An Explosion of Alterity

The Art of the Impersonal Essay by Zadie Smith
The New Yorker, September 22, 2025

At a time when AI-generated writing and algorithmic echo chambers threaten genuine exchange, Zadie Smith's reflection on essay writing reminds us what writing can be. Beyond five paragraphs or thesis statements, essaying is what Smith calls "a complex performance." Smith begins her essay as many of us begin a writing lesson: with a teacher's formula. A six-arrowed rectangle provided her with direction and confidence, to which she eventually added intellectual engagement. She describes the messy, deeply human process of drafting something, then rereading and realizing "I don't actually think any of that." After frowns and deletions, she tries again, "this time allowing myself to think honestly, aloud, a process that will involve the various strands of my thought arguing with one another." The rectangular formula may have offered her structure, but this process of letting different ideas argue with one another on the page, of discovering her own actual beliefs, is the substance. Smith's vision extends beyond individual discovery to democratic practice. She writes for what she describes as "an explosion of alterity: people with their own unique histories, traumas, memories, hopes, fears," not expecting readers to relate to her personally, but to be "in relation." Essay writing becomes a process through which she can engage complexity without retreating to false simplicity. As she says, "Nothing concerning human life is simple. Not aesthetics, not politics, not gender, not race, not history, not memory, not love." As educators grappling with what it means to teach about thinking, writing, and discourse in this moment in time, this essay seems an essential read to remind us of what it is all for — the journey and the complexity of being human.