The topics of Black Lives Matter, worker’s rights, living rent, misogyny, systemic inequality and political incompetence do not take centre stage in all of the essays but are consistently woven into them, often in the context of a stream of personal musings on writing and sometimes inserted in brackets - not as an afterthought but as a vital and remarkable addition to the particular story Smith is telling. The essays are rooted in a social consciousness and a desire to state (and to be overheard in stating) her political standpoint, which Intimations shows to be undeniably radical.

Smith writes in the Foreword that ‘writing means being overheard’ and it is with that stance that she appears to approach her reflection. Each of the essays are grounded in radical thought, intertextual references, candid observations and perceptive personal arguments. While the collection may appear to be whimsical and abstract, that is far from the truth. In our isolation, it is only the company of others that can give meaning to time and what we do with it. With reference to a line about love (‘Without it, life is just doing time’) in an essay by Ottessa Moshfegh, an author famous for writing about isolation, Smith resolves that what this period requires is not ‘something to do’ but a love to be experienced, ‘something to go through’. They are both just something to do.’ In this new environment of such freedom and limitation, despite every attempt to construct a fabricated definition to our days, a feeling of emptiness and a sense that there is always an indeterminable and never-ending amount of time to fill prevails. ‘There’s no great difference between novels and banana bread. In her third essay in the collection, ‘Something to Do’, Smith writes that this seemingly endless and unmarked time has exposed a necessity to place artificial limitations on our days, to ensure that they aren’t wasted. Zadie Smith describes her collection of short essays, Intimations, as a product of her need to fill the gaping hole of time that the pandemic and isolation provided her with. 2020 is a year that has and will continue to inspire an abundance of musings and introspections, both personal and published, that reflect upon what it is to experience such a momentous shift in our mutual understanding of the world, caused by the pandemic.

Intimations zadie smith review