumption that their identity is the right to freedom.” “He turned to me and said: ‘I used to be myself and I’m now white guy, white guy.’ I said: ‘Finally, you understand.’ But the lesson of that is that identity is a huge pain in the arse. She conceded that the assertion of a collective identity was sometimes necessary “to demand rights”, but cited the dismay of her husband – the poet and novelist Nick Laird – at finding himself increasingly categorised.
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