“People sometimes demand change,” says Smith.

Smith praises their unique qualities, especially their strength and compassion. What stands out is a deep sense of gratitude to her family and mentors. The final essay celebrates lessons Smith has learned from some of her favorite people. While dealing with tough subject matter, these essays are also hopeful, empowering, and instructive. He looked at the human beings he had chained up and noted that they seemed to be the type of people who wore chains. “Patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave ship four hundred years ago, looked down at the sweating, bleeding, moaning mass below deck and reverse-engineered an emotion-contempt-from a situation that he, the patient himself, had created. To have contempt for someone is to treat them like an animal, “both subject to man and a threat to him simultaneously.”

It is worse than hate, she says, because hate at least acknowledges you as a whole person. In it, Smith identifies a virus that has plagued the country since the very beginning. It is worth reading on its own even if you do not get to the others. Her most powerful essay is “Postscript: Contempt as a Virus”. In “Screengrabs”, Smith is both critical and forgiving of our need to always be doing something. The book’s opening essay, “Peonies”, recounts the author’s battle with fertility, and her sense of confinement as a woman within the context of death and social isolation.

Zadie smith intimations summary