The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Smith, Zadie. Intimations. Penguin Books, 2020.

Zadie Smith’s Intimations contains six essays. The first, titled “Peonies” recalls a moment near the beginning of the pandemic when Smith’s busy city life ground to a halt at the mere sight of some gaudy tulips in a park. Smith, alongside a few other women, found herself drawn to the symbol of fertility and ponders the way the moment taught her to submit to the urge to stop and stare, and to submit to interruptions in her life. In a way, this pause in her chaotic routine foreshadowed the pause in most people’s lives when the coronavirus pandemic caused nations to go into lockdown.

The next essay is “The American Exception.” Smith discusses the way in which many Americans felt shocked at the coronavirus pandemic’s death toll. She states that death in America is not new, but rather that death there was previously contained among populations of people viewed as being undeserving of compassion – people of color, poor people, and so on. She criticizes American society for caring only when death comes to the white and privileged, and also criticizes American politicians for failing to bring health care into the public sphere and instead keeping it privatized.

The third essay is called “Something To Do,” and in it Smith explores the idea of writing – and any hobby or passion – as being simply something to do to fill the time which appears otherwise endless and daunting. She discusses the way the pandemic caused people to pick up all sorts of pastimes and compares the work of essential workers to the work she does now, at home, as a writer. She finds that for her, even her job is more like a pastime and many others working essential jobs are doing the real work in American society, ensuring others can be safe, fed, and so on. “Suffering Like Mel Gibson” is the fourth essay, and similarly discusses the relativity of people’s positions in the pandemic, finding that though it can be tempting to compare suffering, it is essential to remember that suffering is absolute to the one who endures it.

Smith’s fifth essay is called “Screengrabs” and consists of several short essays exploring a moment of human connection between Smith and a variety of people. Whether it be with her masseuse, her elderly neighbor, a homeless man she sees often, her colleague, a random passerby in the park, or a family friend, Smith recounts these interactions in brief snippets, dwelling only on the moment and connecting each story thematically to the idea of isolation and the pandemic.

The final essay, “Postscript: Contempt as a Virus,” creates a metaphor in which Smith equates contempt as a virus, infecting increasingly more people in American society as ideological and political differences consume daily life and entrench mistrust of the ‘other.’ In particular, Smith focuses on the killing of George Floyd as an example of the way in which contempt as a virus can have deadly consequences, in particular for those groups who have endured such hatred for centuries.