Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is in her kitchen in Brooklyn – a high-ceilinged room with walls painted a deep navy and a few glass ornaments in bright reds and greens placed on shelves near the ceiling.

Her bestselling books, from 2003’s What I Loved, to 2014’s Booker-long listed The Blazing World, may have given her the reputation of being an intimidatingly intellectual 21st-century Virginia Woolf, but she is brilliant at putting me at ease. She leans forward to hear me better and when, at one point, her dishwasher beeps, she leaps up to open it so that steam pours out.

Her latest collection of essays, entitled Mothers, Fathers, and Others, showcases a wonderfully relaxed erudition. Blending family memoir and feminist philosophy, its subjects include misogyny, motherhood and what we inherit from our parents — including her own at times difficult relationship with her professor father.

“I was seeking my father’s approval and I think it’s good in many ways that I didn’t receive it,” she tells me. Why? “Well, I think it toughens you up and it’s no good to want to be patted on the head by the patriarchy.”

(c) Spencer Ostrander

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Let’s get envy out of the way first. While many of us struggled to achieve anything during the first weeks of lockdown, barely baking a loaf of banana bread or completing a workout with Joe Wicks, Zadie Smith managed to write a whole book. It is a very slim book – 82 pages; six essays – but it’s a book, nonetheless. Anyone who feels piqued that this might be a money-spinner, though, should note that the author’s royalties are being donated to charity. Besides, Smith generously suggests that writing is simply something to do, no better or worse than baking, sewing a dress or completing “all the levels on Minecraft”.

These essays have been written from the standpoint of an impassioned reader. This is not new territory for Smith, who declared in an earlier collection of essays, Changing My Mind (2009), that: “Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers, increasing their freedom of movement.”