Inner Thoughts

zadie smith on the structurally invisible side of life.

Zadie Smith at Christchurch City Libraries, 13 November 2019. Photo: Donna Robertson.

But so much of life is structurally invisible, I noted, and has no way of fitting into the external accounts of our lives. Our lives are so different on the inside. We can never express their full particularity and strangeness in public, their inner chaos and complexity.

— Unnamed narrator in Zadie Smith’s short story “For the King,” published in Grand Union