![]() ![]() There, Leah met her best friend, Natalie Blake, at the age of 4, when both girls were residents of Caldwell, a council estate - the British equivalent of a housing project. The novel takes its title from London's northwest postal sector, specifically the neighborhood of Willesden, where Smith herself grew up. Leah can't write the motto down, however all she's got is a pencil and a "pencil leaves no mark on magazine pages." Fitting, since the rest of "NW" is devoted to showing how few of us get to write our lives at will, and how even those who seem to have managed it find the results unsatisfying. It looks like Smith made the line up, but it's already pinging around the Internet, one of those inspirational maxims that so many people like to post to their Tumblrs and blogs. ![]() ![]() The sentence is "I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me," and for all I know it's taken from a recent popular song - "NW" is judiciously sprinkled with glancing references to such things - so I googled it. In the opening paragraph of "NW," Zadie Smith's first novel in seven years, Leah Hanwell, one of the book's central characters, hears a line on the radio and tries to write it down on the back of the magazine she's holding. ![]()
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